Three years ago, climate researchers shocked drought-weary Californians when they revealed that the American West was experiencing its driest 22-year period in 1,200 years, and that this severeย megadroughtย was being intensified by global warming. Now, a UCLA climate scientist has reexamined the data and found that, even after two wet winters, the last 25 years are still likely the driest quarter-century since the year 800.
โThe dryness still wins out over the wetness, big time,โ said UCLA professor Park Williams.
The latest climate data show that the years since 2000 in western North America โ from Montana to California to northern Mexico โ have been slightly drier on average than a similar megadrought in the late 1500s. Williams shared his findings with the Los Angeles Times, providing an update to his widely cited 2022ย study, which he co-authored with scientists at Columbia Universityโs Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The new findings reveal that even the unusually wet conditions that drenched the West since the start of 2023 pale in comparison to the long stretch of mostly dry years over the previous 23 years. And that dryness hasnโt been driven by natural cycles alone. Williams and his colleagues have estimated that a significant portion of the droughtโs severity โ roughly 40% โ is attributable to warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases. The warming that has occurred in the region, an increase of more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, has intensified the dry conditions, making the latest megadrought significantly more severe than it would be without climate change.
But are we still in a megadrought? How will we know when the megadrought is finally over? Williams said those questions will take some time to answer, and the conclusions will only become clear in hindsight.
โBased on the definition of megadrought that weโve been using, which involves looking at the past 10 years to see if dry or wet conditions prevailed, we can only see the termination of a megadrought in hindsight,โ Williams said. โIf the next few years are on average wet, that will mark the end of the megadrought. If theyโre dry, the megadrought will continue.โ
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. On the geologic time scale, the increase to todayโs levels (orange dashed line) looks virtually instantaneous. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lรผthi et al., 2008, via the NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
Coal fired plant near Hayden with the Yampa River 2015. Photo credit: Ken Nuebecker
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 17, 2024
Will there be a water bonus as we close coal plants? In the short term, yes. Itโs harder to say in the long term. Hereโs why.
Use it or lose it. Thatโs a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. Itโs fundamentally anti-speculative. But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.
The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units โ two at Hayden and three at Craig โ they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Coloradoโs largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. Thatโs 40% of Coloradoโs total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.
What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities donโt know. Thatโs the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.
While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants โ two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush โ all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.
This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Headwaters Magazine. Photo above of the Hayden Generating Station and the Yampa River was taken by Ken Neubecker in spring 2015. All other photos by Allen Best unless otherwise noted.
Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? Thatโs the hard question facing utilities across Colorado โ and the nation and world.
Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.
Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Coloradoโs water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Coloradoโs power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.
Emissions Goals
The year 2019 was pivotal in Coloradoโs energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economy-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.
Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.
Colorado lawmakers have adopted dozens of laws since 2019 intended to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Coloradoโs two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.
Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables โ it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.
Colorado Springs Utilities burned the last coal at the Martin Drake power plant along Fountain Creek in August 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Coloradoโs emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us donโt replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.
A final twist that has some bearing on water is Coloradoโs goal of a โjust transition.โ House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.
Possible Water Dividends
The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gas-fired power plant.
Where does this leave water? Thatโs unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge โ for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins โ from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.
In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because theyโre not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.
Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel converted the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.
Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year.
Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?
โIf the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,โ Belt answered. In other words, thereโs so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed. A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcelโs water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.
Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.
โAnother way to look at this dividend is that weโre going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acre-feet a year, and they can use that water within their system,โ Belt explains.
Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.
Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the cityโs center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s, and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities โ a provider of both electricity and water โ delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The cityโs remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.
The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.
The Cherokee plant along the South Platte River north of downtown Denver uses significantly less water since tis conversion from coal to natural gas. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Coloradoโs existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.
The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.
Thatโs why this yearโs bill was needed. Coloradoโs two biggest electrical providers, Xcel and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.
The Future of Energy
Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual net electricity generation. Photo by Milehightraveler/iStock
What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcelโs Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.
Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.
You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesnโt always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesnโt. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.
One possible storage method, called iron-rust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-Stateโs electric resource plan identifies the same technology.
Granby Dam was retrofitted at a cost of $5.1 million to produce hydroelectricity effective May 2016. It produces enough electricity for about 570 homes. Photo/Northern Water
Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.
Xcel Energyโs Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when itโs dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.
Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.
Graphic credit: Joan Carstensen
A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.
Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.
โDuring that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if youโre committed to pumped storage, then you canโt pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,โ he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.
Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. Thatโs why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst. A news story in 2023 called it a โdistant proposition.โ Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.
Gov. Polisโ administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. โItโs not something we are going to give up on quite yet,โ says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.
Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the Good Vibes River Gear in Craig in March 2020 prior to attending a just transition workshop. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.
Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the stateโs electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.
Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.
Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the projectโs initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.
New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.
With a sodium fast reactor, integrated energy storage and flexible power production, the Natrium technology offers carbon-free energy at a competitive cost and is ready to integrate seamlessly into electric grids with high levels of renewables. Graphic credit: http://NatriumPower.com
Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.
Into The Future
The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.
Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?
What will Xcel propose in October for Pueblo as it makes plans for the retired of the last of the Comanche coal-burning units in 2030? Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: โOf all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,โ concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.
What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acre-feet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.
The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isnโt that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a โsmall year,โ with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the riverโs water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? โWe havenโt had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.โ
Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.
Yampa River. Photo credit: Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan website
Why donโt Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.
However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.
One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.
Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
โEven if youโre adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal,โ says Brown. โIf you can double the flow of a river when itโs in dire circumstances itโs a big deal.โ
A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.
Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. โThereโs a lot of learning to be done. My key takeaway is that thatโs really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.โ
A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Coloradoโs two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State donโt know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but itโs possible it will be needed in the future.
No wonder Xcelโs Belt says its โimprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.โ
The coal mining industry reacted with outrage when the Bureau of Land Management recently announced plans to stop issuing new coal leases on the eastern plains of Wyoming and Montana.
From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the National Mining Association predicted โa severe economic blow to mining states and communities,โ while the industryโs political allies likened the move to declaring โwarโ on coal communities.
The truth is that coal has been steadily falling from its past dominance as energy king for nearly two decades. Domestic coal consumption dropped to 512 million tons in 2022, down 55 percent since its 2007 peak.
With the downward trajectory expected to continue, the Biden administrationโs decision to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basinโthe nationโs largest coal-producing regionโreflects clear market trends. And far from killing coal, the administrationโs plan allows mining to continue as the market transitions.
Billions of tons of previously leased federal coal remain available for mining from 270 tracts across the nation, which combined cover an area larger than Rocky Mountain National Park. One Montana mine has enough coal to keep operating until 2060. Taken together, economic effects related to ending new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin may not be felt until the 2040s and beyond.
Coal companies are well aware that U.S. energy markets have rapidly changed, a fact they soberly tell investors: โOver the last few years, customers have shifted to long-term supply agreements with shorter durations, driven by the reduced utilization of (coal) plants and plant retirements, fluidity of natural gas pricing and the increased use of renewable energy sources,โ Wyomingโs largest coal producer, Peabody Energy, disclosed in its 2023 financial filing.
Even with declining markets, the Biden administration did not come to the decision on its own. Arguing that BLMโs past reviews of coalโs contributions to climate change were inadequate, a coalition of environmental groups sued the government and won. That forced the agency to revisit whether more coal leasing was warranted.
โFor decades, mining has affected public health, our local land, air, and water, and the global climate,โ said Lynne Huskinson, a retired coal miner. Sheโs a member of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Wyoming landownersโ group that was among the plaintiffs.
Now, she said, โwe look forward to BLM working with state and local partners to ensure a just economic transition for the Powder River Basin as we move toward a clean energy future.โ
Huskinson lives in Gillette, Wyoming, where a dozen highly mechanized strip mines sprawl across the grasslands of the Powder River Basin. The Wyoming mines alone produce 40 percent of U.S. coal while employing less than 10 percent of the nationโs 44,000 coal workers.
The Basinโs mines have leased 8 billion tons of federal coal since the 1990s, a cheap and plentiful supply for the industry. The leasing process allows companies to nominate desired tracts, and then bid with little or no competition. Winning bidders often pay less than $1 a ton for coal, plus a nominal annual rent and a royalty after final sale.
There is little question that leasing helped launch and sustain the regionโs energy boom. But in his 2022 decision, Judge Brian Morris of the Federal District Court of Montana cast his eye toward the future. Morris wrote that federal law required BLM to consider โlong-term needs of future generationsโ that included โrecreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific, and historical values.โ
The judge also gave the federal agency an out: โCoal mining represents a potentially allowable use of public lands, but BLM is not required to lease public lands.โ
Morrisโ words cleared the way for BLM to stop leasing, a decision that dovetails with a Colorado College poll that found most residents in eight Rocky Mountain statesโincluding Wyoming and Montanaโwant Congress to prioritize conservation over energy development on public lands.
Peter Gartrell
The legal wrangling will likely continue, with the BLM reviewing protests from the coal industry and its political allies that lay the groundwork for more lawsuits. For now, though, it seems the Biden administrationโs decision to keep coal in the ground not only follows the market and the law, but public opinion, too.
Peter Gartrell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a consultant in Washington, D.C., and covered coal leasing issues as a journalist and congressional staffer.
A truck-and-shovel crew removes overburden at the North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyomingโs Powder River Basin in January 2020, as a coal shovel works below. (Alan Nash/WyoFile)
An aerial view of Assignation Ridge in the Thompson Divide area of Colorado. Project 2025 calls to restore mining claims and oil and gas leases in the Thompson Divide withdrawal area. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
Written by former members of the Trump administration and other conservative leaders, Mandate for Leadership exhorts its readers to โgo to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative state.โ Among many other measures, it calls for radical reductions in the federal workforce and in federal environmental protections, and for advancing a โTrump-era Energy Dominance Agenda.โ
The full text of Mandate for Leadership is below, preceded by an agency-by-agency overview of the proposals that could have the greatest impact on Western land, water and wildlife โ as well as on Westerners themselves.
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR (p. 517)
The Project 2025 recommendations for the Department of the Interior were primarily authored by attorney William Perry Pendley, a vociferous opponent of protections for public lands and wildlife. As acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during the Trump administration, he transformed the agency into what one high-level employee described as a โa ghost ship,โ in which โsuspicion,โ โfearโ and โlow moraleโ abounded.
Energy Policy
Pendley notes that the energy section was written โin its entiretyโ by Kathleen Sgamma of theย Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group; Dan Kish of theย Institute for Energy Research, a think tank long skeptical of human-caused climate change; and Katie Tubb of The Heritage Foundation. They recommend reviving the โTrump-era Energy Dominance Agendaโ by:ย
reinstating a dozen industry-friendly orders issued by the Trump administrationโs secretaries of the Interior (p. 522);
expanding oil and gas lease sales onshore and offshore (p. 522);
and weakening theย National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental reviews of federally funded projects, by restoringย Trump-era changesย that set time limits for reviews, allowed agencies to skip some reviews altogether and eliminated any consideration of a projectโs climate impacts (p. 533).
Land Conservation
The project aims to undo large landscape protections by:
ending theย America the Beautifulย initiative (aka the โ30 x 30โ plan) (p. 531);ย
reviewing national monument designations with an eye to reducing their size (p. 532);
The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was expanded via proclamation from President Obama in 2017, making the new monument approximately 112,000 acres. Bob Wick/Bureau of Land Management
Wildlife
Pendley expresses particular hostility toward the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose work he described as โthe product of โspecies cartelsโ afflicted with group-think, confirmation bias, and a common desire to preserve the prestige, power, and appropriations of the agency that pays or employs them.โ He recommends:
delisting the grizzly bearย in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems (p. 534);
ending the reintroduction of โexperimental populationsโ outside a speciesโ historic range (p. 534);
abolishing the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey โ which will be difficult to do, as it no longer exists as such and is now part of theย National Park Service(p. 534);
The free-market advocate behind Project 2025โs section on the USDA has long railed against the subsidies and food stamp programs administered by the agency. As a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Daren Bakst penned a lengthy report, Farms and Free Enterprise, that objects to many aspects of the farm bill, which funds annual food assistance and rural development programs. His vision, documented in the report, is present throughout Project 2025โs proposed agency overhaul.
Agency Organization
Project 2025 seeks to limit regulation in favor of market forces by:
reducing annual agency spending, including subsidy rates for crop insurance andย additional programsย that support farmers for lost crops (p. 296);ย
eliminating theย Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to enrich and protect parts of their land from agricultural production (p. 304);ย
removing climate change and equity from the agencyโs mission (p. 290, 293);ย
and working with Congress to undo theย federal labeling law, which requires consumer products to disclose where they were made and what they contain, as well as encouraging voluntary labeling (p. 307).ย
Forestry
The project will reduce forests on public lands by:
and rescinding the Biden administrationโsย Roadless Rule for the Tongass National Forest, which preserves 9.37 million acres of the worldโs largest temperate rainforest and puts a cap on logging in the region (p. 531).
Logging within the Cougar Park timber sale in Kaibab National Forest in 2018. The timber project was part of an initiative intended to treat more than 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pine forest across northern Arizona. Dyan Bone/U.S. Forest Service
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (p. 417)
Prior to serving as the EPAโs chief of staff during the Trump administration, Mandy Gunasekara was famous for handing Republican Sen. James Inhofe a snowball to disprove the existence of human-caused climate change. At the EPA, she played a key role in the United Statesโ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and in the dismantling of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. Gunasekaraโs vision for the EPA is characterized by staff layoffs, office closures and the embrace of public comment over peer-reviewed science.
Agency Organization
The plan will diminish the agencyโs scope of work by:
reducing full-time staff and cutting โlow-valueโ programs (p. 422);
eliminating all research that is not explicitly authorized by Congress (p. 436);
restructuring scientific advisory boards and engaging the public in ongoing scrutiny of the agencyโs science โ potentially opening the door to a wave of pushback against theย international consensusย on climate change (p. 422, 436-438);
eliminating the use of catastrophic climate change scenarios in drafting regulation (p. 436);
relocating a restructured American Indian Office to the West (p. 440);
partially shifting personnel from headquarters to regional offices (p. 430);
and striking the regulations, including a program to reduce methane and VOC emissions, that enable the EPA to work with external groups to help enforce laws (p. 424).
Natural Resources
The project would jeopardize clean air and water by:
limiting Californiaโsย effort to reduce air pollutionย from vehicles by ensuring that its standards and those of other states avoid any reference to greenhouse gas emissions or climate change (p.426);
supporting the reform of the Endangered Species Act to ensure a full cost-benefit analysis during pesticide approval (p. 434-435);ย
repealing some regulations imposed by the Biden administration to limit hydrofluorocarbons, a particularly potent greenhouse gas (p. 425);
and undoing the expansion of theย Good Neighbor Program, which requires states to reduce their nitrogen oxide emissions, beyond power plants to include industrial facilities like iron and steel mills (p. 424).
Earthjustice is suing Suncor on behalf of GreenLatinos, the Sierra Club and 350 Colorado
Commerce City has been pummeled so long by toxins spewed by local energy companies โ including Suncor Energy โ that some residents have almost grown used to the bad water and air that surround them every day, City Councilor Renee M. Chacon said this week. Chacon hopes a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court this week will make Suncor answer for its environmental abuses. The suit asks a federal judge to force the Suncor refinery to comply with the Clean Air Act, mitigate and offset harm done to the public for violating the federal law and assess fines for each violation of the Clean Air Act up to $121,275 per day. The lawsuit lists 28 specific claims against Suncor and claims that โSuncor consistently and continuously violates the air pollution limits imposed by regulations and conditions of its air permits.โ Chacon said in a news release that fines may not be a big enough punishment for Suncor.
โCommerce City has been the sacrifice zone for corporations like Suncor for so long, the abuse to my community has been normalized and even expected to happen for Coloradoโs economy,โ said Chacon, who is also a member of the activist group GreenLatinos. โNo more normalizing this level of cumulative pollution for any community, Suncor should be prosecuted for more than just fines, especially in a state that has acknowledged environmental justice should be a human right to access clean air, land, water, and a better quality of life for all.โ
The complaint claims that Suncor has repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act by failing to control hazardous emissions from its Commerce City refinery, resulting in long-lasting harm to surrounding communities in north Denver. Earthjustice filed the lawsuit on behalf of GreenLatinos, the Sierra Club, and 350 Colorado. Before filing the lawsuit, Earthjustice and its clients documented over 9,000 instances of Clean Air Act violations, according to the lawsuit. That includes exceeding federal limits of airborne particulate matter, toxic emissions like benzene and formaldehyde, and other dangerous pollutants.
Proposed Uinta Basin rail project in #Utah could result in surge of hazardous shipments along Colorado River
Coloradoโs attorney general recently left open the possibility he will take a formal role in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to help block a proposal that would send a massive surge of oil trains along the Colorado River.
โThe proposed plan to run two-mile-long trains filled with hundreds of thousands of barrels of waxy crude oil along the Colorado River daily poses an extreme risk to this critical water source and the communities, industries, and farmers that rely on it,โ Weiser wrote in an email statement to Colorado Newsline. โThis proposal was rightfully tossed out by an appellate court. I am presently considering all options to protect the Colorado River โ that includes weighing in with the U.S. Supreme Court as it reviews the case.โ
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last year ruled the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, which is the primary federal regulatory agency overseeing U.S. rail projects, erred under the National Environmental Policy Act and ordered the agency to fix significant problems with the proposed 88-mile rail spurโs environmental impact statement.
The appeals court found the STB failed to properly weigh both the upstream and downstream impacts of oil production, including accident data, downline fire risks and the impact to endangered fish from predicted oil spills in the Colorado River.
The seven Utah counties surrounding the Uinta Basin oil fields, which formed the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case in March. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County case will be heard during the high courtโs next session, which begins in October.
Weiser โ a former Supreme Court clerk to justices Byron White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former dean of the University of Colorado law school, and former U.S. Justice Department attorney in the anti-trust division โ has been one of the top state officials critical of the Uinta Basin Railway project.
โI am disappointed the Supreme Court heard (the Uinta Basin) case. We won an important decision,โ Weiser said in a phone interview last week. โI have been a vocal critic of the idea of taking what seems to me a high-risk move through a fragile ecosystem by allowing there to be the shipping of oil in railway cars that could lead to the sort of ecological harms weโve seen happen elsewhere.โ
Weiser points to the environmental devastation of Norfolk Southern railroadโs East Palestine, Ohio, chemical train derailment last year.
โIt doesnโt take much for a single incident to create extraordinary and lasting damage, and that, too, is a good basis for prohibiting (the Uinta Basin) project for going forward, so weโll continue to make that case,โ Weiser said. โI worry that a Supreme Court that is not interested in protecting our land, air and water could be less sympathetic to this point. We did see that lack of sympathy in the case involving the Clean Water Act.โ
Weiser said the only silver lining in that case was that conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the liberal minority, joining Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissenting against the ruling.
โWe were successful in that case with Justice Kavanaugh, but obviously we were still a vote short,โ Weiser said. โIโm worried about all of our environmental statutes if the mindset is, โHow do we gut any environmental protections?โ We as a society are going pay a price for that, whether thatโs coming from the Supreme Court or a second Trump administration.โ
From an antitrust standpoint, Weiser says consolidation in the railroad industry has opened up new risks of harm, because less competition leads companies to be less committed to reliable, safe service and adequate staffing. While federal legislation is stalled, Colorado lawmakers took up the issue last session and set up a new state rail safety office.
โPart of the challenge from a competition standpoint is the Surface Transportation Board I believe has had the sole authority to evaluate mergers in rail, and theyโve been willing to approve mergers in rail that really highly concentrated that industry,โ Weiser said, specifically referring to the U.S. Justice Department objecting to the Union Pacific merger with Southern Pacific in 1996.
โI think the system of oversight that does not allow the Justice Department to stop anti-competitive mergers is problematic, and itโs problematic that the Surface Transportation Board took action in this case and did not take the Department of Justice competition concerns more seriously,โ Weiser added. Now Union Pacific controls most east-west freight through Colorado and is currently negotiating with the state for a new lease at the state-owned Moffat Tunnel.
Eagle County officials have said they hope the state will take a more active role in the Uinta Basin Railway battle going forward, citing $450,000 in legal fees.
Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, in a rare statement on the Utah oil-train project, which has united the stateโs Democratic lawmakers in opposition, said that if the Supreme Court greenlights the Uinta Basin Railway this fall, it will have โprofound implications across the West.โ
โItโs a legal case that weโre following, of course,โ Polis said recently in Vail, as quoted in the Colorado Times Recorder. โWeโre actively monitoring it. It would have a major impact on our state for sure, in terms of transportation. I donโt have any say over it. Itโs not up to the governor. Itโs a pending court case, so weโre aggressively monitoring it, and it would have profound implications across the West.โ
More than 350 prominent climate advocates on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Harris for president, a sign that environmental leaders believe hercampaign will energize like-mindedvoters in a way thatย President Bidenย could not. In aย letterย shared first with The Washington Post, big names in the environmental movement โ including former U.S. climate envoyย John F. Kerry, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D)โ wrote that Harrisย has long prioritized climate actionย and would continue to do so as president.
โWe know that protecting our planet for ourselves and future generations requires the kind of bold leadership that Kamala Harris has demonstrated her whole life,โ they wrote. โWe are proud to support her and be in the fight against climate change with her.โ
Inslee, whose ambitious climate proposals duringย his 2020 presidential campaignย influencedย Bidenโs climate policies, said Harris could help mobilize young voters, a crucial Democratic constituency.ย Polls showย that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to faceย raging wildfires,ย rising seasย and stronger storms in their lifetimes.
โHer candidacy instantly lit an electric spark under young people across the country,โ Inslee said. โThatโs going to bode well for our fortunes.โ
Kerry, who left the Biden administration in March, said in an interview that Harris was a โterrific allyโ on climate policy. He noted that she was an early advocate of the United States reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, and she delivered a forceful speech at theย U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubaiย last fall.
Three years ago, climate researchers shocked drought-weary Californians when they revealed that the American West was experiencing its driest 22-year period in 1,200 years, and that this severe megadrought was being intensified by global warming. Now, a UCLA climate scientist has reexamined the data and found that, even after two wet winters, the last 25 years are still likely the driest quarter-century since the year 800.
โThe dryness still wins out over the wetness, big time,โ said UCLA professor Park Williams.
The latest climate data show that the years since 2000 in western North America โ from Montana to California to northern Mexico โ have been slightly drier on average than a similar megadrought in the late 1500s…Williams shared his findings with the Los Angeles Times, providing an update to his widely cited 2022 study, which he coauthored with scientists at Columbia Universityโs Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The new findings reveal that even the unusually wet conditions that drenched the West since the start of 2023 pale in comparison to the long stretch of mostly dry years over the previous 23 years. And that dryness hasnโt been driven by natural cycles alone. Williams and his colleagues have estimated that a significant portion of the droughtโs severity โ roughly 40% โ is attributable to warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases. The warming that has occurred in the region, an increase of more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, has intensified the dry conditions, making the latest megadrought significantly more severe than it would be without climate change…Scientists and policy experts widely agree that adapting to aridification driven by climate change in the western U.S. will require major changes in how limited water supplies are managed for farms, cities and the environment.
โRegardless of what happens in the next few years, which will be dictated mostly by the randomness of weather, as the atmosphere continues to warm we should expect it to continue to degrade our water supply,โ Williams said. โA warmer atmosphere is a thirstier atmosphere, and without a compensating increase in precipitation, which has not occurred, humans and ecosystems will be left with less water.โ
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. On the geologic time scale, the increase to todayโs levels (orange dashed line) looks virtually instantaneous. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lรผthi et al., 2008, via the NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
Visitors walk past a sign reading โStop: Extreme Heat Dangerโ in Death Valley National Park during a heat wave on July 7, 2024. Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images
A month into summer 2024, the vast majority of the U.S. population had already experienced at least one extreme heat wave, and millions of people were under heat alerts, with forecasts warning of more ahead.
Globally, the planet had its hottest day in at least eight decades of recordkeeping on July 21 โ and then broke the record again on July 22, according to the European Unionโs Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The extreme heat is part of a longer trend: Each of the past 13 months has been the hottest on record for that month globally, including the hottest June, the EU service reported in early July. It also found that the average temperature for the previous 12 months had been at least 1.5 C (2.7 F) warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
The 1.5 C warming threshold can be confusing, so letโs take a closer look at what that means. In the Paris climate agreement, countries worldwide agreed to work to keep global warming under 1.5 C, however that refers to the temperature change averaged over a 30-year period. A 30-year average is used to limit the influence of natural year-to-year fluctuations.
So far, the Earth has only crossed that threshold for a single year. However, it is still extremely concerning. We study weather patternsinvolving heat. The world appears to be on track to cross the 30-year average threshold of 1.5 C within 10 years.
Heat is becoming a global problem
Several countries have experienced record heat across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia in 2024. In Mexico and Central America, weeks of persistent heat starting in spring 2024 combined with prolonged drought led to severe water shortages and dozens of deaths.
Muslim pilgrims spent hours in extreme temperatures and humidity during the Hajj in June 2024 in Saudi Arabia. Over 1,000 people died in the heat. AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool
Hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan, were overwhelmed amid weeks of high heat, frequent power outages, and water shortages in some areas. Neighboring India faced temperatures around 120 F (48.9 C) for several days in April and May that affected millions of people, many of them without air conditioning.
The climate connection: This isnโt โjust summerโ
Although heat waves are a natural part of the climate, the severity and extent of the heat waves so far in 2024 are not โjust summer.โ
A scientific assessment of the fierce heat wave in the eastern U.S. in June 2024 estimates that heat so severe and long-lasting was two to four times more likely to occur today because of human-caused climate change than it would have been without it. This conclusion is consistent with the rapid increase over the past several decades in the number of U.S. heat waves and their occurrence outside the peak of summer.
These record heat waves are happening in a climate thatโs globally more than 2.2 F (1.2 C) warmer โ when looking at the 30-year average โ than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began releasing large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that warm the climate.
Global surface temperatures have risen faster per decade in the past 30 years than over the past 120. NOAA NCEI
While a temperature difference of a degree or two when you walk into a different room might not even be noticeable, even fractions of a degree make a large difference in the global climate.
At the peak of the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, when the Northeast U.S. was under thousands of feet of ice, the globally averaged temperature was only about 11 F (6 C) cooler than now. So, it is not surprising that 2.2 F (1.2 C) of warming so far is already rapidly changing the climate.
If you thought this was hot
While this summer is likely be one of the hottest on record, it is important to realize that it may also be one of the coldest summers of the future.
Actions to reduce warming can limit a wide range of hazards and create numerous near-term benefits and opportunities. National Climate Assessment 2023
There is much that humanity can do to limit future warming if countries, companies and people everywhere act with urgency. Rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions can help avoid a warmer future with even worse heat waves and droughts, while also providing other benefits, including improving public health, creating jobs and reducing risks to ecosystems.
This term, the courtโs conservative supermajority handed down several rulings that chip away at the power of many federal agencies. But the environmental agency has been under particular fire, the result of a series of cases brought since 2022 by conservative activists who say that E.P.A. regulations have driven up costs for industries ranging from electric utilities to home building. Those arguments have resonated among justices skeptical of government regulation. On Friday [June 28, 2024], the court ended the use of what is known as the Chevron doctrine, a cornerstone of administrative law for 40 years that said that courts should defer to government agencies to interpret unclear laws. That decision threatens the authority of many federal agenciesย to regulate the environment and also health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more…
But more remarkable have been several decisions by the court to intervene to stop environmental regulations before they were decided by lower courts or even before they were implemented by the executive branch. On Thursday, the court said the E.P.A. could not limit smokestack pollution that blows across state borders under a measure known as the โgood neighbor rule.โ In that case, the court took the surprising step of weighing in while litigation was still pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Iron Fen. Photo credit from report “A Preliminary Evaluation of Seasonal Water Levels Necessary to Sustain Mount Emmons Fen: Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests,” David J. Cooper, Ph.D, December 2003.
The court also acted in an unusually preliminary fashion last year when itย struck down a proposed E.P.A. ruleย known as Waters of the United States that was designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands from pollution, acting before the regulation had even been made final…Similarly, in a 2022 challenge to an E.P.A. climate proposal known as the Clean Power Plan, the courtย sharply limited the agencyโs ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissionsย from power plants, even though that rule had not yet taken effect.
That kind of intervention has little in the way of precedent. Usually, the Supreme Court is the last venue to hear a case, after arguments have been made and opinions have been rendered by lower courts…Collectively, those decisions now endanger not only many existing environmental rules, but may prevent future administrations from writing new ones, experts say…
Comanche Generating Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 26, 2024
In one sense, Adam Frisch was an anomaly on the agenda of an energy conference held in Pueblo last Friday. Heโs a Democrat, making a second run for Congress after narrowly losing in 2022 to Lauren Boebert in Coloradoโs Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District. The districtโs largest city, Pueblo, once was reliably Democratic but has become a political toss-up.
Republican legislators, both current and former, were present at the conference, but I didnโt notice any Democratic legislators, even from Pueblo. Why that is, itโs hard to say.
Credit Frisch with knowing how to play to his crowd. He tipped his hat to natural gas several times even as he talked about how geothermal would use much the same skills sets and machinery.
He talked extensively about domestic energy mining and energy production. โThereโs no green energy without mining, just none,โ he said. He suggested that even now, burning wood may produce more energy than solar โ although he did acknowledge Colorado has far more solar capacity than the national average. He took swipes at the โColorado Capitol,โ a reference to the Democrats who have run the show since the 2018 election and who have passed dozens of bills with the intent of pushing and pulling Colorado into a giant pivot that will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For the conference on the Pueblo campus of Colorado State University, Frisch dressed in a style that suggested allegiance to his party: blue jeans, blue shirt and blue sports jacket. But he has some tip-toeing to do in this Congressional district. Heโs an Aspen resident, a member of the city council when that cityโs municipal utility, Aspen Electric, succeeded in achieving 100% renewables. And Frisch by no means disavows climate change.
โWhether Iโm in Durango or Boulder or up in Rangely, Colorado, I would say the same thing, that there is a climate crisis,โ he said at the outset of his remarks in the conferenceโs opening session. โItโs hotter and drier. Everybody knows this. People are planting at different times, theyโre harvesting at different times, theyโre hunting at different times. But we need to figure out if we truly want to try to solve this problem.โ
When running as an โoutsider,โ itโs useful to point to perceived hypocrisies among the elites. In Colorado, the prime candidate is Boulder.
โI need to poke fun a little bit at my former zip code, because in 2019 Boulder County, of the 3,147 counties in the country, (had) on a per-capita basis the most greenhouse gas emissions per person in the country.โ
Congressional candidate Adam Frisch explains why generation will be important. Photo/Allen Best
True? Well, not really. It wasnโt Boulder County but one zip code within the county that spawned many stories in 2020. And it wasnโt total greenhouse gas emissions per capita, but only those provoked by buildings. For that matter, the University of Michigan researchers reported that were able to include only two-thirds of the nationโs counties in the study.
With those caveats in mind, they did find that the buildings in zip code 80510 produced 23,811 pounds of carbon dioxide per person. That zip code is in and around Allenspark, along the road between Boulder and Estes Park. Itโs a place of knotty-pined cabins that burn a lot of propane gas as well as newer and some very large homes that likely use electricity.
The methodology of the researchers also examined the sources of electricity, and by that measure the heavy coal in the electrical mix bumped the figures higher. That area is served by a member cooperative of Tri-State Generation and Transmission or Xcel Energy, and in 2019 both were still very heavily invested in coal โ including coal burned at Pueblo.
One other detail: that same study found that a zip code in San Francisco, the bastion of woke politics, actually had the nationโs lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions for buildings.
Details, details, details
That was par for the day. Just as important as who was at this energy summit and the information they shared was who was not there and what was not said.
The event was sponsored by Action Colorado, formerly known as Colorado 22, a reference to the counties of southwestern Colorado and the San Luis Valley that are included. Think of it as patterned after the much older Club 20.
The morning agenda had various speakers, but most notable was a defense of natural gas in buildings. The afternoon was almost entirely about the promise of nuclear energy.
Interspersed through the day were speakers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW. They told about their lives and about their work. They spoke very well, very effectively. I spent eight years in Toastmasters trying to smooth my tongue of rusted iron into moments of silver. These guys were like professionals as they talked about growing up on ranches, about the dangers of working with electricity, about building better lives for themselves and their families.
The background question for the dayโs conversation was what will happen when the last of Puebloโs three coal-burning units becomes quiet. One of the three coal-burning units at Comanche Generating Station has closed, another will in 2025, and the third is to become silent no later than Jan. 1, 2031, as per the decision by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.
(In my message to Big Pivots subscribers of June 13, I vaguely and imprecisely referred to 2030. To add some confusion, Gov. Jared Polis last week said 2029.)
What will replace the tax base and jobs in Pueblo and Pueblo County?
President Joe Biden visited the CW Wind factory in Pueblo, the worldโs largest manufacture of towers for wind turbines, in November 2023. Photo/Allen Best
Pueblo is a river town, bisected by the Arkansas River. Itโs a transportation hub for both highways and rail. It is above all a place that makes things. I am sure it has Ph.D.s among its 111,000 residents, but it has blue-collar DNA. Work gloves could be the cityโs logo.
The steel mill was first and maybe even now remains foremost, hulks of rust rising above I-25 even as a new mill is now taking shape. The mill began producing rail in 1882, and thatโs still the primary product, if the lengths have been extended to quarter-mile sections. It was called CF&I when I was young, and although I have no personal memories, Pueblo was still a rich ethnic stew in the mid-20th century, a cauldron of immigrants who labored under a film of coal smoke. You donโt have to go far to find people whose fathers and grandfathers and perhaps great-grandfathers had walked to the mill, lunch buckets in hand, from their houses in the Bessemer and other close-by neighborhoods.
That includes the former mayor, Nick Gradisar, and the fellow I had lunch with at the conference, Joseph Griego. Gradisar, a former board chair for Action Colorado, the organization sponsoring this conference, had a vison of pivoting Pueblo to a green-energy economy. He was handily defeated in the election last year.
Some of that pivot, however, had already started before he even became mayor.
On Saturday morning, after the conference, I awoke in our motel room on Puebloโs north side soon after daybreak and set out to get photographs. I drove south on I-25, pausing during shift change at the gates of the steel mill, which is now owned by EVRAZ North America. Based in London, majority ownership was held by Russian oligarchs, cronies of Putin, most notably Roman Abramovich, who alone owned between a quarter and a third of the company. Evraz said in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that it would sell its North American assets, but nothing has come of that. As best I can tell, Putin cronies still have a stake in Pueblo.
Continuing south out of the city, I turned off from I-25 at the Stem Beach turnoff, then headed northeast on Lime Creek Road, putting Greenhorn Mountain in the rearview mirror.
Greenhorn was originally Cuerno Verde, the name given by Spanish colonizers to two leaders, the father and son, of a band of Comanches. They were known for their distinctive headdress.
The younger Cuerno Verde was killed there in 1779 by the Spanish troops led by Juan Batiste de Anza and their Apache, Ute and Pueblo allies. And with the Comanche weakened, the Great Plains in Colorado with their plentiful bison became more available to some other immigrants, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe.
The alignments of what became Colorado were, in the 18th century, as convoluted as they are in the 21st century, but the conflicts for the time being now draw only figurative blood. By that measure, these disagreements about the energy transition are mild indeed even if one former legislator at the Pueblo conference described the politics he left behind at the Colorado Capitol as โtoxic.โ
The Lime Creek Road constitutes Puebloโs industrial alley. First in this sequence is the former wind turbine factory formerly owned by the Danish company Vesta but purchased in 2021 by CS Wind, a South Korean company. The factory produces towers that are 90 meters tall and weigh 240 tons. President Joe Biden was there last November to give a pep talk about the clean energy agenda.
A little farther along is a turnoff to another set of gray industrial buildings rising up from the plains, the GCC cement plant and limestone quarry, one of two remaining cement plants in Colorado with the recent closure of a plant at Lyons.
The day before, a speaker at the conference โ in the morning, non-nuclear session โ representing a company called Carbon America, had spoken about the hopes to sequester carbon dioxide under cap rock in a geologic formation northeast of Pueblo. Two potential partners exist in the Pueblo area, this one and another near Florence. They manufacture cement from lime.
Carbon America sees carbon dioxide created in this process โnone of it through combustion โ as being one market for carbon sequestration along with the almost pure stream of carbon dioxide being emitted by corn ethanol plants. The companyโs office is about a mile from my own in suburban Denver.
As I continued north, the three giant smokestacks of Comanche 3 rose higher. Before I got there, though, I first saw the low-rising rows of solar panels, a virtual sea of them amid the cacti.
The first solar farm, located directly east of the coal plant, was developed by Eric Blank, who has now become the chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Then, in 2021, completion of a far larger array of solar panels was completed. This project, Bighorn, was on land owned by Evraz around Comanche Station. It can generate 300 megawatts of direct current or 240 megawatts of alternating current. Through the artifice of credits, the solar production allows the steel mill to proclaim it has solar-made steel. (It also matters that the plant works with recycled steel, which requires less heat).
Still heading toward Comanche, I drove under transmission lines. whether generated by solar or for by coal units. However electricity is generated, it must be transmitted to metro Denver and wherever else. Will a nuclear plant transmit electricity at Comanche sometime in the 2030s?
The Pueblo area has Coloradoโs two remaining limestone quarries and cement kilns, including this one along Lime Creek Road. Photo/Allen Best
The tone for the conference was set by the panel that followed Adam Frisch.
The panel consisted of representatives of three of Coloradoโs four privately-owned utilities that sell methane, the primary constituent in natural gas, to consumers for building heat and water cooling.
Curbing methane emissions from Coloradoโs buildings may be Coloradoโs most difficult nut to crack. We donโt swap out buildings the way we do cars or cell phones.
Ken Fogle is a marketing vice president for Atmos Energy, one of Coloradoโs two regulated gas-only utilities, meaning that they donโt also sell electricity. Black Hills Energy does sell both electricity and gas, but not necessarily in the same place. It was represented by Tom Henley, the senior public affairs director. And there was Michael Sapp, the state public affairs director for Xcel Energy, with sells both gas and electricity, and in largely the same areas.
The Monday prior to the conference, the Colorado PUC commissioners had issued their formal 141-page decision about Xcelโs proposed clean heat plan. The PUC commissioners rejected a lot of Xcelโs ideas.
The plan was in response to legislation adopted in 2021 that said that the gas utilities needed to figure out how to start reducing emissions from the natural gas they delivered to their customers for heating of space and water. Itโs one of maybe a half-dozen bills taking aim at methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that the Environmental Defense Fund says is responsible for about 30% of todayโs global warming driven by human action.
โFor those of you donโt know, natural gas has been kind of under the microscope, shall we say, for a number of years now down at the state capitol,โ said Black Hillsโ Henley.
The panelists in Pueblo said they thought the clean-heat legislation adopted in 2021 required too much, too soon. A major grievance is that the legislation required a 4% reduction in emissions by 2025 compared to a 2015 baseline โ but ignoring the role of population growth. In effect, said several panelists, this means a 20% reduction.
Nobody argued whether climate change is real or the role of greenhouse gas emissions in causing climate change. That debate has, at least formally, passed. The argument is whether the reduction goals are realistic.
Itโs a legitimate question. But this was not a panel created to further the dialogue. Instead, aided by softball questions, the remarks drifted toward preserving the status quo. These are companies who donโt want to change their business models in light of the evidence of climate change.
โHow do we support legislators who favor an all-of-the-above energy mix,โ they were asked.
โWeโve got to talk to people that are electing their officials to make sure they know what their officials are doing in Denver,โ said Fogle, the Atmos representative. โI donโt think a lot of folks would agree with whatโs happening in Denver when you go to these places like the Western Slope or Southeastern Colorado. I donโt think theyโd agree with whatโs happening in Denver. So you got to get the people involved and activate the base.โ
Then another question. โDems control the House, Senate and governorโs office, how do you navigate policies that are aimed at mandated, forced beneficial electrification, and what strategies do you try to deploy to work with that agenda?โ
The key strategy that emerged in the remarks of panelists is to emphasize cost of adopting other technologies that will end the need for natural gas in buildings. Going electric is expensive, and natural gas is affordable. And thereโs truth to that. Staying the course is the cheapest alternative. Cost can matter.
Ironically, along the way in this discussion about natural gas, there was a plug for nuclear. But when the agenda moved to nuclear that afternoon that cost almost entirely disappeared from the conversation.
That seems to be a pattern.
Former PUC commissioner Frances Koncilja explains the task force perspective as to what Pueblo needs after all the units in the Comanche Generating Station close. Photo/Allen Best
While some reading this might conclude otherwise, I am actually neutral about nuclear as a long-term solution. As Iโve written before, one of the leading climate change scientists, James Hansen, has embraced the need for nuclear. I know people in Boulder County โ yes, in that place that many want to see as a hotbed of cross-breeding of privilege and wokeism โ who believe it is necessary.
It would certainly solve a lot of problems. Even now, 20% of U.S. power comes from nuclear power plants.
Then thereโs the matter of Coloradoโs declared intention of not leaving behind coal communities in this transition. Frances Koncilja, a former PUC commissioner, in 2023 co-chaired a task force created by Xcel Energy that produced a report in January. The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee Report heartily recommended a nuclear power plant to replace Comanche.
Pueblo County has done its part to reduce emissions, she said. Pueblo County will be responsible for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by Xcel Energy and 20% statewide from the electric sector.
She emphasized the obligation of Colorado. โJust transition means that coal communities should not only be no worse off with the closure of coal facilities but also replace the coal generation with high-paying and highly-skilled jobs and lost tax base so that coal communities have an opportunity to prosper, grow and reimagine their local economies.โ
Koncilja did not specifically cite the 2019 law, which in my read is a little more fuzzy than how she summarized it. Colorado does not owe Pueblo a one-for-one replacement.
The law says the โeffects of coal plant closures on works and communities have the potential to be significant if not managed correctly.โ It also mentions the stateโs intention to โassist workers and communities impacted by changes in Coloradoโs coal economy.โ It also mentions a โmoral commitment.โ
The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee she co-chaired recommended nuclear because of the 300 jobs with a salary range of $60,000 to $200,000 and annual tax payments of $95 million. In 2021, Xcel and its two co-owners of Comanche 3, one of the coal-burning units, collectively paid $31 million.
She also pointed to strong comparisons in wealth to other counties in Colorado, specifically Aspen/Pitkin County, Vail/Eagle County, Boulder County and Denver.
Exploitation of fossil fuels has left Pueblo far, far behind these other locations.
One unit of Comanche Generating Station has ceased operation and the other two will before 2031 gets underway. Photo/Allen Best
The afternoon was rich with speakers with a wealth of information about different types of nuclear technology that are in some stage of development. There were many details, but almost entirely absent were those most useful for relevancy in Pueblo and Colorado altogether. That begins with cost.
One speaker said his companyโs technology will be able to deliver electricity for 3 cents a kilowatt-hour โ making it competitive with renewables. But, of course, it has not been deployed yet.
When the representative from nuclear powerhouse Westinghouse concluded, she took several questions. The first was: What is the cause of the most significant pushback you get?โ Cost, she replied.
Cost infamously rose to $35 billion, more than double original projections, on the two Vogtle units that have come on line recently in Georgia.
But what about the advanced nuclear designs? True enough, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in early 2023 approved the design of small modular reactors. But NuScale, the company that had sought the approval for deployment at Idaho Falls, just a few months later cancelled the order. The problem? Escalating costs.
Can Bill Gates disprove us naysayers? He was in Wyoming on Monday to help break ceremonial ground for a nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. The company has a pending application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the plant design. Gates and company hope for completion in 2030, a brisk pace.
Gates has put in $1 billion into TerraPower and the U.S. Department of Energy has $2 billion promised for the project. Gates, in an interview on Face the Nation on Sunday morning (see transcript), said he expects to invest several billion more. He estimated completion price at $10 billion. He also said he hopes to 100 projects using the same nuclear technology โto really make an impact.โ
A sea of solar panels exists around Comanche Generation Station along with many transmission lines that export the power to Xcel Energyโs customers. Photo/Allen Best
In a seminar several weeks before, Duane Highley, chief executive of Tri-State Generation and Transmission, said he thought the price will not be bent down until about 2035 or beyond to a point where it can be justified for his members in places like the San Luis Valley and the corn-and-millet and wheat-and-ranch country of eastern Colorado.
To be fair, Highley said the cost of geothermal for electrical production is no better at this point. The comparison may not be the most useful. The technologies compete in two different cost arenas. Simply put, nuclear is a bigger gamble, the entry bid at a higher level.
But the larger point is that we have a whole host of technologies competing to be the final answer to 100% emissions-free energy โ and nuclear is just one.
So why the bandwagon for nuclear? Will Colorado really throw cost considerations out the window and became the test lab for advanced nuclear technologies?
Highley, in his interview,(which you can read elsewhere in this issue), said he wished the federal government would bankroll the next-generation nuclear technology, such as for use on military bases. That would get us over this gigantic hump of price.
It would still leave us with puddles of radioactive waste hither and thither with that huge issue unresolved. Our past recklessness in places such as Rocky Flats, between Arvada and Boulder, leaves many uncomfortable.
And finally, there is this question: Why do nuclear advocates in Colorado think they can continue to make their case without addressing these hard questions.
The best I can figure is that nuclear has become a stand-in for coal and a political statement that borders on religion. Because Aspen, Boulder and Denver likes renewables, we need to be for nuclear. Thatโs why I found the talking points of the congressional candidate from Aspen so interesting. (And, to be honest, speaking to a Pueblo crowd and leading with the fact that youโre from Boulder likely would not be the wisest way to introduce yourself).
But what was Xcel Energy up to in creating this task force? What did it truly hope to accomplish? A mere distraction, a way to gain leverage against the Democratic majority at the Colorado Capitol?
Iโm still scratching my head. I probably will be still until Xcel submits its proposal to the PUC in five weeks.
Attorney General Phil Weiser released the following statement regarding todayโs U.S. Supreme Court decision overruling 40 years of regulatory law precedent:
โUnder 40 years of precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, the Supreme Court has given reasonable deference to federal agencies to implement statutes passed by Congress, notably, when a statute is unclear. As the court has consistently acknowledged, it is impossible for Congress to legislate every detail needed to carry out and enforce complex laws.
โWith todayโs opinion inย Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court appoints itself as the super regulator. The court says that it knows better than highly trained experts when it comes to protections for the air we breathe, the water we drink, public lands, worker safety, food and drug safety, public safety, disaster relief, public benefits, or any other regulation that affects American lives. [ed. emphasis mine] The courtโs decision in this case threatens to create regulatory uncertainty for businesses, government agencies, and everyday Americans. As a result, it promises not only confusion, but also higher costs and greater harms. Rather than clarifying the scope of the Chevron doctrine, the court chose to sow chaos and uncertainty.
โTodayโs decision does not impact state regulations promulgated under Colorado state law. The Department of Law will continue to work with state agency partners to implement and enforce state regulations.โ
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a precedent Friday that had for decades limited judicial power to strike executive branch regulations, in a decision immediately criticized for potentially undermining decisions by scientists and agency experts.
The 6-3 and 6-2 decisions in two cases brought by fishing operators in New Jersey and Rhode Island challenged a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rule and overturned the principle known as Chevron deference.
That precedent gave federal agencies broad discretion to use their judgment to resolve any ambiguity Congress left in a federal statute.
The courtโs six conservatives reasoned that courts โroutinely confront statutory ambiguitiesโ that have nothing to do with the authority of regulatory agencies, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
โOf course, when faced with a statutory ambiguity in such a case, the ambiguity is not a delegation to anybody, and a court is not somehow relieved of its obligation to independently interpret the statute,โ Roberts wrote.
Under the 40-year-old precedent, courts gave up their interpretive role and deferred to agencies, Roberts wrote.
But they shouldnโt, he added. Judges should apply their own legal reasoning to reach a sound decision.
โCourts instead understand that such statutes, no matter how impenetrable, do โ in fact, must โ have a single, best meaning.โ
1984 ruling overturned
The decision overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that said courts must defer to federal agenciesโ expertise when considering legal challenges to a rule. The 1984 ruling significantly raised the bar for overturning an agency rule.
The precedent strengthened the executive branch under presidential administrations of both parties, but experts worry its reversal will strip agencies of the power to enact regulatory safeguards across a broad spectrum of issues including clean air and public health.
In a dissenting opinion, the courtโs three liberals โ not including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in one of the cases, after she recused herself because sheโd heard the case as an appeals court judge before joining the Supreme Court โ said the majority erred by misunderstanding the roles of three branches of government.
Congress knows it cannot โwrite perfectly complete regulatory statutes,โ Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent. Interpretation of those statutes is a given, and Congress usually prefers a โresponsible agencyโ instead of a court.
Agencies are more politically accountable and have greater technical expertise in a given issue than courts, she wrote.
โPut all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice,โ Kagan wrote.
Kagan went on to criticize the decision as a power grab by the judiciary at the expense of agency experts.
โA rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,โ she wrote. โIn one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue โ no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden โ involving the meaning of regulatory law.โ
Liberals see a weakening of safeguards
Liberal groups and elected Democrats worried the reversal will strip agencies of the power to enact strong regulatory safeguards across a broad spectrum of issues, especially climate and environmental regulations.
โIt weakens our governmentโs ability to protect us from the climate crisis, threats to worker safety, public health, clean air and water, safe medicines and food, a sound financial system, and more,โ Manish Bapna, president of the environmental group NRDC Action Fund, wrote in a statement.
โTodayโs reckless but unsurprising decision from this far-right court is a triumph for corporate polluters that seek to dismantle common-sense regulations protecting clean air, clean water and a livable climate future,โ Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of the advocacy group Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.
Rachel Weintraub, the executive director of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, a group that advocates for strong federal regulations, said in an interview before the decision was released that Chevron deference has allowed a host of regulations affecting consumer safety, labor, environmental protections and other issues.
โThe important role that government plays in ensuring the health and safety of our families and the fairness of our markets could be undermined here,โ she said.
The ruling takes power away from the experts on a particular subject of a federal regulation โ traffic engineers at the Department of Transportation, disease experts at the Food and Drug Administration or scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, for example โ and gives it to the federal judiciary, Weintraub said.
U.S. Rep. Raรบl Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who is the ranking member on the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, called the ruling a gift to polluters and the fossil fuel industry.
โFor 40 years, Congress has passed laws with the understanding that the interpretation of those laws is for the courts, but the implementation laid in the hands of the scientific and policy career experts at our federal agencies,โ Grijalva said in a statement.
โBut now, thanks to this extremist power-grab, our most fundamental protections will be at the whim of individual judges โ many of whom are far-right ideologues โ regardless of their lack of expertise or political agenda.โ
Conservatives applaud rollback
Republicans in Congress and conservative activists praised the decision for weakening the administrative state, saying it would return power to the legislative branch.
โThe Constitution vests Congress with the sole authority to make law,โ Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a statement. โAfter forty years of Chevron deference, the Supreme Court made it clear today that our system of government leaves no room for an unelected bureaucracy to co-opt this authority for itself.โ
Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said Fridayโs ruling should spur Congress to write more prescriptive laws.
โCongress has sidestepped our legal duties for far too long and todayโs ruling puts us back in the driverโs seat when it comes to rulemaking and regulatory authority,โ Westerman said in a written statement. โWeโre no longer going to let federal agencies fill in the details when it comes to the policies we enact.โ
Roman Martinez, an attorney who argued on behalf of the Rhode Island fishing operators, called the ruling a โwin for individual liberty and the Constitution.โ
โThe Court has taken a major step to shut down unlawful power grabs by federal agencies and to preserve the separation of powers,โ Martinez said in a statement distributed by the conservative public relations firm CRC Advisors. โGoing forward, judges will be charged with interpreting the law faithfully, impartially, and independently, without deference to the government.โ
No plans to reopen old cases
In the majority opinion, Roberts said the court did not plan to reopen cases that had been decided by Chevron โdespite our change in interpretive methodology.โ
Even prior to Fridayโs decision, the court had used Chevron less often. During theย oral argument, Roberts cited a study that the court had relied on the precedent sparingly over the past 14 years.
The courtโs conservative majority has shown a willingness to move away from deference to agency decision-making, demanding more explicit congressional instruction.
In West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, for example, the court ruled that the EPA lacked the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Daniel Wolff, an administrative law attorney at the law firm Crowell & Moring, downplayed the effect the ruling would have on the administrative state.
Congress at times explicitly directs agencies to craft regulations, and those rules will still be subject to the same standard that they were written reasonably, Wolff said in an interview prior to the decision.
Rules with solid legal and statutory foundations would survive under either standard, he said.
โRolling back Chevron is simply going to mean agencies donโt get the benefit of the doubt in the case of a tie,โ Wolff said. โThey have to come into the court and persuade the court that they have the better reading of the statute.โ
Fishing operators
The cases decided Friday was brought by herring fishing operators from New Jersey and Rhode Island who challenged a NOAA rule requiring the operators to pay for the federal monitors who regularly join fishing boats to ensure compliance with federal regulations.
The fishing operators said the rule forced them to hand over up to 20% of their profits.
After a lower court relied on Chevron deference to rule in favor of NOAA, oral arguments at the Supreme Court in January focused almost entirely on Chevron.
PLUS: Biden has not issued more drilling permits than Trump
๐ฅต Aridification Watch ๐ซ
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
The latest Lower Colorado River Accounting Report is out from the Bureau of Reclamation, and it holds some good news: The biggest guzzlers of the riverโs water are using less of it.
Last year, the Lower Basin states of California, Nevada, and Arizona consumed1 5.78 million acre-feet, or nearly 900,000 acre-feet less than in 2022. Thatโs a huge amount of water thatโs staying in โ or being returned to โ the river rather than getting gulped up by crops or lawns or power plants or swimming pools.
Still more impressive is that consumptive use has decreased by nearly 1.8 million acre-feet since 2003, or a 23% drop, even as the population of the region served by the river has ballooned. Both agriculture and municipal users appear to be taking a portion of the cuts. The predominantly agricultural Imperial Irrigation District, the riverโs single biggest user, slashed consumption by 160,000 acre-feet from the previous year, indicating that federal compensation programs for fallowing fields are working. Nevada, where virtually no water is used for farming, is taking less of its already paltry share of the river by cracking down on waste.
The riverโs largest water users have cut consumption over the past decade, some more dramatically than others. Source: USBR.
Whether these cuts will be enough isnโt yet clear โ they donโt include any changes in Upper Basin use. Federal officials have said 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of reductions will be necessary to offset the effects of climate change-exacerbated aridification and to keep Lake Mead and Powell viable. Others think even deeper cuts will be necessary if the river continues to shrink.
The river has carried less than 10 million feet during nine of the last 22 years. In 2002 and 2023 it only held about 5 million acre-feet โ which wouldnโt have been enough to serve just the Lower Basin.
Estimated natural flow of the Colorado River at Leeโs Ferry (the dividing line between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin). The natural flow is basically the total amount of water the river delivers each year, or the volume that would pass by Leeโs Ferry if there were no upstream diversions. Source: USBR.
***
On a related note: Those Summer Solstice storms and flash floods gave a bit of a boost to Lake Powell. On June 21, the average inflow to the reservoir was about 31,000 cubic feet per second โ a pretty good volume resulting from the tail-end of the spring runoff. Two days later, it popped up to more than 51,000 cfs, bringing the surface elevation up to 3,583 feet above sea level and a bit further out of the dead pool danger zone. Itโs still a long, long ways from full, however.
From the Lake Powell Water Database.
Itโs likely the floods delivered another gift to Lake Powell: a herd of rafts belonging to a boating party that happened to set up camp along the banks of the San Juan River above Mexican Hat just before the storm hit. They had tied up their boats and set up their tents right at the mouth of Lime Creek. Pretty soon a wall of hot chocolate-colored water came barreling down the wash, taking gear and all of the boats with it. Thankfully, no one was hurt…
๐ต Public Lands ๐ฒ
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Here we go again: Another media outlet is trying to make hay out of the question of who issued more oil and gas drilling permits, Biden or Trump. And here I go once again, allowing myself to get dragged into this little tiff, which has received so many words in the news and yet is ultimately about as consequential as a hypothetical Jell-O wrestling match between the two main presidential contenders. So why bother with it this time? Because people seem to care. Also, thereโs a funny new twist.
As you may recall, about a year after Biden took office, environmental groups began scolding the administration for issuing more oil and gas drilling permits than the Trump administration did during its first year. The trope has been dusted off and repeated every January since, including early this year, as more evidence that Biden is still failing to live up to campaign-era statements that he would end drilling on federal land. Since this statistic is losing Biden support among young, climate-minded folks, the administration has generally played it down or denied it.
Now, the Washington Free Beacon, which is not exactly a legitimate news organization, is claiming that Biden, himself, is bragging about issuing more permits than Trump. Furthermore, the Beacon is arguing that Bidenโs boasts are false and based on misleading data โ and that Trump actually issued more permits.
So which is it? Before I get to the big reveal, let me say this: This whole comparison is stupid. Seriously. Itโs all part of the horse-race politics our society has embraced.
This is being portrayed almost as if Biden and Trump are sitting on opposite ends of the Oval Office in a race to sign the most (or least) drilling permits, with the winner (or loser) getting the most votes. Of course, thatโs not how it works. Neither the president, nor their cabinet members, nor the director of the Bureau of Land Management actually sign off on these things. Theyโre issued at the field or district office level. Those bureaucrats, sitting in Carlsbad or Farmington or Buffalo or what have you, can only approve a permit if an oil and gas company applies for one. And a lot of factors wholly unrelated to who is in the White House dictate whether a company wants to drill in a specific place or not.
So what Iโm saying is that the numbers Iโm about to present to you are less an indication of how oil and gas-friendly or climate-friendly a president is, than a sign of how healthy the oil and gas market is. So take them with a grain of salt.
But for now, the โwinnerโ โฆ or, rather, the administration that issued the most drilling permits per month, on average, is โฆ Donald J. Trump (by a hair). Which means (though it pains me to say it): The enviros were wrong and the Free Beacon is right.
14,543: Total number of drilling permits issued by the Bureau of Land Management during the Trump administration (1/21/2017 to 1/20/2021)
302: Monthly average of drilling permits issued by the BLM under Trump (total permits/48 months).
11,964: Total number of drilling permits issued by the Bureau of Land Management during the first 41 months of the Biden administration. (1/21/2021 to 6/20/2024)
292: Monthly average of drilling permits issued by the BLM under Biden (total permits/41 months).
The bar for 2024 includes permits issued until 6/20/2024.Data is from the BLMโs Approved APDs Report database. During fiscal year 2021, more than 5,000 permits were issued, 2,030 of which were handed out by the Trump administration between Oct. 1, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021.
So there you have it. Bidenโs BLM has issued 10 fewer permits per month, on average, than Trumpโs. I suppose this is notable, given the extreme differences in approach and policy between the two: Trumpโs โEnergy Dominanceโ vs. Bidenโs campaign pledge to end drilling on federal lands.
But campaign promises, vapid slogans, and even the number of drilling permits issued are far less meaningful than actual policy. And in that realm, Biden has done pretty well on environmental and public lands issues, implementing new protections and pollution-fighting regulations, getting massive amounts of funding for clean energy and abandoned well cleanup from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts, establishing new national monuments, extending Endangered Species Act protections to more critters in the path of energy development, and leasing less land to oil and gas companies than any administration in recent memory.
And let me add that if youโre a climate and/or environmentally minded person or just value public lands and are still on the fence when it comes to Biden or Trump, then youโreย not paying attention. A second Trump administration will be a far bigger disaster for our lands, air, water, and climate than the first one. Last time, Trumpโs and his cabinetโs incompetence mitigated the damage, somewhat. This time right-wing think tanks (an oxymoron, perhaps?) areย preparing a โplaybookโย to guide a second Trump administration in eviscerating environmental and public health protections, rescinding national monuments, and generally opening up public lands to corporate pillaging and profiteering. [ed. emphasis mine]
1 Consumption = Consumptive Use = Total Diversions – Return Flows. So Nevada may pull more than 400,000 acre-feet from Lake Mead, but because it returns more than half of it to the reservoir in the form of treated effluent, its consumptive use is less than 200,000 acre-feet.
Judge Robert R. Gunning, a district court judge hearing the case in Boulder, rejected requests from both companies to dismiss the lawsuit on Friday.ย The rulingย allows the case to proceed, setting the stage for a trial that will consider whether fossil fuel companies should pay some of the costs related to climate-related disasters like floods and wildfires. Boulder County first filedย the lawsuitย in 2018 in cooperation with the City of Boulder and San Miguel County. The complaint argues Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy spent decades misleading the public about the dangers of unchecked fossil fuel consumption. The lawsuit further demands the companies pay unspecified financial damages to fund local efforts to recover from recent climate-related disasters and brace for more frequent climate-fueled catastrophes in the future…The lawsuit cites the 2010 Fourmile Canyon fire and 2013 floods as examples of climate disasters in Boulder County. The case was filed before theย Marshall fireย swept through the area in the winter of 2021, incinerating more than 1,000 homes and causing more than $2 billion in damage in what is now considered the most destructive wildfire in state history…
The Boulder climate damage lawsuit has also been delayed by both companiesโ attempts to push the case into federal court. Those effortsย failedย last year after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the lawsuit, clearing a path for the case to proceed in state court.ย The recent ruling comes as more than 20 state and local governments have filed similar lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. Boulder is among the first to prevail against motions to dismiss from Exxon Mobil and other defendants, joining Honolulu and Annapolis, Md., along with the states of Massachusetts and Delaware.ย
Atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAAโs Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory peaked in May 2024 at a monthly average of 426.9 parts per million, establishing another high mark in the 66-year record of observations on the Hawaiian volcano. Credit: NOAA
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Theo Stein):
June 6, 2024
Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever โ accelerating on a steep rise to levels far above any experienced during human existence, scientists from NOAA and theย Scripps Institution of Oceanographyoffsite linkย at the University of California San Diego announced today.
This graph shows the full record of monthly mean carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. They were started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March of 1958 at the NOAA Weather Station on Mauna Loa volcano. NOAA started its own CO2 measurements in May of 1974, and they have run in parallel with those made by Scripps since. (Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory)
CO2 measurements sending ominous signs
Scientists at Scripps, the organization that initiated CO2 monitoring at Mauna Loa in 1958 and maintains an independent record, calculated a May monthly average of 426.7 ppm for 2024, an increase of 2.92 ppm over May 2023โs measurement of 423.78 ppm. For Scripps, the two-year jump tied a previous record set in 2020.
From January through April, NOAA and Scripps scientists said CO2 concentrations increased more rapidly than they have in the first four months of any other year. The surge has come even as one highly regarded international reportoffsite link has found that fossil fuel emissions, the main driver of climate change, have plateaued in recent years.
โOver the past year, weโve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,โ said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. โNow we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever. We must recognize that these are clear signals of the damage carbon dioxide pollution is doing to the climate system, and take rapid action to cut fossil fuel use as quickly as we can.โ
Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 program that manages the institutionโs 56-year-old measurement series, noted that year-to-year increase recorded in March 2024 was the highest for both Scripps and NOAA in Keeling Curve history.
โNot only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever,โ said Keeling. โEach year achieves a higher maximum due to fossil-fuel burning, which releases pollution in the form of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill.โ
These graphs compare the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in Mauna Loa and global records.The decadal average rate of increase of CO2 in the graphs on the right are depicted by the black, horizontal lines. (Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory)
Like a giant heat-trapping blanket
Like other greenhouse gases, CO2 acts like a blanket in the atmosphere, preventing heat radiating off of the planetโs surface from escaping into space. The warming atmosphere fuels extreme weather events, such as heat waves, drought and wildfires, as well as heavier precipitation and flooding. About half of the carbon dioxide humans release into the air stays in the atmosphere. The other half is absorbed at Earthโs surface, split roughly equally between land and ocean.
The record two-year growth rate observed from 2022 to 2024 is likely a result of sustained high fossil fuel emissions combined with El Nino conditions limiting the ability of global land ecosystems to absorb atmospheric CO2, said John Miller, a carbon cycle scientist with NOAAโs Global Monitoring Laboratory. The absorption of CO2 is changing the chemistry of the ocean, leading to ocean acidification and lower levels of dissolved oxygen, which interferes with the growth of some marine organisms.
A longstanding scientific partnership
For most of the past half century, continuous daily sampling by both NOAA and Scripps at Mauna Loa provided an ideal baseline for establishing long-term trends. In 2023, some of the measurements were obtained from a temporary sampling site atop the nearby Mauna Kea volcano, which was established after lava flows cut off access to the Mauna Loa Observatory in November 2022. With the access road still buried under lava, staff have been accessing the site once a week by helicopter to maintain the NOAA and Scripps in-situ CO2 analyzers that provide continuous CO2 measurements.
Scripps geoscientist Charles David Keeling initiated on-site measurements of CO2 at NOAAโs Mauna Loa weather station in 1958. Keeling was the first to recognize that CO2 levels in the Northern Hemisphere fell during the growing season, and rose as plants died in the fall. He documented these CO2 fluctuations in a record that came to be known as the Keeling Curveoffsite link. He was also the first to recognize that, in addition to the seasonal fluctuation, CO2 levels rose every year.
NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans spearheaded the effort to begin NOAAโs own measurements in 1974, and the two research institutions have made complementary, independent observations ever since.
While the Mauna Loa Observatory is considered the benchmark climate monitoring station for the northern hemisphere, it does not capture the changes of CO2 across the globe. NOAAโs globally distributed sampling network provides this broader picture, which is very consistent with the Mauna Loa results.
The Mauna Loa data, together with measurements from sampling stations around the world, are incorporated into the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, a foundational research dataset for international climate scientists and a benchmark for policymakers attempting to address the causes and impacts of climate change.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday accepted a last-ditch appeal from the backers of a controversial oil-by-rail project in eastern Utah, agreeing to review a lower-court ruling that sided with a Colorado county and environmental groups who accused federal regulators of failing to adequately analyze the proposalโs downstream risks.
In an August 2023 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the Surface Transportation Boardโs approval of the 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway contained โnumerousโ and โsignificantโ violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, and ordered the STB to correct deficiencies in the projectโs environmental impact statement. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a group of Utah county governments backing the project, appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court in March.
In a list of case orders released Monday morning, the court issued a so-called writ of certiorari and agreed to review the case. With the Supreme Court set to enter its summer recess next week, arguments in the case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, will be heard during the courtโs next term, which begins in October.
An ambitious multibillion-dollar scheme first formally proposed in 2019, the Uinta Basin Railway aims to connect Utahโs largest oil field to the national rail network, allowing drillers there to ship large volumes of the basinโs โwaxyโ crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries. At an estimated capacity of up to 350,000 barrels exported per day, it would rank among the largest sustained efforts to transport oil by rail ever undertaken in the U.S., singlehandedly more than doubling the nationwide total in 2022, and causing a tenfold increase in hazmat rail traffic through environmentally sensitive and densely populated areas in Colorado.
Coloradoโs Eagle County joined five environmental groups in suing the STB over its 2021 approval of the project, arguing the agencyโs analysis had violated NEPA. A three-judge Court of Appeals panel agreed, directing the STB to further scrutinize downstream risks of increased oil-train traffic in Colorado, wildfire hazards, impacts on communities along the Gulf Coast and more.
โItโs disappointing the Supreme Court took up this case but the appellate courtโs decision on this destructive project is legally sound and should ultimately stand,โ said Wendy Park, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the environmental groups that sued to block the project. โThe proposal for the Uinta Basin Railway cut corners from the start but federal laws are now catching up with this climate and environmental catastrophe.โ
In its March 4 petition to the Supreme Court, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition argued that the lower courtโs ruling conflicted with existing case law, and that analysis of such โdistant effectsโ would exceed the STBโs authority.
โAgencies need a manageable line to guide their NEPA studies, and this Court is now the only place to find one,โ the coalition wrote.
In a reply brief, Eagle County and the environmental groups wrote that the lower court โcorrectly concluded the Board has authority to consider the reasonably foreseeable effects of oil production and refining that the Railway would induce.โ
Keith Heaton, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalitionโs executive director, told a committee of Utah lawmakers in February that while he believed the project had โa very good case before the Supreme Court,โ his organization was prepared for a do-over of the NEPA process if necessary. The project is a public-private partnership between Heatonโs group, the Rio Grande Pacific Corporation and the private equity firm Drexel Hamilton Infrastructure Partners.
โWorst case scenario is we can always go back and re-do the environmental impact statement,โ Heaton said.
Even with federal approval, however, critics have expressed widespread doubts about the partnershipโs chances of securing the billions in financing necessary to build and operate the rail line. Backers have signaled their intent to apply for $1.9 billion in special tax-exempt infrastructure bonds that must be approved by the Department of Transportation, a move that also drawn staunch opposition from Colorado lawmakers.
โThe fossil fuel industryโs insistence on a doomed project at the expense of taxpayers underscores that itโs only interested in protecting its own bottom line,โ said Luis Miranda, director of the Sierra Clubโs Utah chapter. โThe Uinta Basin Railway threatens public health, as well as treasured landscapes and waterways. A derailment would carry immeasurable harm.โ
Despite bipartisan agreement on a handful of key reforms, Coloradoโs 2024 legislative session highlighted the deep divides and entrenched interests that define some of the stateโs thorniest and longest-running environmental challenges.
Colorado Democrats and environmental groups began the year with an ambitious plan to crack down on ozone pollution from the oil and gas industry. It was the most significant new attempt to regulate drilling since a sweeping health and safety overhaul passed by Democrats in 2019, and the opposition it drew from deep-pocketed industry groups was similarly intense.
In an eleventh-hour deal brokered by Gov. Jared Polis,ย proponents abruptly changed course, agreeing to drop most of the proposed regulations in favor of a new fee on oil and gas production to fund public transit and conservation projects. Other bills approved by lawmakers this session, which ended Wednesday [May 8, 2024], aim to establish or expand protections for disproportionately impacted communities, drinking water supplies and wild streams and wetlands.
โThe 2024 legislative session was a win for the climate, for Colorado consumers, and for equity,โ Elise Jones, executive director of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, said in a statement. โIn particular, lawmakers approved unprecedented funding for bus and rail service across the state, and adopted a package of climate-friendly land use bills to enable more affordable and abundant housing opportunities in Coloradoโs cities along transit lines, while reducing transportation pollution and traffic congestion.โ
Separately from the package of ozone reforms, lawmakers for the first time considered a bill that sought to put an end date on oil and gas extraction in Colorado as part of the stateโs efforts to address climate change. Similar plans to phase out drilling are underway in states like California and in countries around the world, but Coloradoโs Senate Bill 24-159 likely never stood a chance; facing a veto threat from Polis, a Democrat, and lacking support from key Democratic lawmakers, it died in its first committee hearing in March.
One of two bills introduced late in the 2024 session as part of the compromise on oil and gas issues, SB-229 will make a relatively minor set of reforms to the way state agencies issue permits and enforce regulations on oil and gas operations. It will give Coloradoโs Energy and Carbon Management Commission more explicit power to penalize operators and address the problem of orphaned wells, and codify a mandate on oil and gas producers to reduce emissions of so-called ozone precursors, which Polis first issued in an executive order last year.
Beginning in July 2025, this bill will levy new fees on oil and gas production in Colorado. The per-unit fees will be adjusted quarterly based on benchmark prices, but will roughly equate to a surcharge of about 0.5% per barrel of crude oil, and will raise between $100 million and $175 million in a typical year. The revenue will fund projects to offset the impacts of oil and gas pollution, with 80% allocated to public transit projects and the remainder used by Colorado Parks and Wildlife for land acquisition and habitat projects.
SB-230โs fees will substantially increase the share of oil and gas production revenue collected by the state, while doing little to offset its exceptionally low rates of conventional taxes on the industry, aย Newsline analysis found.
Sponsored by Democratic state Reps. Manny Rutinel of Commerce City and Elizabeth Velasco of Glenwood Springs, HB-1338 directs the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to carry out the recommendations of the stateโs Environmental Justice Action Task Force. Those measures include increased oversight of the stateโs only petroleum refinery, the Suncor facility in Commerce City, and the creation of a โrapid responseโ inspection team to act quickly to address air quality complaints.
Sponsored by Democratic House Speaker Julie McCluskie of Dillon and Republican state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer of Weld County, HB-1379 reestablishes protections for certain streams and wetlands following a 2023 Supreme Court decision that excluded them from the federal Clean Water Act. The bill creates a new CDPHE permitting program to regulate dredge and fill activities that impact those waters, with a variety of exemptions, including for many agricultural operations.
Another bipartisan water bill, SB-197 would implement several conservation proposals endorsed by last yearโs Colorado River Drought Task Force, including the expansion of a program for the temporary loaning of water rights to the Colorado Water Conservation Board to protect the environment.
SB-81 expands the stateโs ban on products containing cancer-causing PFAS, so-called โforever chemicals,โ to include new categories of items like nonstick cookware, ski wax and artificial turf.
It was signed into law by Polis on May 1.
Land use and transportation
For the second legislative session in a row, climate and environmental advocates lined up in support of a push to steer Colorado land-use policy towards more abundant, higher-density housing development. Proponents say the reforms are a critical step towards meeting the stateโs clean transportation and energy goals, but theyโve run into stiff opposition from local governments and homeowners who object to the state interfering in local zoning and development policies.
Following the defeat of a sweeping package of land-use reforms in the 2023 legislative session, sponsors revived several of its components in piecemeal fashion this year.
The most ambitious of 2024โs housing bills, HB-1313 sets goals for Coloradoโs most populous cities to increase housing density in areas nearest to public transit stations. It establishes a $35 million fund to support infrastructure in communities that meet the goals, but a controversial provision that wouldโve withheld state highway funding from local governments that failed to comply was stripped from the bill prior to its passage by the Senate.
Accessory dwelling units, sometimes called โgranny flats,โ are housing units built on a property with an existing single-family home. HB-1152 would legalize the construction of ADUs across virtually all residential areas in Coloradoโs most populous cities and suburbs, prohibiting local governments from restricting their construction on any land zoned for single-family residential development.
HB-1007 bars local governments from regulating the number of unrelated people who can live together in a housing unit, except for standards enforced based on building or fire codes. Low occupancy limits in cities like Boulder โ which prohibited more than three unrelated people from living together until last year, when it raised the limit to five โ have been a flashpoint in local battles over housing affordability.
The bill was signed into law by Polis on April 15.
HB-1304 would prohibit local governments from enacting minimum parking requirements for new housing developments in areas nearest to transit service. Critics of such ordinances say they inflate the cost of constructing new housing units while exacerbating traffic congestion and vehicle pollution.
Polis signed the bill into law on May 10.
Senate Bill 24-184: Support surface transportation infrastructure development
As the state ramps up efforts to win federal funding for a new passenger rail system along the Front Range, SB-184 would create a new revenue stream for rail infrastructure spending by levying a new fee of up to $3 per day on rental cars. Transportation officials said the $58 million raised annually by the new fee will help the state โcompete effectivelyโ for federal passenger rail grants.
NEWS: The Bureau of Land Management cancelled 25 Trump-era oil and gas leases totaling more than 40,000 acres in the Lands Between, an area in southeastern Utah rich with cultural resources between Bears Ears and Hovenweep/Canyon of the Ancients National Monuments.
CONTEXT: There is a place known as the Great Sage Plain or, in more recent times, the Lands Between, a place of mesas and sagebrush and broad canyons spread that spread out north of the San Juan River and west of the Utah-Colorado state line. The beauty is more subtle here than in the serpentine gorges to the west, but itโs also ubiquitous, found in lichen-splattered stone, in the way the light plays across rain-soaked sagebrush, in the lascivious dusk bloom of the sacred datura.
And human history is omnipresent here, layers upon layers of reminders of those who came before. Cultural sites abound, some obvious, many barely discernible. The Lands Between is one of the most archaeologically rich swaths of land in the nation. And yet, the place is often ignored and more often abused.
In 2018, as part of its marauding quest for โenergy dominance,โ the Trump administration offered up thousands of acres in the Lands Between for oil and gas leasing. Tribal nations with ancestral ties to the land, environmental groups, and historic preservation advocates protested nearly all of the parcels. The administration cast the protests aside, however, and in March and December of that year, energy company representatives logged onto EnergyNet.com and bid between $2 and $91 per acre for the right to drill, with companies like Wasatch Energy, Kirkwood Oil & Gas, and Ayers Energy walking away with the spoils.
Friends of Cedar Mesa (now Bears Ears Partnership),ย sued the Trump administration, alleging that the BLM violated federal environmental law by issuing the leases. Early last year the BLM agreed to re-evaluate the leases, and launched a new environmental assessment process. That process culminated this week with the cancellation of 25 of 28 of the leases under review, with three leases affirmed.
BLM map of the contested and canceled leases.
Reasons for the decision included:
More than 900 National Register-eligible historic sites were identified within the leases, along with hundreds more within the half-mile buffer zone around the leases;
Twelve of the leases lie within the Alkali Ridge Area of Critical Environmental Concern and contain a total of 806 documented cultural resources, including Three Kiva Pueblo.
โRecent concerns brought forth by the Pueblo of Acoma, including the need to conduct a โmore comprehensive reviewโ, and a โstructured consultation process with the Pueblo of Acoma and other tribes, ensuring that tribal expertise and cultural knowledge guide the evaluation and management of these lands.โ
Detail of a site on the eastern edge of the Lands Between. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
While compelling, I was most interested in โtopographic anomaliesโ identified by LiDAR, or a sort of laser-based radar used more and more frequently in archaeology, especially to find ancient โroadsโ such as the ones that radiate out from Chaco Canyon. The agency was tipped off to these anomalies by Winston B. Hurstโs draft report titled: โLiDARโs Gifts: Firstlook Insights into Puebloan Roads and Berm-Swale Field Systems in Utah and Neighboring Sections of the Northern San Juan Region.โ Hurst identified a number of these features within the lease areas and their five-mile buffer zones.
In its record of decision cancelling the leases, the BLM writes that the anomalies, which potentially are berm-swale fields, ancient roads, or other architectural features with unknown function, warrant more study, and adds:
So there you have it. Itโs probably not a good idea to go in and wreck these significant cultural objects with well pads and drilling rigs and pipelines and roads. And the BLM seems to understand that, at last.
โAcoma is deeply grateful for the BLMโs decision to cancel these leases, which affirms the importance of this landscape for the Pueblo of Acoma and other Pueblos and Tribes. This landscape is a living testament to our ancestors and our ongoing cultural traditions. Preserving these areas from development allows us to maintain our deep connection to our history and educate future generations about their rich cultural heritage,โ said Governor Randall Vicente of the Pueblo of Acoma in a written statement.
But the fightโs not over yet. Acoma is also challenging leases in the same area sold in 2019.
Read more about the Lands Between, national monuments, and the inadequacy of โidentify and avoidโ. But first, subscribe to get a taste of these delicious archives:
Valley of the Gods from Cedar Mesa. Valley of the Gods was included in the original Bears Ears National Monument but taken out by President Trump. Now President Joe Biden is expected to restore the original boundaries. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Official photograph of [former] United States Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. By Department of Energy – Office of the Secretary of the Department of Energy, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26224045
With a pair of fossil-fuel friendly senators at his side, former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Tuesday released a favorable report on U.S. natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG), funded by the natural gas industry.
The report, โThe Future of Natural Gas in a Low-Carbon World,โ was written by the EFI Foundation, a nonprofit Moniz founded, and released at the U.S. Capitol. The report examined the role of natural gas in advancing energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability in the United States, Europe and Asia.
The EFI report comes at a pivotal moment for the U.S natural gas and LNG export industry. The Biden Administration paused the approval of new LNG export capacity in January while the Energy Department considers the climate and financial impacts to U.S. gas consumers of additional LNG exports. The document seeks to broaden the discussion on U.S. LNG exports.
โThe study, as youโll be hearing, examines the role of natural gas in addressing what is sometimes referred to as the โenergy trilemmaโ: energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability,โ said Moniz,ย president of the EFI Foundation and chair of the advisory committee that oversaw the report. โUnfortunately, too often, the discussion around those three priorities tends to devolve into stovepipes, as opposed to recognizing that progress on all of them requires treating it as one conversation.โ
One of the reportโs specific recommendations was to include an โenergy security determinationโ in evaluating future permits for additional U.S. LNG export capacity.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), the largest recipient of oil and gas money in Congress, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), representing a state that derives a significant share of its revenue from oil and gas, joined Moniz as โkeynoteโ speakers at the event.
Murkowski spoke of the need for an โall of the aboveโ energy policy, which was the U.S. energy policy during the Obama administration when Moniz was Secretary of Energy.
Manchin called for lifting the pause on approvals for new LNG export capacity.
The report referred repeatedly to the โessentialโ role of natural gas.
The same day as the reportโs release, Democrats in Congress released a report of their own, the culmination of a three-year investigation, concluding the oil and gas industry has misled Americans for decades about climate change.
โThe fossil fuel industry engaged in an elaborate campaign of deception and doublespeak โฆ as well as disinformation about the climate safety of natural gas and its role as a bridge fuel to a fossil-free future,โ the Democratsโ report concluded.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who released the report as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the oil and gas industry seeks academic partnerships to legitimize its reports.ย
โDocuments explicitly discuss leveraging โthird party endorsementsโ and partnerships with academic institutions to bolster Big Oilโs disinformation campaign,โ Whitehouse said in a written statement to Inside Climate News.
Referring explicitly to the new Moniz report on natural gas, Whitehouse said โthis report is yet another example of the industry deceiving the public about the compatibility of continuedโor even expandedโproduction of natural gas with the scientific emission reduction targets we must achieve in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the very worst effects of climate change.โ
A spokeswoman for Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability added that industryโs disinformation campaign โcontinues to this day, including, as [Monizโs] recent report shows, their portrayal of natural gas as a green and climate friendly fuel even though they have failed to address methane emissions associated with natural gas. We know that Big Oil is intent on entrenching natural gas into both the U.S. and global energy economies for the foreseeable future by any means necessary.โ
Some climate researchers echoed her conclusion that the new report may be a continuation of industry-funded misinformation.
โMy concern is that Moniz isโand perhaps has been since his time in the administrationโan advocate for polluters over people and the planet,โ said Michael Mann, an earth and environmental science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.ย
โIt strains credulity to believe this is a coincidence,โ Mann said of the reportโs favorable view of natural gas, given its gas-industry funding. โUnfortunately, the old adage โfollow the moneyโ seems quite relevant here.โ
In addition to his role at EFI, Moniz is an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a โspecial advisorโ to MIT president Sally Kornbluth.
The EFI Foundation declined to respond publicly to criticisms of the report, and MIT did not respond to a request for comment.
The United States is the worldโs largest exporter of LNG. Additional projects already approved by the Energy Department and not subject to the ongoing pause would triple existing U.S. export capacity.
The pause followed the pre-release of a study that is still undergoing peer review by Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University.ย Howarthโs studyย concluded the climate impact of LNG fuel is worse than burning coal.
Natural gas flares near a community in Colorado. Colorado health officials and some legislators agree that better monitoring is necessary. Photo credit the Environmental Defense Fund.
When burned, natural gas emits roughly half as much carbon dioxide as coal. However, methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a highly potent greenhouse gas, more than 80 times more effective at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. If even a small amount of methane is leaked, vented, or otherwise emitted into the atmosphere before the gas is burnedโas it commonly isโthe climate impact of natural gas can be worse than that of other fossil fuels.
Whitehouse challenged the energy security claims in the Moniz report.
โThere is no energy security for American families and businesses when the price of energy is determined by geopolitical events outside our control and by an industry that frequently engages in cartel-pricing,โ he said. โTrue energy security will be achieved when we fully transition to renewable energy sources, the โfuelsโ for whichโwind, sunlight, flowing water, the earthโs heatโare free and not controlled by any one country or cartel.โ
Nonetheless, the European Commissionโs executive vice president for the European Green Deal, Maroลก ล efฤoviฤ, whose responsibilities include leading the European Commissionโs work on becoming climate-neutral by 2050, praised the Moniz report in a video address shown at the release event.
โNatural gas has a role to play as a transitional fuel, something reflected in the COP28 conclusions,โ ล efฤoviฤ said, referring to the 2023 U.N. climate conference in Dubai. โIt will help ensure our energy security and energy equity as our economies decarbonize.โ
โSo with Europe, having taken decisive action to reach net zero by 2050 including by accelerating the clean energy transition, we also recognize the importance of natural gas, notably in the medium term, and LNG in particular will continue to represent a significant source of gas for the EU,โ ล efฤoviฤ added.ย
Funders or โsponsorsโ of the report, which was not peer-reviewed, included Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest independent gas producers in the U.S, and U.S. LNG export companies Venture Global LNG and Tellurian. The American Petroleum Institute and three other gas industry organizations or industry PR groups also provided funding.
Additional money came from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, named after the late George P. Mitchell, who is often referred to as the โfather of frackingโ for his role in developing the drilling technology known as hydraulic fracturing. The Institute of Energy Economics, a think tank in Japan, the worldโs largest importer of LNG, also provided support.
The report states that the โEFI Foundation maintains editorial independence from its public and private sponsors.โ However, more than half of the reportโs โadvisory committeeโ was comprised of individuals representing the reportโs funders.
โEFIโs report reinforces more than a decadeโs worth of independent and government-led research that has consistently shown the long-term role of natural gas in the global energy mix and its ability to accelerate global climate progress while strengthening global energy security,โ API spokesperson Scott Lauermann said.
Joseph Romm, a researcher also at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, said the reportโs โenergy trilemmaโ framing that looks at energy security, equity and environmental sustainability downplays the importance of climate change.
โClimate is the overriding issue,โ Romm said. โNot that the others arenโt important, but if you donโt do climate, the others donโt matter.โ
Six years later, there is even less room for new fossil fuel developments, Romm said.
The EFI report states that carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is an effective option for reducing CO2 emissions across the natural gas supply chain, even though to date such technology has never been successfully deployed at a commercial level. As the report notes, โthere is no natural gas-fired power plant with CCUS in operation worldwide as of July 2023.โ
The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided tax incentives and billions of dollars for large-scale carbon sequestration projects.
โYou shouldnโt go around telling people that, โOh, youโre going to solve whatever your natural gas problem is with carbon capture, utilization and storageโ when there isnโt a single one in operation,โ Romm said. โOne has to distinguish between reality and wishful thinking.โ [ed. emphasis mine]
The Moniz report also says that LNG shippers have started to offer their customers โcarbon-neutral LNG cargo,โ in which emissions from LNG production are offset through the purchasing of carbon credits.
Carbon offsets have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as offset projects have failed to live up to their emission reduction claims. Even if the projects offset the emissions of LNG production, there would still be significant emissions when the fuel is burned.
The report acknowledges the climate impact of methane emissions associated with natural gas and says โmethane emissions reductions are also critical.โ The report also notes that โthe carbon footprint of natural gas, while lower than some alternatives, must be dramatically reduced furtherโ and โovercoming these challenges will ultimately determine whether natural gas is indeed a transitional fuel or an integral part of the long-term global energy mix.โ
In releasing the report, Moniz said the gas industry โcan do a lot more in terms of having the pause be a pause by taking care of some of the homework that needs to be done,โ such as on methane emissions reductions.
However, the report focuses less on methane emissions and more on the carbon dioxide emissions reductions that can be achieved by switching from coal to gas.
Interested in methane and other greenhouse gas emissions near you? Check out http://climatetrace.org, which allows you to see emissions from oil and gas fields, large individual facilities, and more. You can also break it down by industry.
Whitehouse said the focus on carbon dioxide emissions over methane emissions is misleading, intentional and not new.
โInternal documents obtained in our recent investigation demonstrate that fossil fuel companies knew methane leaks made natural gas just as harmful to the climate as coal but sought to discredit the scientific evidence and paint natural gas as a clean fuel and a crucial part of the energy mix,โ Whitehouse said.
One such document obtained through the Congressional investigation was an August 2016 email from Amory Lovins, the cofounder and, at the time, chief scientist for the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy and sustainability research organization now known as RMI. The email was addressed to Rex Tillerson, then the chief executive of ExxonMobil.
Tillerson had just been appointed the chair of the National Petroleum Council, a federal advisory committee to the Secretary of Energy, a position then held by Moniz.
Lovins, who served as an environmental representative on the council, warned Tillerson of increasing methane emissions monitoring by โcitizen activists.โ He urged Tillerson, the countryโs leading oil and gas executive, and his industry to โget ahead of that emerging movementโ and โfix the leaksโ before the โsloppy operators further damage the good firmsโ reputation.โ
Another record obtained through the Congressional investigation isย a document from Chevron marked โclassified,โย which includes a presentation Lovins gave to the oil and gas companyโs board of directors at a meeting in Pebble Beach, California, in 2018.
In the presentation, Lovins notes that the โ#1 threat to gasโ is โmethane โslip,โโ or emissions. Lovins added that โ2.3% of US gas output is now lostโ as emissions, making gas โlittle/noโ better for the climate than burning coal. Lovins added that LNG is โworseโ for the climate than coal.
LNG has higher greenhouse gas emissions than natural gas due to the energy it takes to liquify and then regasify natural gas, not counting the additional methane emissions that occur during the transport of LNG in ships.
โRMI experts routinely share their independent analysis and research with a variety of stakeholders, and in this case, we presented our understanding of the climate risks of methane to the oil and gas industry, in the hopes that the facts would lead to solutions,โLovins said in an email. โThe facts presented then and subsequent research from RMI and peers have confirmed that leaks of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, even at small amounts, make it as bad as or worse than coal for the climate and not necessarily the cleaner alternative it was once thought to be.โ
Peer-reviewed studies published since 2018 suggest the climate impact of natural gas is worse than previously thought.ย A study published last month in Natureย found that 2.95 percent of U.S. gas output is emitted rather than the 2.3 percent figure Lovins used in 2018. For the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where much of the natural gas that is exported from the U.S. as LNG originates, emissions are far higherโ9.6 percentโaccording to the Nature study.
Other factors, such as the use of a 20-year rather than 100-year timeframe for measuring the climate impact of methane, can result in an even smaller leak rate, making natural gas worse than coal. A study published last year in Environmental Research Letters by RMI researchers found a โmethane leakage rate as low as 0.2 percent brings a gas systemโs climate risk on par with coal.โ
For Howarth, the Cornell professor, recent events elicit a sense of dรฉjร vu. In 2011, Howarth published one of the first studies suggesting the climate impact of natural gas may be worse than coal.
The same year, Moniz, then the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, was co-chair of a non-peer-reviewed Energy Initiative report funded largely by industry, โThe Future of Natural Gas,โ a title nearly identical to the EFI report Moniz and colleagues published this week.
The 2011 report led by Moniz downplayed Howarthโs findings and called for federal policies that โencourage the development of a [global liquid natural gas] market.โ
โIt feels familiar,โ Howarth said of the new โFuture of Natural Gasโ report. โShale gas is clearly as bad or worse than coal, no matter what industry funded people want to spin.โ
โAnd even if I were wrong,โ Howarth added, โItโs just not the time to be promoting any fossil fuels.โ
The report which covers microplastics and nanoplastics states โa myriad of environmental exposure pathways to humans including ingestion, inhalation, and bodily absorption, are likely to exist.โ It adds there is growing evidence that bioaccumulation of microplastics in tissues and organs of humans can potentially lead to nutritional and reproductive effects.
Current science gaps are mentioned. The report says that โunderstanding if or when environmental exposures pose a health risk is complicated by the diversity of microplastic sizes, morphologies, polymer types, and chemicals added during manufacturing or sorbed from the environment; ongoing challenges in analytical methods used to detect, quantify, and characterize microplastics and associated chemicals in our ecosystems; and the fact that ecotoxicological studies regarding microplastics are still in their infancy.โ
It also adds that a better understanding of the sources, pathways, fate, and biological effects of microplastics has become a priority of the federal government as well as some state governments.
Federal environmental officials have rejected a request by Aethon Energy to pump Moneta Divide oilfield wastewater into the Madison aquifer, saying the deep reservoir could be used for drinking water, especially by tribal nations on the Wind River Indian Reservation.
The Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in November 2020 approved wastewater disposal into the 15,000-foot deep well, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last week the stateโs decision did not align with federal rules.
Aethonโs plan does not support a finding โthat the aquifer cannot now and will not in the future serve as a source of drinking water,โ the EPA wrote in a 20-page record of decision. Aethon argued, and the Wyoming commission agreed 4-1, that the underground Madison formation was too deep and remote to be used for drinking water.
The EPA relied on the Safe Drinking Water Act as the authority under which to protect the aquifer. It also cited climate, environmental justice and tribal interests in its decision, pointing to the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation as a community that could use the water.
โThe significance of that is the EPA finally didnโt wimp out on us,โ said Wes Martel, a member of the Wind River Water Resources Control Board. โWeโre just glad they now have some people in place following up on their Indian policy.โ
The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes โforesee increased reliance on groundwater for drinking water purposes and anticipate needing to access deeper aquifers, such as the Madison aquifer, as the climate changes and water resources grow scarcer,โ the EPA wrote in a 94-page analysis of tribal interests. The agency cited historic cultural and spiritual ties to the land and water and tribesโ status as sovereign nations in its decision.
โWe have to make sure our future generations have a reliable source of clean water,โ Martel said. โOur reservation, this is all we have left. Weโve got to do our best to protect it.โ
The Powder River Basin Resource Council, along with the Wyoming Outdoor Council and others, has spent years monitoring discharge reports and industry permits and was vital in challenging pollution threats, Martel said.
The EPA understood that science, and the law did not support Aethonโs request, said Shannon Anderson, organizing director and staff attorney with the resource council. โThey recognized the value of our groundwater resources and the need to protect those into the future,โ she said, hailing the decision.
Vast quantities of water
Aethon must find a way to dispose of produced water โ a brine pumped from energy wells to release gas and oil โ as it expands the Moneta Divide field by 4,500 wells. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management authorized that expansion in 2020, leaving the question of water disposal to Wyoming, which has authority over surface and underground water quality under overarching federal standards.
Aethon must find a way to dispose of the equivalent of 120 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of produced water a day to expand the field. Aethon and Burlington Resources, a co-producer at Moneta, could generate $182 million a year in federal royalties, $87.5 million a year in Wyoming severance taxes and $106 million annually in County Ad Valorem taxes from the expansion.
An elk skull adorns a fencepost near the Eastern Shoshoneโs buffalo management land on the Wind River Indian Reservation. (Katie Klingsporn/WyoFile)
But Aethon has violated state permits that allow it to pump some produced water into Alkali and Badwater creeks that flow into Boysen Reservoir, a drinking water source for the town of Thermopolis. Wyomingโs Department of Environmental Quality has notified the Dallas-based investment company of its infraction and has required Aethon to reduce the salinity of surface discharges this year.
The DEQ this year listed the two creeks as โimpairedโ and unable to sustain aquatic life. Underground injection of wastewater into the Madison was to be a new component of the disposal program.
The EPA cited climate change, drought, increasing temperatures and use of reservation surface water by others as some of the reasons to preserve the Madison aquifer.
โRemoving the existing statutory and regulatory protections for a potential source of high-quality drinking water for the rural and overburdened communities in Fremont County and on the WRIR would further exacerbate existing inequities particularly with respect to historic and ongoing adverse and cumulative impacts to water resources and community health,โ the EPA wrote.
โThus, equity and environmental justice considerations, which include Tribal interest considerations, support maintaining the existing [Safe Drinking Water Act] protections that apply to the aquifers consistent with Congressional intent to protect both current and potential future sources of drinking water,โ EPA documents state.
Neither Aethon nor a representative of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission responded immediately to a request for comment Wednesday. But WyoFile received this response from Tom Kropatsch, oil and gas supervisor for the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, shortly after publication:
โWe do not agree with EPAโs decision on this application. We are still reviewing their decision and the information utilized by EPA in support of their decision. Much of this information was not part of the original application or a part of the record. EPA did not follow the standard procedure of allowing the WOGCC and the applicant to review and respond to the additional information they had available prior to making their final decision. EPA evaluated data that differs in its geographic, geologic, engineering, and other technical information. EPA also inappropriately related the proposed injection location to other areas of the state. Since the data EPA reviewed does not accurately reflect the conditions at the location of the proposed disposal well it is not appropriate to rely on it for a decision on this application. The WOGCC is reviewing EPAโs decision and weighing its options for further action.โ
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratoryโs global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
Vermont lawmakers passed a bill this week that is designed to make big fossil fuel companies pay for damage from weather disasters fueled by climate change. The legislation is modeled after the Environmental Protection Agencyโs superfund program, which requires the companies responsible for environmental contamination to either clean sites up themselves or reimburse the government for the costs of work to do so.ย Vermontโs bill, referred to as itsย Climate Superfund Act, would similarly mandate that big oil companies and others with high emissions pay for damage caused by global warming.
The amounts owed would be determined based on calculations of the degree to which climate change contributed to extreme weather in Vermont, and how much money those weather disasters cost the state. From there, companiesโ shares of the total would depend on how many metric tons of carbon dioxide each released into the atmosphere from 1995 to 2024. The law passed with just three no votes in Vermontโs state Senate in early April, followed by approval in the state House on Monday. The Senate will deliver a final vote later this week before the bill heads to Republican Gov. Phil Scottโs desk.ย State Sen. Anne Watson, a co-sponsor of the bill, said she hopes that if the law goes into effect, it pushes big oil companies โto become purveyors of renewable energy sources and keep fossil fuels in the ground.โ
Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Seth Klamann and Nick Coltrain). Here’s an excerpt:
April 29. 2024
Leading Colorado Democrats and the stateโs oil and gas industry announced a preemptive armistice Monday โ one that seeks to defuse the latest round ofย dueling ballot initiativesย andย legislation aimed at the industryย and its environmental impacts. The proposals, described to reporters by Gov. Jared Polis and legislative leadership, include imposing a new per-barrel production fee on the industry and enacting new environmental standards. In exchange, the industry, lawmakers and several environmental groups agreed to abandon recent attempts at regulatory legislation and ballot initiatives…
A key part of the deal takes the form of two new bills set to be introduced in the coming days โ roughly one week before the end of the legislatureโs 2024 session. One bill would institute a fluctuating production fee on oil and gas that is expected to generate roughly $138 million annually, based on returns from recent years. Much of that money would go toward supporting transit in Colorado, potentially including metro Denverโs Regional Transportation District. The state also would set aside a slice to help restore public lands impacted by oil and gas production. The second bill would seek to reduce emissions and improve air quality via new permitting and enforcement authority. It would include funding to plug orphan wells and strategies to help communities that are disproportionately impacted by the oil and gas industry, Polis and legislative leaders said at Mondayโs late-afternoon news conference.
Ceremonial shovels mark the location of the Innovation Center coal refinery field demonstration project north of Gillette on Sept. 2, 2022. It will be co-located with Atlas Carbon’s facility that produces activated carbon products. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Biden administrationโs suite of coal pollution rules a win for climate and health, advocates say, but a major blow to one of Wyomingโs bedrock economic drivers.
Gov. Mark Gordon has promised to sue over a new suite of federal rules that most observers agree will hasten the U.S. thermal coal industryโs trajectory toward extinction โ an existential threat to many Wyoming communities and one of the stateโs main economic drivers.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued four โfinalโ rules aimed at drastically cutting coal pollution, including a mandate that existing coal-fired power plants cut or capture 90% of their planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions by 2032 or convert to natural gas or close altogether. The agencyโs other rules set timelines for significant cuts to smokestack emissions of mercury and other toxic metals, polluted wastewater from coal power plants and more stringent standards for coal ash disposal.
The โpower plantโ rules make good on President Joe Bidenโs promise to address human-caused climate change, according to the EPA. The actions are also intended to help curtail illness and premature deaths from coal pollution while providing a clear regulatory framework for utilities to shift to renewable sources of energy.
The agency also noted that it consulted with coal-reliant utilities about their existing plans regarding coal facilities and crafted the implementation schedules to allow for planning that avoids electrical power supply issues.
Gov. Mark Gordon and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan held a joint press conference at the University of Wyoming on August 9, 2023. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
โBy developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans,โ EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a prepared statement.
Coal proponents in Wyoming are furious.ย
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratoryโs global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
While the rules target coal-fueled power plants, they also put Wyoming coal mines on notice: Their already waning U.S. customer base has an expiration date.
โIt is clear the only goal envisioned by these rules released by the Environmental Protection Agency today is the end of coal communities in Wyoming,โ Gordon said in a prepared statement Thursday. โEPA has weaponized the fear of climate change into a crushing set of rules that will result in an unreliable electric grid, unaffordable electricity and thousands of lost jobs.โ
The Wyoming Mining Association also discounted climate change as an excuse to attack the coal industry.
โWyoming is once again the sacrificial lamb on the altar of the climate change cult,โ the associationโs Executive Director Travis Deti said.
The rules
Theย carbon dioxide emissions ruleย applies to coal-fired power plants as well as new natural gas-fired facilities, requiring them to prevent at least 90% of greenhouse gasses from entering the atmosphere.ย
โExisting coal-fired power plants are the largest source of [greenhouse gas] from the power sector,โ the EPA stated in the rule. โNew natural gas-fired combustion turbines are some of the largest new sources of [greenhouse gas] being built today, and these final standards will ensure that they are constructed to minimize their [greenhouse gas] emissions.โ
The rule updating Mercury and Air Toxics Standards tightens emissions by about 70%, an especially significant reduction for plants that burn lignite โ a lower-value coal than Wyomingโs subbituminous product โ according to the agency.
Wyoming remains the nationโs largest coal producer, although production has plummeted by nearly half since 2008, with companies shipping some 237 million tons in 2023, according to the Wyoming State Geological Survey. More than 90% of coal mined in the state is sold to power plants in the U.S., which is why itโs often referred to as โthermal coalโ โ unlike โmetallurgic coalโ that is sold to steel manufacturers.
Wyoming coal production has decreased by nearly half since 2008. (University of Wyoming)
Coal mining contributed some $650 million in taxes, royalties and fees to the state in 2019 and employed more than 5,000 workers, according to the Wyoming Mining Association.
The vast majority of coal mining occurs in the Powder River Basin in the northeast corner of the state, while several communities host nearby coal-fired power plants: Gillette, Glenrock, Wheatland, Kemmerer and Rock Springs.
Although Wyoming has experienced declines in both coal production and coal-fired power, the industry still serves as a major economic backbone for the state โ and a significant source of government revenue. The potential loss of coal-fired power facilities is an especially daunting prospect for nearby communities.
Those communities have wrestled with the knowledge of potential plant closures for a long time already, and the EPAโs new rules only serve to clarify that potential reality, said Robert Godby, associate professor at the University of Wyomingโs Economics Department.
โIt really just kind of steepens the glide path to what we all knew was happening anyway,โ he told WyoFile on Friday.ย
Explosive materials are loaded into a โblast holeโ at a coal mine. (Dyno Nobel)
The new rules are likely to be challenged in court, not only by Wyoming, but also by other coal-reliant states, Godby said. Politics will also continue to play a role โ particularly if a Republican wins the presidential election this year. He noted, however, that former President Donald Trump was not able to make good on a promise to turn around the coal industryโs decline.
Regardless, utilities are under increasing pressure to make long-term investment decisions in a quickly changing energy environment, and the EPAโs actions this week diminish the likelihood that theyโll find the regulatory certainty needed to invest in coal-fueled power.
โIt makes it more likely theyโre going to retire [coal plants] and announce firm dates,โ Godby said. โThatโs going to create more certainty for the communities that are affected.โ
Meantime, Gordon, who has touted technologies to reduce carbon dioxide from coal power plants, has vowed to fight the rules.
โThese rules are a travesty, and their effects are devastating,โ Gordon said. โI have directed the Wyoming Attorney General to engage with and lead a coalition of states to challenge the power plant emissions rule, and we are prepared to apply our litigation strategy to the oncoming wave of federal regulatory actions that threaten Wyoming.โ
The University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources, and its partners, are advancing multiple CO2 capture and sequestration demonstration projects at Basin Electric’s Dry Fork Station north of Gillette, seen here on Sept. 2, 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released a sweeping set of rules aimed at cutting air, water and land pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants.
Environmental and clean energy groups celebrated the announcement as long overdue, particularly for coal-burning power plants, which have saddled hundreds of communities across the country with dirty air and hundreds of millions of tons of toxic coal ash waste. The ash has leached a host of toxins โ including arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, radium and other pollutants โ into ground and surface water.
โToday is the culmination of years of advocacy for common-sense safeguards that will have a direct impact on communities long forced to suffer in the shadow of the dirtiest power plants in the country,โ said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the nationโs oldest and largest environmental organizations. โIt is also a major step forward in our movementโs fight to decarbonize the electric sector and help avoid the worst impacts of climate change.โ
But some electric industry and pro-coal organizations blasted the rules as a threat to jobs and electric reliability at a time when power demands are surging. They also criticized the ruleโs reliance on largely unproven carbon capture technologies.
Americaโs Power, a trade organization for the nationโs fleet of about 400 coal power plants across 42 states, called the number of new rules โunprecedented,โ singling out the new emissions standards that will force existing coal plants to cut their carbon emissions by 90% by the 2032 if they intend to keep running past 2039. Michelle Bloodworth, the groupโs president and CEO, called the rule โan extreme and unlawful overreach that endangers Americaโs supply of dependable and affordable electricity.โ
The Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, a nonprofit organization representing Pennsylvania coal mining companies, called the new rule โa haphazard and dangerous threat to our gridโs electricity supply, national security and our economy,โ in a news release.
โThis forces thatโ
Many experts expect the regulations to be litigated, particularly the carbon rule, since the last time the EPA tried to restrict carbon emissions from power plants, a group of states led by West Virginia mounted a successful legal challenge that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Julie McNamara, deputy policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the agency took great pains to conform the rule to the legal constraints outlined by the court.
โThis rule is specifically responsive to that Supreme Court decision,โ she said. โWhich doesnโt mean that it wonโt go to the courts but this is so carefully hewn to that decision that it should be robust.โ
The four rules EPA released Thursday mainly target coal-fired power plants.
โBy developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans,โ EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said.
In some ways, they attach a framework to a sea change in electric generation that is already well under way, McNamara said.
Coal accounted for just 16% of U.S. electric generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 1990, by comparison, it comprised more than 54% of power generation. However, some states are more reliant on coal power than others.
In 2021, the most coal-dependent states were West Virginia, Missouri, Wyoming and Kentucky, per a 2022 report by the EIA.
โThis rulemaking adds structure to that transition,โ McNamara said. โFor those who have chosen not to assess the future use of their coal plants, this forces that.โ
The same EIA report found that Ohio and Pennsylvania had the largest declines in coal-fired capacity over the past two decades. Both states shifted from coal to natural gas as their largest source of electricity over that period.
Heather OโNeill, president and CEO of the clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United, said the new regulations are a chance for utilities to embrace cheaper, cleaner and more reliable options for the electric grid.
โInstead of looking to build new gas plants or prolong the life of old coal plants, utilities should be taking advantage of the cheaper, cleaner, and more trusty tools in the toolbox,โ she said.
The carbon rule
In 2009, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gas emissions โendanger our nationโs public health and welfare,โ the agency wrote, adding that since that time, โthe evidence of the harms posed by GHG emissions has only grown and Americans experience the destructive and worsening effects of climate change every day.โ
The new carbon emissions regulation will apply to existing coal plants and new natural gas plants. Coal plants that plan to operate beyond 2039 will have to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. New gas plants are split into three categories based on their capacity factor, a measure of how much electricity is generated over a period of time relative to the maximum amount it could have produced.
The plants that run the most (more than 40% capacity factor) will have to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. Existing gas plants will be regulated under a forthcoming rule that โmore comprehensively addresses GHG emissions from this portion of the fleet,โ the agency said.
Michelle Solomon, a senior policy analyst for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank, predicts that most coal plants will close rather than install the costly technology to capture carbon emissions.
โClimate goals aside, the public health impacts of the rules in securing the retirement of coal fired power plants is so important,โ she said. Coal power in the U.S. has been increasingly pressured by cheaper gas and renewable generation and mounting environmental restrictions, but some grid operators have still been caught flat-footed by the pace of coal plant closures.
โI think the role of this rule, to provide that certainty about where weโre going, is so crucial to get the entities that have control over the rate of the transition to start to take action here,โ she said. But the National Rural Electric Cooperative Associationโs CEO, Jim Matheson, called the rules โunlawful, unrealistic and unachievableโ noting that it relies on technology โthat is not ready for prime time.โ
And Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, a trade group for competitive power suppliers, called the rule โa painful example of aspirational policy outpacing physical and operational realitiesโ because of its reliance on unproven carbon capture and hydrogen blending technologies to cut emissions.
A beefed up Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule
The EPA called the revision to the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards โthe most significant update since MATS was first issued in February 2012.โ It predicted the rule would cut emissions of mercury and other air pollutants like nickel, arsenic, lead, soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and others. It cuts the mercury limit by 70% for power plants fired by lignite coal, which is the lowest grade of coal and one of the dirtiest to burn for power generation.
For all coal plants, the emissions limit for toxic metals is reduced by 67%. The EPA says the rule will result in major cuts in releases of mercury and other hazardous metals, fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide. The agency projects โ$300 million in health benefits,โ including reducing risks of heart attacks, cancer and developmental delays in children and $130 million in climate benefits.
Stronger wastewater discharge limits for power plants
Coal fired power plants use huge volumes of water, and when the wastewater is returned to lakes, rivers and streams it can be laden with mercury, arsenic and other metals as well as bromide, chloride and other pollution and contaminate drinking water and harm aquatic life.
The new rule is projected to cut about 670 million pounds of pollutants discharged in wastewater from coal plants per year. Plants that will cease coal combustion over the next decade can abide by less stringent rules.
โPower plants for far too long have been able to get away with treating our waterways like an open sewer,โ said Thomas Cmar, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, during a briefing on the new rules earlier this week.
Closing a coal ash loophole
Coal ash, whatโs left after coal has been burned for power generation, is one the nationโs largest waste streams. The 2015 EPA Coal Combustion Residuals rule were the first federal regulations for coal ash. But that rule left about half of the ash sitting at power plant sites and other locations โ much of it in unlined disposal pits โ unregulated because it did not apply to so-called โlegacy impoundmentsโ that were not being used to accept new ash.
โWeโre going to see a long-awaited crackdown on coal ash pollution from Americaโs coal plants, and itโll be a huge win for Americaโs health and water resources,โ said Lisa Evans, a senior attorney with Earthjustice. โThey are all likely leaking toxic chemicals like arsenic into groundwater and most contain levels of radioactivity that can be dangerous to human health.โ
Groundwater monitoring data shows that the vast majority of ash ponds at coal plants are contaminating groundwater, said Abel Russ, a senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project. Butunder the old rule, Russ said, facilities could dodge cleanup requirements by blaming contamination on older ash dumps not covered by the regulation.
โThis is a huge loophole,โ Russ said. โYou canโt restore groundwater quality if youโre only addressing half of the coal ash sources on site.โ
However, several attorneys on the Earthjustice briefing said the new rules, which will require monitoring at clean up and hundreds of more ash sites, will only be as good as the enforcement.
โItโs meaningful only if these utilities obey the law. Unfortunately to date, many of them have not,โ said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com. Follow Utah News Dispatch on Facebook and Twitter.
The courtship ritual performed by the sage-grouse, the icon of western North Americaโs sagebrush plains, is one of natureโs most dramatic. Males woo hens at display sites, called leks, fanning their tails and inflating their breast sacs. For decades, The Nature Conservancty has worked with ranchers and energy and mining companies to protect the grouseโs stage in the sage. GREATER SAGE-GROUSE ยฉ Charlie Hamilton James
Embracing the stateโs decades of collaboration, federal officials have found more agreement than outrage in response to a pending plan to protect the iconic western bird.
As home to about 38% of the planetโs remaining greater sage grouse โ far more than any other state or province โ and the architect of key conservation measures, Wyoming has a lot to gain or lose from upcoming changes to the complex, multi-agency matrix of rules and regulations governing management of the imperiled bird and its habitat.
Those stakes were top of mind Wednesday evening for Natrona County rancher Doug Cooper and others who attended a BLM information session on the agencyโs recently released draft management plan for sage grouse habitat.
โWhen you say โconservation,โ it sounds wonderful,โ Cooper said. โBut Iโm not sure โconservationโ is going to mean just that when we get down on the ground.โ
Similar questions bubbled up for the dozen residents trying to make sense of the latest developments in what has been a whipsaw of approaches between Republican and Democratic administrations. Does the pending plan account for sage grouse predation from ravens and magpies? Is livestock grazing considered a harmful practice that might come under new restrictions in sage grouse habitats? And how might restrictions on federal lands impact grazing and oil and gas development on adjacent private property?
Natrona County rancher Doug Cooper poses a question to Bureau of Land Management officials April 24, 2024 in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Not only is the birdโs future at stake, but it serves as an indicator for 350 other species that rely on a sprawling sage-steppe ecosystem that also supports rural economies in Wyoming and throughout much of the West. If the sage grouse is in peril, so are myriad other species and rural economies, according to proponents. The future of the species and its habitat also has major implications for the oil and gas industry, which frequently targets minerals underlying the sage grouseโs habitat in Wyoming.
The agency is soliciting public comments through June 13 on itsย draft environmental impact statement. After weighing that input, the BLM will issue a final rule for how it will manage sage grouse habitat in 10 western states, including the speciesโ stronghold in Wyoming.
โIt is extremely important to get your guysโ feedback and ideas on how this plan can be improved,โ BLM Wyoming Sage Grouse Coordinator Matt Holloran said.
Holloran, a wildlife biologist who has led myriad sage grouse studies, explained that the draft plan includes several aspects of the agencyโs 2015 and 2019 plans while incorporating new scientific data and accounting for mounting pressures on the birdโs habitat from climate change, invasive plant species and wildfire.
The draft plan includes six alternative approaches, ranging from very stringent conservation measures to no change in current management. The BLMโs โpreferredโ option is Alternative 5, which mostly aligns with Wyomingโs own evolving management strategies implemented by executive order under recent governors.
Bureau of Land Management Wyoming Sage Grouse Coordinator Matt Holloran (right) visits with a Natrona County resident April 24, 2024 in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
That alignment with state policy has likely contributed to stakeholders across the spectrum in Wyoming expressing cautious, but caveated, optimism since the BLM published the draft plan in March.
Sage grouse conservation in Wyoming
The BLM manages 18 million surface acres and about 43 million acres of subsurface minerals in Wyoming. Although the agency does not manage wildlife, it does manage wildlife habitats, giving it an outsized influence on the stateโs bedrock energy, recreation, wildlife and agriculture industries.
When conservation groups in the early 2000s sounded alarms about declining sage grouse populations, state leaders sprung into action fearing economy-endangering federal action, including a potential listing under the Endangered Species Act. Wyoming has earned accolades since for being the first state to voluntarily take on greater sage grouse protections โ both a proactive drive for conservation and in defense of ongoing agriculture and oil and gas development.
In some instances, the stateโs protections go further than the federal governmentโs, including a maximum 5% disturbance threshold for industrial activity in sage grouse โcore areas.โ So far, Wyoming is the only western state with a disturbance threshold that also takes wildfire impacts into account.
How the 5% calculation is made, however, is important. Some critics have alleged that some core area boundaries are simply made larger to allow for more disturbance.
The gubernatorial-appointed Sage Grouse Implementation Team is considering adding tens of thousands of acres of protective โcore area,โ along with some retractions, to the state map. Proposed changes are outlined here. (Sage Grouse Implementation Team)
Following Wyomingโs lead, the BLM proposes to maintain livestock grazing within core areas โ mostly considered an insignificant impact and, in some cases, beneficial to sage grouse, according to state and federal documents. Although the BLMโs preferred alternative doesnโt include major changes to grazing, it does further define poor grazing practices that would be restricted in sage grouse management areas, according to local BLM officials.
Stakeholder responses
Oil and gas industry officials in Wyoming have tentatively expressed hope for a workable federal approach to conserving sage grouse and its habitat. Notably, the BLMโs preferred alternative does not include new leasing restrictions for oil and gas.
Conservation groups, however, want the BLM to include the use of a special wildlife habitat designation โย Areas of Critical Environmental Concernย โ which would prohibit industrial activities. They point to a 2021ย U.S. Geological Survey studyย that shows sage grouse populations have declined 80% throughout the West since 1965, and that even with recent conservation measures the speciesโ population is still expected to decline.
Responding to a question Wednesday, the BLMโs Holloran said the agency takes the speciesโ cyclical population into account. โWhat you see is those lows keep getting lower and the highs are not as high,โ he said.
The Petroleum Association of Wyoming says it will push back against calls to include stringent habitat designations such as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.
โAlternative 5 is the best option presented, but there is still work to be done,โ PAW Vice President Ryan McConnaughey told WyoFile via email. โWe appreciate the BLMโs willingness to take a measured approach and will work through the comment process to share our concerns.โ
Reached for comment, Gov. Mark Gordonโs office referred to earlier statements regarding the BLMโs draft plan.
โWhile more analysis of this is needed,โ Gordon said in March, โthe first pass shows the BLM picked a preferred alternative that will allow for detailed comments that specifically [address] Wyomingโs concerns, including that the preferred alternative does not propose Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) on top of our state identified core areas.โ
Visit this BLM website for more information regarding the draft plan and how to comment.
by Jonathan Thompson, High Country News April 25, 2024
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States.Sign up to get it in your inbox.
On March 27, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed an order withdrawing nearly 222,000 acres of federal land in western Coloradoโs Thompson Divide area from future mining claims and oil and gas leases. The protected area includes aspen forests, alpine ridges, piรฑon-juniper-dotted mesas and high-country meadows โ diverse habitat that is home to an array of big game species and other wildlife. It stretches from Glenwood Springs to Crested Butte and over to Paonia, home of High Country Newsโ headquarters.
The move was a big deal for the eclectic ensemble of local ranchers, environmentalists and recreational users who had spent the last two decades fighting proposed mining and fossil fuel development in the area. It solidified a decade-old ban on new oil and gas leases while also driving a nail into the coffin of a thwarted bid to mine molybdenum on the โRed Lady,โ a wildflower-strewn mountain outside Crested Butte.
The Thompson Divide protections cover just one-tenth of 1% of the land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. So a cynic might see this temporary withdrawal โ it expires in 2044 โ as little more than a mildly consequential attempt by President Joe Biden to further differentiate himself from his Republican rival and perhaps regain the support of voters disillusioned by his administrationโs failure to end or significantly curtail fossil fuel development on public lands.
Zoom out a bit, though, and a much different picture reveals itself: The Thompson Divide withdrawal, like the Chaco region leasing ban, is merely one piece in a far larger policy puzzle. Taken alone, theyโre not terribly significant. But the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts: Itโs the most significant shift in public-land management since Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which mandated multiple use and sought to rid the BLM of its reputation as the โBureau of Livestock and Mining,โ in the process rocking the Western political landscape and sparking the Sagebrush Rebellion.
Marcelina Mountain in the Raggeds Wilderness is seen from Gunnison National Forestโs Horse Ranch Park trail, Colorado. A portion of the scene is part of a withdrawal of nearly 222,000 acres of federal lands in Coloradoโs Thompson Divide area from future mining claims and oil and gas leases.
The administration has issued so many public-lands-related orders, rules and protections over the last several weeks that Iโve had a tough time keeping up. Tracking the environmentalistsโ fluctuating responses โ along with the growing outrage from Republican officials โ has been downright exhausting, and at times exasperating. The recent acts include:
The BLM finalized its methane waste prevention rule on March 27, requiring operators on public lands to find and repair leaks and to reduce flaring and venting of the potent greenhouse gas. Each year, oil and gas facilities on federal land lose about 44.2 billion cubic feet of methane โ i.e., natural gas โ and other associated gases to venting and flaring alone. This equates to burning 2.7 million tons of coal, and it also robs American taxpayers of as much as $32 million per year in lost royalties. The rule will not only require drillers to capture or reuse methane when feasible, it will also charge royalties on wasted gas, bringing in tens of millions of dollars annually in additional revenue.
The administration blocked new oil and gas leases on 13 million acres โ or just over half โ of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. The move is a bittersweet victory for environmentalists; it doesnโt affect the gargantuan Willow Project, which the Biden administration approved last year, or any other active leases in the reserve. Alaska Republicans slammed Biden nonetheless, calling his action an โillegalโ blow and a โone-two punchโ to the stateโs economy.
The administration revoked a Trump-era approval for the proposed 211-mile Ambler industrial road through northwestern Alaska wilderness, saying it would violate environmental laws and harm wildlife and Indigenous subsistence hunters. The road would give mining companies access to a massive copper deposit buried beneath ecologically sensitive lands.
The Biden administration also blocked new mining claims and oil and gas leases on 4,200 acres of federal land near Placitas, New Mexico, for the next 50 years. The Pueblos of San Felipe and Santa Ana consider the land in question sacred.
The administration finalized rules raising royalty rates and reclamation bonding amounts for oil and gas drilling on federal land. Environmentalists welcomed the new rules, which mark one of the most significant changes to the Mineral Leasing Act since it became law in 1920. However, some argued that they did not go far enough to reduce hydrocarbon production โ or reduce the resulting emissions โ from public lands. And a ProPublica/Capital & Main investigation found that the new bonding amounts, which were based on flawed math, would not be nearly enough to cover the actual costs of cleaning up all the wells. Meanwhile, New Mexicoโs oil and gas industry, which has enjoyed record-high profits in recent years, whined: โThe new anti-oil and gas development policies will substantially handcuff production opportunities for small producers.โ
The Biden administration just blocked new oil and gas leases on over half of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve.
Probably the most intense reactions โ of both elation and anger โ came in response to last weekโs finalization of the public-lands rule, designed to put conservation on a par with oil and gas development, grazing and other extractive uses. The rule directs the agency to prioritize landscape health and creates a mechanism enabling outside entities to lease public land for restoration projects, much as a rancher or oil and gas company might lease BLM land. It also allows firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere on public lands, and it clarifies the process for designating areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources. And it directs the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.
Environmentalists lauded the decision. In a written statement, Wilderness Society President Jamie Williams called it a โgeneration-defining shift in how we manage our shared resources.โ It was met by an equally fervent but entirely opposite response from conservative lawmakers. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, denounced it as a โland grabโ that would โend federal grazingโ and block access to public lands โ a misguided worry that was echoed by a variety of her GOP colleagues.
Both responses are likely to prove excessive. The rule doesnโt add any new restrictions or put any public land off-limits to development, nor does it give greens the power to expel a legitimate drilling, mining or grazing operation in order to do a restoration project. It simply provides new tools to help the BLM uphold the multiple-use charge that Congress mandated nearly 50 years ago, before the agency went astray during the Reagan and successive Bush administrations. And Boebertโs notion that it will hurt grazing is especially off-base: While Biden has occasionally stood up to the oil industry, he has done nothing to reform public-lands grazing policy, much to conservationistsโ dismay.
Again, taken on its own, the new rule is hardly radical or revolutionary. But combined with the administrationโs other actions โ from significantly reducing the amount of land leased to oil and gas companies, to restricting energy development via resource management plans, to establishing new and restoring shrunken national monuments โ it begins to amount to something important. At long last, a coherent โ if imperfect โ public-lands climate policy has begun to take shape.
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The public lands beat has been rather busy, to put it mildly, as the Biden administration rushes to finalize rules, orders, and protections as soon as possible to make them less vulnerable to being rolled back if Biden were to lose in November to, ummm, a more hostile candidate. Maybe Bidenโs also working to more clearly distinguish himself on environmental issues from Trump in advance of the election โ as if the stark contrast isnโt abundantly clear already.
So much has happened that Iโve fallen behind. So forget the pre-amble, letโs get to it:
In late March, the Bureau of Land Management finalized its methane waste prevention rule, which requires oil and gas operators on federal lands to find and repair leaks in their infrastructure and to phase out flaring and venting of methane โ a.k.a. natural gas. The rules complement the EPAโs similar regulations finalized earlier this year.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, having about 86 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over the near-term (methane in the atmosphere breaks down into carbon dioxide and water over the long-term). While methane โ which occurs alongside oil in underground reservoirs โ can be captured and marketed as natural gas, oil drillers tend to vent or flare it and other associated gases, since it isnโt as profitable as oil.ย
Flaring and venting of methane and other gases shot up after horizontal drilling-multistage hydraulic fracturing opened up vast new stores of oil. Source: Bureau of Land Management.
Between 2010 and 2020, after the โfrackingโ-enabled shale revolution got underway, oil and gas operations on federal and tribal land vented and flared an average of 44.2 billion cubic feet of methane annually. Thatโs as bad for the climate as burning around 9 million tons of coal. And since operators donโt pay royalties on gas they throw away, that cost American taxpayers some $166 million in lost revenue over a decade.
The rules look to rein that in by gradually decreasing the maximum amount of methane that can be flared or vented and charging royalties on the gases that are wasted. It is expected to slash greenhouse gas emissions and result in about $50 million annually in added royalty revenue.ย
A few days later, the administration finalized its ban on new oil and gas leases and mining claims on about 220,000 acres along Western Coloradoโs Thompson Divide. The protections cover a stretch of high-country BLM and USFS land between Glenwood Springs, Crested Butte, and Somerset. It does not affect valid, existing leases or claims.
In the early 2000s an eclectic group of environmentalists, ranchers, and recreational users banded together to protect the Divide from the growing threat of oil and gas development. Their efforts goaded the feds to halt new development and cancel existing leases on much of the acreage, long before this springโs move. Meanwhile, a similar uprising in the Crested Butte area blocked a proposed molybdenum mine on Mt. Emmons, or the Red Lady.
The administrationโs withdrawal bolsters these efforts and blocks new development for the next 20 years. By then, one would hope, the administrationโs demand-side efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption โ including encouraging clean energy development and pushing zero-emission cars โ will have kicked in.ย
***
And Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland raised royalty rates and reclamation bonding amounts for oil and gas drilling on federal land. This one was a long-time coming. The previous 12.5% royalty rate has remained unchanged since Congress passed the Mineral Leasing Act in 1920. And oil and gas drillers have been getting away with posting bonds for all of their wells in a state that donโt get anywhere near covering the cost of cleaning up a single well.
Environmentalists welcomed the reforms, but also criticized them for failing to address climate impacts of oil and gas development on public lands. Oh, and then thereโs the thing about the faulty math: Mark Olalde and Nick Bowlin, for ProPublica and Capital & Main, found that even the new bonding amounts wouldnโt cover clean up. The problem? A BLM staffer miscalculated the cost to plug and reclaim a single well, and the inaccurate figure got incorporated into the analysis and final rule. Whoops.
***
The administration blocked new oil and gas leases on 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Thatโs a huge amount of land and especially remarkable given that itโs in a petroleum reserve and itโs likely to result in some 50% less greenhouse gas emissions than Trumpโs plan for the same area. Still, it may not be enough for the climate hawks who remain livid over the administrationโs approval of a scaled-back, but still gargantuan, Willow (a.k.a. โcarbon bombโ) drilling project in the reserve. Meanwhile, Bidenโs Willow approval is not enough to soothe the anger of Alaskaโs congressional delegation โ including Democrat Rep. Mary Peltola โ who blasted Biden for ignoring Alaskaโs love for fossil fuels and called it an โillegalโ move that dealt a โone-two punchโ to the stateโs economy. You just canโt win for losing, can you?
***ย
Light and texture. Big Gypsum Valley, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
And last, but certainly not least: The Bureau of Land Management finalized its public lands rule, designed to put conservation on a par with oil and gas development, grazing, and other extractive uses.
The ruleโs main provisions include:ย
It directs the agency to prioritize landscape health in all decision making, which is what itโs already supposed to do when assessing grazing allotments. It hasnโt done a very good job at that, so far.ย
It creates a mechanism for outside entities โ states, tribes, or nonprofits โ to lease public land for restoration projects โ much as a rancher or oil and gas company might lease BLM land.ย
It allows firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere.ย
It clarifies the process for designating areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources.ย
And it directs the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.ย
The rule is being hailed by conservationists as a โgeneration-defining shiftโ in public land management, and lambasted by Sagebrush Rebel-wannabes as a โmisguided land grab meant to prevent oil and gas production โฆ <and> โฆ an attack on our ranchers and farmers that will end grazing on federal lands and will also prevent Coloradans from accessing their public lands.โ (A gold star to whoever guesses which MAGA-loving congress member made the latter grossly misinformed quote!).
Honestly, Iโm not sure either sideโs hoohas are warranted. Itโs hard to see how a couple new leasing categories will be generation defining, I kinda doubt the rules will affect oil and gas production, and Iโm absolutely certain they wonโt end grazing or otherwise block access to public lands.
The rule doesnโt add any new restrictions or put any land off-limits to development. It doesnโt give greens the power to kick a legitimate drilling, mining or grazing operation off public land to do a restoration or mitigation project. The mitigation leases could actually facilitate energy development. As for grazing, the Biden administration has indicated it considers ranching to be a type of land conservation, a theory that is manifested in the BLMโs policy of veering away from public lands grazing reform. Grazing is allowed in most ACECs. And the agency just set the 2024 grazing fee at $1.35 per animal unit month, the minimum Congress allows. I think the cows and their ranchers will be just fine under this new rule.
It seems to me that this ruleโs provisions are fairly open to interpretation. That means the actual implementation โ and how it plays out on the ground โ will depend largely on BLM state, regional, and field-office managers. And those local-level bureaucrats can be swayed by the prevailing attitudes of the communities where they live and work, and by pressure from local or state officials.ย
In the end, the rule is essentially a reminder to the BLM that their job is not just to bend over for corporate and extractive interests, but to actually care for the land that belongs to all Americans. It is simply reinforcing the multiple-use charge Congress set forth when it passed the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act back in 1976. Itโs not that big of a deal. But then again, FLPMA helped spark the Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s. So who knows what this rule might inspire now…
๐ธ Parting Shot ๐๏ธ
Eagles in a tree near Norwood, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Corn in Baca County. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
Unanimous votes in the Colorado Legislature are rare, but they do happen. Consider HB24-1435, the funding for the Colorado Water Conservation Board projects.
The big duffle bag of funding for various projects was approved 13-0 by the Senate Water and Agriculture Resources Committee. It had bipartisan sponsors, including Rep. Marc Catlin, a former water district official from Montrose.
โColorado has been a leader in water for a long, long time, and this is bill is an opportunity for us to stay in that leadership position,โ said Catlin, a Republican and a co-sponsor.
โThis is one of my favorite bills,โ said Rep. Karen McCormick, a Democrat from Longmont and former veterinarian. She is also a co-sponsor.
This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo
The bill has some very big-ticket items, including $20 million for the Shoshone power plant agreement between Western Slope interests and Public Service Co. of Colorado, better known by its parent company, Xcel Energy. Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River District, called the effort to keep the water in the river โincredibly importantโ to those who make a living in the Colorado River Basin.
This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB
Mueller also pointed out that keeping water in the river will benefit of four endangered species of fish that inhabit what is called the 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River near Grand Junction.
Another $2 million was appropriated for the turf-replacement program in cities, a program first funded in 2022. Another mid-range item is telemetry for Snotel sites, to keep track of snow depths, the better to predict runoff. It is to get $1.8 million.
Among the smallest items in the budget is a big one for Baca County, in Coloradoโs southeast corner. The bill, if adopted, would provide the Colorado Water Conservation Board with $250,000 to be used to evaluate the remaining water in aquifers underlying southeastern Colorado. There, near the communities of Springfield and Walsh, some wells long ago exhausted the Ogallala aquifer and have gone deeper into lower aquifers, in a few cases exhausting those, too. Farmers in other areas continue to pump with only modest declines.
What exactly is the status of the underground water there? How many more decades can the agricultural economy dependent upon water from the aquifers continue? The area is well aside from the Arkansas River or other sources of snowmelt.
A study by the McLaughlin Group in 2002 delivered numbers that are sobering. Wes McKinley, a former state legislator from Walsh, at a meeting in February covered by the Plainsman Herald of Springfield, said the McLaughlin study numbers show that 84% of the water has been extracted. That study suggested 50-some years of water remaining. If correct, that leaves 34 years of water today.
Tim Hume, the areaโs representation on the Colorado Groundwater Commission, has emphasized that he believes this new study will be needed to accurately determine how water should be managed.
How soon will this study proceed? asked Rep. Ty Winter, a Republican from Trinidad who represents southeastern Colorado. Tracy Kosloff, the deputy director of the Colorado Division of Water Resources, answered that the technical analysis should begin sometime after July. โI would think it is reasonable to finish it up by the end of 2025, but that is just an educated guess.โ
She said the state would work with the Baca County community to come up with a common goal and direction โabout how they want to manage their resources.โ
Unlike the Republican River area of northeastern Colorado, where farmers also have been plunging wells into the Ogallala and other aquifers, this area of southeastern Colorado has no native river. In the Republican Basin, Colorado is trying to remove 25,000 acres from irrigation by the end of 2029 in order to leave more water to move into the Republican River.ย See story. A similar proposition is underway in the San Luis Valley, where farmers have also extensively tapped the underground aquifers that are tributary to the Rio Grande.ย See story.
San Luis Valley Groundwater
The closest to critical questioning of the bill came from Rep. Richard Holtorf, a Republican who represents many of the farming counties of northeastern Colorado. He questioned the $2 million allocated to the Office of the Attorney General.
He was told that $1 million of that constantly replenishing fund is allocated to the Colorado River, $110,000 for the Republican River, $459,000 for the Rio Grande, $35,000 for the Arkansas and $200,000 for the South Platte.
Then thereโs the litigation with Nebraska about the proposed ditch that would begin in Colorado near Julesburg but deliver water to Nebraskaโs Perkins County. Colorado hotly disputes that plan.
Lauren Ris, the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, said Colorado is โvery confident in our legal strategy.โ
Holtorf also noted that the severance tax provides 25% of the funding for the water operations. The severance tax comes from fossil fuel development. As Colorado moves to renewable energy, โwhat happens to this Colorado water if we kill the goose that lays the golden egg?โ
Ris replied said future declines in the severance tax is a conversation underway among many agencies in Colorado state government.
The South Platte Hotel building that sits at the Two Forks site, where the North and South forks of the South Platte River come together. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
โI am proud to see the collaborative work of the newly developed Colorado Produced Water Consortium begin to bear fruit with the development of the Initial Guidance Documents and Case Studies to Promote Best Practices for In-Field Recycling and Reuse of Produced Water Report. The engagement, diversity of views, and expertise of the whole of the Consortium was utilized in the development of this report, which will continue to evolve as more technology, case studies, and research are incorporated in the future as we continue to implement HB23-1242 and explore ways to reduce the amount of freshwater used and increase the amount of reuse and recycling of produced water used in oil and gas operations across the state,โ said Consortium Chair John Messner.
The Consortium collaboratively developed this synthesis report by identifying and reviewing over 130 research journal articles, best practices, and case studies. Key themes that promote best practices for in-field recycling and reuse of produced water throughout the state emerged from the review and will be used to inform the Consortiumโs future recommendations. Given the ongoing and evolving nature of produced water research, the library of references is expected to grow over time.
โI congratulate the Consortium in submitting their first deliverable to the Colorado legislature and for working hard to bring together the expertise of a diverse set of stakeholders,” said Dan Gibbs, Executive Director, Colorado Department of Natural Resources. โThis first report builds the expertise of Coloradoโs policy makers and the public on produced water. I look forward to the Consortiumโs continued work to inform produced water policy.โ
The Colorado Produced Water Consortium was established in the Department of Natural Resources byย HB23-1242 to help reduce the consumption of freshwater within oil and gas operations. The Consortium’s responsibilities also include making recommendations towards developing an informed path for reuse and recycling of produced water inside and potentially outside of oil and gas operations within the state and identifying measures to address barriers associated with the use of produced water.
The Consortium consists of 31 members representing state and federal agencies, research institutions, environmental groups, industry, local governments, environmental justice groups, and disproportionately impacted communities.
All this worry about warming when itโs just a natural cycle. The climate is always changing and todayโs no different — right? Global Weirding is produced by KTTZ Texas Tech Public Media and distributed by PBS Digital Studios. New episodes every other Wednesday at 10 am central. Brought to you in part by: Bob and Linda Herscher, Freese and Nichols, Inc, and the Texas Tech Climate Science Center.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Theo Stein):
Levels of the three most important human-caused greenhouse gases โ carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide โ continued their steady climb during 2023, according to NOAA scientists.
While the rise in the three heat-trapping gases recorded in the air samples collected by NOAAโs Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML) in 2023 was not quite as high as the record jumps observed in recent years, they were in line with the steep increases observed during the past decade.
โNOAAโs long-term air sampling program is essential for tracking causes of climate change and for supporting the U.S. efforts to establish an integrated national greenhouse gas measuring, monitoring and information system,โ said GML Director Vanda Grubiลกiฤ. โAs these numbers show, we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.โย
The global surface concentration of CO2, averaged across all 12 months of 2023, was 419.3 parts per million (ppm), an increase of 2.8 ppm during the year. This was the 12th consecutive year CO2ย increased by more than 2 ppm, extendingย the highest sustained rateย of CO2ย increases during the 65-year monitoring record. Three consecutive years of CO2ย ย growth of 2 ppm or more had not been seen in NOAAโs monitoring records prior to 2014. Atmospheric CO2ย is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratoryโs global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
โThe 2023 increase is the third-largest in the past decade, likely a result of an ongoing increase of fossil fuel CO2 emissions, coupled with increased fire emissions possibly as a result of the transition from La Nina to El Nino,โ said Xin Lan, a CIRES scientist who leads GMLโs effort to synthesize data from the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network for tracking global greenhouse gas trends.
Atmospheric methane, less abundant than CO2ย but more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere, rose to an average of 1922.6 parts per billion (ppb). The 2023 methane increase over 2022 was 10.9 ppb, lower than the record growth rates seen in 2020 (15.2 ppb), 2021(18 ppb)ย and 2022 (13.2 ppb), but still the 5th highest since renewed methane growth started in 2007. Methane levels in the atmosphere are now more than 160% higher than their pre-industrial level.
This graph shows globally-averaged, monthly mean atmospheric methane abundance determined from marine surface sites for the full NOAA time-series starting in 1983. Values for the last year are preliminary, pending recalibrations of standard gases and other quality control steps. Credit: NOAA GM
In 2023, levels of nitrous oxide, the third-most significant human-caused greenhouse gas, climbed by 1 ppb to 336.7 ppb. The two years of highest growth since 2000 occurred in 2020 (1.3 ppb) and 2021 (1.3 ppb). Increases in atmospheric nitrous oxide during recent decades are mainly from use of nitrogen fertilizer and manure from the expansion and intensification of agriculture. Nitrous oxide concentrations are 25% higher than the pre-industrial level of 270 ppb.
Taking the pulse of the planet one sample at a time NOAAโs Global Monitoring Laboratory collected more than 15,000 air samples from monitoring stations around the world in 2023 and analyzed them in its state-of-the-art laboratory in Boulder,
Colorado. Each spring, NOAA scientists release preliminary calculations of the global average levels of these three primary long-lived greenhouse gases observed during the previous year to track their abundance, determine emissions and sinks, and understand carbon cycle feedbacks.
Measurements are obtained from air samples collected from sites in NOAAโsย Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, which includes about 53 cooperative sampling sites around the world, 20 tall tower sites, and routine aircraft operation sites from North America.ย
Carbon dioxide emissions remain the biggest problem
By far the mostย important contributor to climate changeย is CO2ย , which is primarily emitted by burning of fossil fuels. Human-caused CO2ย pollution increased from 10.9 billion tons per year in the 1960s โ which is when the measurements at theย Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaiiย began โ to about 36.8 billion tons per year in 2023. This sets a new record, according to theย Global Carbon Project, which uses NOAAโsย Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Networkย measurements to define the net impact of global carbon emissions and sinks.
This graph shows annual mean growth rates of carbon dioxide based on globally averaged marine surface data. Decadal averages of the growth rate are plotted as horizontal lines. Credit: NOAA GML
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere today is comparable to where it was around 4.3 million years ago during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when sea level was about 75 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.
About half of the CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to date have been absorbed at the Earthโs surface, divided roughly equally between oceans and land ecosystems, including grasslands and forests. The CO2absorbed by the worldโs oceans contributes to ocean acidification, which is causing a fundamental change in the chemistry of the ocean, with impacts to marine life and the people who depend on them. The oceans have also absorbed an estimated 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases.
Research continues to point to microbial sources for rising methane
NOAAโs measurements show that atmospheric methane increased rapidly during the 1980s, nearly stabilized in the late-1990s and early 2000s, then resumed a rapid rise in 2007.
Aย 2022 studyย by NOAA and NASA scientists and additionalย NOAA research in 2023ย suggests that more than 85% of the increase from 2006 to 2021 was due to increased microbial emissions generated by livestock, agriculture, human and agricultural waste, wetlands and other aquatic sources. The rest of the increase was attributed to increased fossil fuel emissions.ย
โIn addition to the record high methane growth in 2020-2022, we also observed sharp changes in the isotope composition of the methane that indicates an even more dominant role of microbial emission increase,โ said Lan. The exact causes of the recent increase in methane are not yet fully known.
NOAA scientists are investigating the possibility that climate change is causing wetlands to give off increasing methane emissions in a feedback loop.
Great Sage-Grouse. Photo: Evan Barrientos/Audubon Rockies
Click the link to read the release on the Audubon website (Jason Howe):
(Washington, DC-April 12, 2024) โ The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) today announced a rule updating the cost of doing business on public lands and helping to balance the extraction of natural resources with the conservation of wildlife habitat and the preservation of landscapes sacred to Indigenous peoples.
In addition to siting oil and gas development away from wildlife habitat and cultural resources, the new regulations increase fees โ including royalty and rental rates, and minimum bids associated with oil and gas development โ bringing them in line with what many states require; and reduce so-called โspeculative leasingโ, where companies hold leases on land with little potential for development.
The BLM manages 245 million acres, nearly 40 percent of U.S. public lands. The agency is charged with balancing the protection of Americaโs natural legacy with managing the 30 percent of the nationโs mineral wealth that lies beneath the surface. But over the past 50 years, the agency has mainly focused on extractive uses (coal, and oil and gas), applying rules governing that extraction that have been unchanged for decades. An estimated 300 bird species spend at least part of their lives there, including Burrowing Owls and the Greater Sage-Grouse, which is already under stress across much of its range.
“When BLM oil and gas leasing policy was last updated, Gerald Ford was in the White House, the Bee Gees were on the radio and a gallon of gas cost an average of 59 cents,” said Christopher Simmons, senior manager of public lands policy for the National Audubon Society. “The BLMโs approach to oil and gas leasing has been the equivalent of a polyester leisure suit โ painfully outdated. This is a big step forward towards the BLM fulfilling its mission, delivering common-sense policies that balance responsible development with land and wildlife conservation.”
For decades, oil and gas policies prioritized development on public lands over activities like hunting, fishing, birding, hiking, grazing and restoration. When oil and gas companies left behind a mess on public lands, American taxpayers were previously forced to foot the bill. Before todayโs update, taxpayers could have been responsible forย as much as $15 billionย in clean-up costs.ย
The snowpack for the Aspen-area mountains was about 46% below the 30-year median after a dry November and was about 35% below in December, according to Sam Collentine, a Basalt-based chief operating officer and meteorologist forย OpenSnow.com. Conditions improved slightly in January when the snowpack ended up 3% above the 30-year median for the month, despite a dry stretch for a good share of the month. Conditions finally flipped in February, when the snowpack was 20% above median, and especially in March, which ended at plus 74%…The season started with a lot of promise with two big snowstorms in October that established an impressive base. But, as is typical for Colorado, conditions dried out in November and into December…
Snowmass collected 94.6 inches of snow in March, or 172% of normal. Aspen Mountain recorded just shy of 86 inches or 175% of normal, according to Aspen Weather…OpenSnowโs Collentine took a look for snowfall at the Aspen-Snowmass ski areas for Oct. 1 into early April and found Aspen Highlands nosed out Snowmass with 312 inches to 310 inches. Highlands finished the season at 105% of the 30-year median while Snowmass was at 101%. Aspen Mountain recorded 257 inches or 107% of median while Buttermilk was at 161 inches and 106%…
As a whole, the Roaring Fork basinโs snowpack was at 115% of median on Tuesday. Collentine noted that conditions around Aspen were similar to those in the Upper Colorado River Basin and the state as a whole. The Upper Colorado Basin, which the Roaring Fork is part of, is at 106% of the 30-year median and the statewide snowpack is at 108%.
Colorado lawmakers on Wednesday hailed the announcement by federal officials that 220,000 acres of national forest land on Coloradoโs Western Slope will be protected from oil and gas development and mining for at least the next 20 years.
The U.S. Interior Department confirmed that it would withdraw the Thompson Divide area near Crested Butte from federal mineral leasing, following an 18-month review process and more than a decade of advocacy by local conservationists and Colorado officials.
โThis announcement is a testament to the persistence of Coloradoโs farmers, ranchers, hunters, anglers, recreationists, wildlife enthusiasts, and conservation groups, who were unrelenting in their work to protect the landscape we all love,โ Bennet, a Democrat who has long championed the move, said in a press release.
โThe Thompson Divide area is a treasured landscape, valued for its wildlife habitat, clean air and water, and abundant recreation, ecological and scenic values,โ said U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. โThe Biden-Harris administration is committed to ensuring that special places like these are protected for future generations.โ
Prohibiting mineral leasing in the Thompson Divide area is one component of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act, a public lands package championed by Democrats in the stateโs congressional delegation since 2019. With the bill stalled by Republican opposition, President Joe Biden in 2022 moved to implement several CORE Act provisions through executive action, including the designation of the Camp HaleโContinental Divide National Monument near Leadville.
While oil and gas trade groups opposed the move, a U.S. Forest Service assessment last year found the impact on the industry would be negligible, while โthe proposed action would protect the agricultural, ranching, wildlife, air quality, recreation, ecological, and scenic values of the Thompson Divide area for both intrinsic and economic value to local communities.โ
The withdrawal order applies to nearly 200,000 acres of in the White River and Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison national forests, in addition to 20,000 acres of public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act authorizes the Interior Department to order such withdrawals for a maximum of 20 years.
The CORE Act, which Colorado Democrats have reintroduced for a third time in Congress, still aims to make the withdrawal permanent. The bill stands little chance of being passed by the Republican-controlled House, where GOP lawmakers including Rep. Lauren Boebert of Windsor have called it a โ400,000-acre land grab.โ
But a long list of local elected officials and conservation advocates say Wednesdayโs announcement has been a long time coming.
โWe have worked for almost two decades to secure meaningful protection for the Divide, with ranchers, hunters, anglers, mountain bikers, off road vehicle users, and environmentalists coming together in an unlikely alliance to preserve the current uses of these lands,โ Jason Sewell, a rancher and president of the Thompson Divide Coalition, said in a statement. โWhile we will continue to advocate for permanent protections for the Thompson Divide as afforded in the CORE Act, we could not be more thrilled to know that this landscape will continue for the next 20 years to provide the recreational opportunities, jobs, and wildlife habitat that it has for generations.โ
Interested in methane and other greenhouse gas emissions near you? Check out http://climatetrace.org, which allows you to see emissions from oil and gas fields, large individual facilities, and more. You can also break it down by industry.
Final rule established after Hickenlooper and Bennet pushed federal government to follow Coloradoโs lead
WASHINGTON โ Today, U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet applauded the announcement of a final rule from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that will reduce methane emissions from the production of oil and gas on federal and Tribal lands, conserving billions of cubic feet of gas that might otherwise have been vented, flared, or leaked.
โColorado has led the way in reducing methane emissions. Taking basic steps to cut harmful emissions will go a long way to slowing climate change and keep pollutants out of our atmosphere. Now, the rest of the country will follow Coloradoโs lead so we can meet our climate goals,โ said Hickenlooper.
โColorado has led the nation in limiting methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, and has long recognized the harm caused by routine venting and flaring. These practices waste valuable natural resources, risk the health of surrounding communities, and pollute the environment,โ said Bennet. โIโm glad BLM followed our stateโs example and is taking steps to cut down on these wasteful practices on our public and Tribal lands.โ
The final rule comes after Hickenlooper and Bennet urged the agency last year to follow Coloradoโs lead by eliminating routine venting and flaring from oil and gas operations on public and Tribal lands. This final rule will conserve billions of cubic feet of gas and keep harmful methane emissions from entering our atmosphere, while generating more than $50 million in additional natural gas royalty payments each year. This conserved gas will be available to power American homes and industries.
Routine flaring is the practice of regularly burning off excess gas during oil and gas production and processing as a waste product; venting allows excess gas to escape directly into the atmosphere without burning it. Methane, a harmful climate pollutant many more times more potent than carbon dioxide, can be released into the atmosphere in pollution from flaring and venting. Human-caused methane emissions are responsible for at least 25 percent of the climate warming we are experiencing today.
As governor, Hickenlooper brought together environmentalists and the oil industry to create the worldโs first methane regulations. Those regulations were used by President Obama as a model for national standards which in turn were used as a basis for the international methane pledge in 2021.
Hickenlooper and Bennet have consistently worked to cut methane emissions and strengthen federal oil and gas methane rules, modeled on Coloradoโs. In 2021, Hickenlooper and Bennet led members of the Colorado congressional delegation to push the EPA for stronger methane regulations for the oil and gas sector. Last year, the senators urged the EPA to use data from innovative monitoring technologies like satellite imaging, and tighten restrictions on routine flaring to strengthen methane emission standards. In November, the senators urged the EPA to more accurately track methane emissions. In January, Hickenlooper celebrated the announcement of a conditional commitment from the Department of Energy for up to $189 million in loan guarantees from the Inflation Reduction Act to support the fabrication and installation of a real time methane emissions monitoring network across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota, and New Mexico.
Interested in methane and other greenhouse gas emissions near you? Check out http://climatetrace.org, which allows you to see emissions from oil and gas fields, large individual facilities, and more. You can also break it down by industry.
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Scott Weiser). Here’s an excerpt:
Battle lines have been drawn in a fight between oil-producing red states and environmentally-driven blue states over a new regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency…Led by the attorneys general of Texas and Oklahoma, 26 states are suing the EPA over a final rule published March 8 that, in part, sets new regulations for existing methane infrastructure. Twenty other states, including Colorado and the District of Columbia, filed a motion to intervene in the case in support of the new federal regulation Tuesday…
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said the new rule must be defended in a Monday news release announcing the state’s intervention in the Texas case.
โThese protections must remain in place at the federal level for effective oversight of methane emissions from surrounding states; thatโs why we are committed to defending the federal methane rule,โ Weiser said in the release…
The new rule from the EPA regulates methane emissions from both new sources and existing infrastructure, something the EPA has never done before. This raises the question of whether the EPA has legal authority to expand its statutory mandate without asking Congress for permission. The โmajor questionsโ doctrine states that federal agencies must have explicit permission to newly regulate politically and economically significant issues, rather than assuming they have unbridled regulatory authority.
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee, Amanda Tachine, An Garagiola, and Audrianna Goodwin):
February 7, 2024
This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.
Alina Sierra needs $6,405. In 2022, the 19-year-old Tohono Oโodham student was accepted to the University of Arizona, her dream school. She would be the first in her family to go to college.
Her godfather used to take her to the universityโs campus when she was a child, and their excursions could include a stop at the turtle pond or lunch at the student union. Her grandfather also encouraged her, saying: โYouโre going to be here one day.โ
โEver since then,โ said Sierra. โI wanted to go.โ
Then the financial reality set in. Unable to afford housing either on or off campus, she couch-surfed her first semester. Barely able to pay for meals, she turned to the campus food pantry for hygiene products. โOne week I would get soap; another week, get shampoo,โ she said. Without reliable access to the internet, and with health issues and a long bus commute, her grades began to slip. She was soon on academic probation.
โI always knew it would be expensive,โ said Sierra. โI just didnโt know it would be this expensive.โ
Alina Sierra poses for a photo while wearing a locket containing the ashes of her godfather. โHe would tell me, like, โFurther your education, education is power,’โ she said. โBefore he passed away, I promised him that I was going to go to college and graduate from U of A.โ Bean Yazzie / Grist
She was also confused. The university, known as UArizona, or more colloquially as U of A by local residents and alumni, expressed a lot of support for Indigenous students. It wasnโt just that the Tohono Oโodham flag hung in the bookstore or that the university had a land acknowledgment reminding the community that the Tucson campus was on Oโodham and Yaqui homelands. The same year she was accepted, UArizona launched a program to cover tuition and mandatory fees for undergraduates from all 22 Indigenous nations in the state. President Robert C. Robbins described the new Arizona Native Scholars Grant as a step toward fulfilling the schoolโs land-grant mission.
Sierra was eligible for the grant, but it didnโt cover everything. After all the application forms and paperwork, she was still left with a balance of thousands of dollars. She had no choice but to take out a loan, which she kept a secret from her family, especially her mom. โThatโs the number one thing she told me: โDonโt get a loan,โ but I kind of had to.โ
Cacti grow behind a sign for the University of Arizona. Bean Yazzie / Grist
Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.
By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizonaโs Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcise it.
But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land expropriated from Indigenous communities to these universities.
In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 689,000 acres of land โ an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 705,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground. Known asย trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the schoolโs continued benefit.
A parcel of land in Willcox, Arizona, granted to the University of Arizona. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they donโt always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.
The parcels themselves are scattered and rural, typically uninhabited and seldom marked. Most appear undeveloped and blend in seamlessly with surrounding landscapes. That is, when they donโt have something like logging underway or a frack pad in sight.
In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizonaโs state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million โ enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.
UArizonaโs reliance on state trust land for revenue not only contradicts its commitment to recognize past injustices regarding stolen Indigenous lands, but also threatens its climate commitments. The school has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
The parcels are managed by the Arizona State Land Department, a separate government agency that has leased portions of them to agriculture, grazing, and commercial activities. But extractive industries make up a major portion of the trust land portfolio. Of the 705,000 subsurface acres that benefit UArizona, almost 645,000 are earmarked for oil and gas production. The lands were taken from at least 10 Indigenous nations, almost all of which were seized by executive order or congressional action in the wake of warfare.
Over the past year, Grist has examined publicly available data to locate trust lands associated with land-grant universities seeded by the Morrill Act. We found 14 universities that matched this criteria. In the process, we identified their original sources and analyzed their ongoing uses. In all, we located and mapped more than 8.36 million surface and subsurface acres taken from 123 Indigenous nations. This land currently produces income for those institutions.
โUniversities continue to benefit from colonization,โ said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher. โItโs not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.โ
Indigenous landgranted to universities
The amount of acreage under management for land-grant universities varies widely, from as little as 15,000 acres aboveground in North Dakota to more than 2.1 million belowground in Texas. Combined, Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.7 million in todayโs dollars for these lands, but in many cases, nothing was paid at all. In 2022 alone, these trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion for their schools. Between 2018 and 2022, the lands produced almost $6.7 billion. However, those figures are likely an undercount as multiple state agencies did not return requests to confirm amounts.
This work builds upon previous investigations that examined how land grabs capitalized and transformed the U.S. university system. The new data reveals how state trust lands continue to transfer wealth from Indigenous nations to land-grant universities more than a century after the original Morrill Act.
It also provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change in the Western United States.
Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals, like coal and iron-rich taconite. Grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Those parcels are often coupled with subsurface rights, which means oil and gas extraction can occur underneath cattle operations, themselves often a major source of methane emissions. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases โ for roads or pipelines, for instance โ make up much of the remaining acreage.
By contrast, renewable energy production is permitted on roughly one-quarter of 1 percent of the land in our dataset. Conservation covers an even more meager 0.15 percent.
However, those land use statistics are likely undercounts due to the different ways states record activities. Many state agencies we contacted for this story had incomplete public information on how land was used.
โPeople generally are not eager to confront their own complicity in colonialism and climate change,โ said Stein. โBut we also have to recognize, for instance, myself as a white settler, that we are part of that system, that we are benefiting from that system, that we are actively reproducing that system every day.โ
Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoplesโ lands and supported with their natural resources. But both current and future generations will have to live with the way trust lands are used to subsidize land-grant universities.
In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out.
UArizona did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Acreage now held in trust by states for land-grant universities is part of Americaโs sweeping history of real estate creation, a history rooted in Indigenous dispossession.
Trust lands in most states were clipped from the more than 1.8 billion acres that were once part of the United Statesโ public domain โ territory claimed, colonized, and redistributed in a process that began in the 18th century and continues today.
The making of the public domain is the stuff of textbook lessons on U.S. expansion. After consolidating statesโ western land claims in the aftermath of the American Revolution, federal officials obtained a series of massive territorial acquisitions from rival imperial powers. No doubt youโve heard of a few of these deals: They ranged from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
Backed by the doctrine of discovery, a legal principle with religious roots that justified the seizure of lands around the world by Europeans, U.S. claims to Indigenous territories were initially little more than projections of jurisdiction. They asserted an exclusive right to steal from Indigenous nations, divide the territory into new states, and carve it up into private property. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Catholic Churchโs association with the doctrine in 2023, it remains a bedrock principle of U.S. law.
Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty
Starting in the 1780s, federal authorities began aggressively taking Native land before surveying and selling parcels to new owners. Treaties were the preferred instrument, accompanied by a range of executive orders and congressional acts. Behind their tidy legal language and token payments lay actual or threatened violence, or the use of debts or dire conditions, such as starvation, to coerce signatures from Indigenous peoples and compel relocation.
By the 1930s, tribal landholdings in the form of reservations covered less than 2 percent of the United States. Most were located in places with few natural resources and more sensitive to climate change than their original homelands. When reservations proved more valuable than expected, due to the discovery of oil, for instance, outcomes could be even worse, as viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon learned last year.
The public domain once covered three-fourths of what is today the United States. Federal authorities still retain about 30 percent of this reservoir of plundered land, most conspicuously as national parks, but also as military bases, national forests, grazing land, and more. The rest, nearly 1.3 billion acres, has been redistributed to new owners through myriad laws.
A waste pond on a land-grant parcel in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
When it came to redistribution, grants of various stripes were more common than land sales. Individuals and corporate grantees โ think homesteaders or railroads โ were prominent recipients, but in terms of sheer acreage given, they trailed a third group: state governments.
Federal-to-state grants were immense. Cram them all together and they would comfortably cover all of Western Europe. Despite their size and ongoing financial significance, they have never attracted much attention outside of state offices and agencies responsible for managing them.
The Morrill Act, one of the best known examples of federal-to-state grants, followed a well-established path for funding state institutions. This involved handing Indigenous land to state legislatures so agencies could then manage those lands on behalf of specifically chosen beneficiaries.
Many other laws subsidized higher education by issuing grants to state or territorial governments in a similar way. The biggest of those bounties came through so-called โenabling actsโ that authorized U.S. territories to graduate to statehood.
Every new state carved out of the public domain in the contiguous United States received land grants for public institutions through their enabling acts. These grants functioned like dowries for joining the Union and funded a variety of public works and state services ranging from penitentiaries to fish hatcheries. Their main function, however, was subsidizing education.
Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have lived with, and cared for, the lands they call home. But as settlers moved west, U.S. government and military officials forced those communities from their lands, sometimes through the signing of treaties, sometimes through military action. Once ceded, those lands became territories and then states. With statehood, those lands became part of America’s real estate system.
Lands inside newly formed states were overlaid with the Public Land Survey System โ a rectangular survey system designed by early colonists to map newly acquired Indigenous lands. One 6-by-6 mile square on the grid is known as a township. Inside each township are 36 more 1-by-1 mile squares called sections.
In most states, sections 16 and 36 of every township were automatically set aside to fund K-12 schools, known as common schools at the time. From the remaining 34 sections, states could choose which lands would benefit other public institutions, like hospitals, penitentiaries, and universities.
In the years since statehood, some of these lands have been sold or swapped, but most Western states have held onto their trust lands. Spread across the Western U.S. land grid, trust lands are often unseen, landlocked, and anonymous on the landscape.
Primary and secondary schools, or K-12 schools, were the greatest beneficiaries by far, followed by institutions of higher education. What remains of them today are referred to as trust lands. โA perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the Beneficiaries and future generationsโ is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.
Higher education grants were earmarked for universities, teachers colleges, mining schools, scientific schools, and agricultural colleges, the latter being the means through which states that joined the Union after 1862 got their Morrill Act shares. States could separate or consolidate their benefits as they saw fit, which resulted in many grants becoming attached to Morrill Act colleges.
Originally, the land was intended to be sold to raise capital for trust funds. By the late 19th century, however, stricter requirements on sales and a more conscientious pursuit of long-term gains reduced sales in favor of short-term leasing.
The change in management strategy paid off. Many state land trusts have been operating for more than a century. In that time, they have generated rents from agriculture, grazing, and recreation. As soon as they were able, managers moved into natural resource extraction, permitting oil wells, logging, mining, and fracking.
Land use decisions are typically made by state land agencies or lawmakers. Of the six land-grant institutions that responded to requests for comment on this investigation, those that referenced their trust lands deferred to state agencies, making clear that they had no control over permitted activities.
Credit: Grist
State agencies likewise receive and distribute the income. As money comes in, it is either delivered directly to beneficiaries or, more commonly, diverted to permanent state trust funds, which invest the proceeds and make scheduled payouts to support select public services and institutions.
These trusts have a fiduciary obligation to generate profit for institutions, not minimize environmental damage. Although some of the permitted activities are renewable and low-impact, others are quietly stripping the land. All of them fill public coffers with proceeds derived from ill-gotten resources.
For a $10 fee last December, anyone in New Mexico could chop down a Christmas tree in a pine stand on a patch of state trust land just off Highway 120 near Black Lake, southeast of Taos. The rules: Pay your fee, bring your permit, choose a tree, and leave nothing behind but a stump less than 6 inches high.
โThe holidays are a time we should be enjoying our loved ones, not worrying about the cost of providing a memorable experience for our kids,โ said Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, adding that โthe nominal fee it costs for a permit will directly benefit New Mexico public schools, so it supports a good cause too.โ The offer has been popular enough to keep the program running for several years.
The New Mexico State Land Office, sometimes described by state legislators as โthe most powerful office youโve never heard of,โ has been a successful operation for a very long time. Since it started reporting revenue in 1900, itโs generated well over $42 billion in 2023 dollars.
All that money isnโt from Christmas trees.
For generations, oil and gas royalties have fueled the stateโs trust land revenue, with a portion of the funds designated for New Mexico State University, or NMSU, a land-grant school founded in 1888 when New Mexico was still a territory.
New Mexico State University, as seen in an aerial view, is a land-grant school founded in 1888. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
The oil comes from drilling in the northwestern fringe of the Permian Basin, one of the oldest targets of large-scale oil production in the United States. Corporate descendants of Standard Oil, the infamous monopoly controlled by John D. Rockefeller, were operating in the Permian as early as the 1920s. Despite being a consistent source of oil, prospects for exploitation dimmed by the late 20th century, before surging again in the 21st. Today, itโs more profitable than ever.
In recent decades, more sophisticated exploration techniques have revealed more โrecoverableโ fossil fuel in the Permian than previously believed. A 2018 report by the United States Geological Survey pegged the volume at 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which made the Permian the largest oil and gas deposit in the nation. Analysts, shocked at the sheer volume, and the money to be made, have taken to crowningthe Permian the โKing of Shale Oil.โ Critics concerned with the climate impact of the expanding operations call it a โcarbon bomb.โ
As oil and gas extraction spiked, so did New Mexicoโs trust land receipts. In the last 20 years, oil and gas has generated between 91 and 97 percent of annual trust land revenue. It broke annual all-time highs in half of those years, topping $1 billion for the first time in 2019 and reaching $2.75 billion last year. Adjusted for inflation, more than 20 percent of New Mexicoโs trust land income since 1900 has arrived in just the last five years.
โEvery dollar earned by the Land Office,โ Commissioner Richard said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, โis a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.โ
Credit: Grist
Trust land as a cost-free source of subsidies for citizens is a common framing. In 2023, Richard declared that her office had saved every New Mexico taxpayer $1,500 that year. The press release did not mention oil or gas, or Apache bands in the state.
Virtually all of the trust land in New Mexico, including 186,000 surface acres and 253,000 subsurface acres now benefiting NMSU, was seized from various Apache bands during the so-called Apache Wars. Often reduced to the iconic photograph of Geronimo on one knee, rifle in hand, hostilities began in 1849, and they remain the longest-running military conflict in U.S. history, continuing until 1924.
In 2019, newly elected New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham began aligning state policy with โscientific consensus around climate change.โ According to the stateโs climate action website, New Mexico is working to tackle climate change by transitioning to clean electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, supporting an economic transition from coal to clean energy, and shoring up natural resource resilience.
โNew Mexico is serious about climate change โ and we have to be. We are already seeing drier weather and rising temperatures,โ the governor wrote on the stateโs website. โThis administration is committed not only to preventing global warming, but also preparing for its effects today and into the future.โ
No mention was made of increasingly profitable oil and gas extraction on trust lands or their production in the Permian. In 2023, just one 240-acre parcel of land benefiting NMSU was leased for five years for $6 million.
NMSU did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
More than half of the acreage uncovered in our investigation appears in oil-rich West Texas, the equivalent of more than 3 million football fields. It benefits Texas A&M.
Take the long drive west along I-10 between San Antonio and El Paso, in the southwest region of the Permian Basin, and youโll pass straight through several of those densely packed parcels without ever knowing it โ theyโre hidden in plain sight on the arid landscape. These tracts, and others not far from the highway, were Mescalero Apache territory. Kiowas and Comanches relinquished more parcels farther north.
A flare glows on a land-grant parcel in Pyote, Texas, associated with Texas A&M. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
In the years after the Civil War, a โpeace commissionโ pressured Comanche and Kiowa leaders for an agreement that would secure land for tribes in northern Texas and Oklahoma. Within two years, federal agents dramatically reduced the size of the resulting reservation with another treaty, triggering a decade of conflict.
The consequences were disastrous. Kiowas and Comanches lost their land to Texas and their populations collapsed. Between the 1850s and 1890s, Kiowas lost more than 60 percent of their people to disease and war, while Comanches lost nearly 90 percent.
If this general pattern of colonization and genocide was a common one, the trajectory that resulted in Texas A&Mโs enormous state land trust was not.
Texas was never part of the U.S. public domain. Its brief stint as an independent nation enabled it to enter the Union as a state, skipping territorial status completely. As a result, like the original 13 states, it claimed rights to sell or otherwise distribute all the not-yet-privatized land within its borders.
Following the broader national model, but ratcheting up the scale, Texas would allocate over 2 million acres to subsidize higher education.
Texas A&M was established to take advantage of a Morrill Act allocation of 180,000 acres, and opened its doors in 1876. The same year, Texas allocated a million acres of trust lands, followed by another million in 1883, nearly all of it on land relinquished in treaties from the mid-1860s.
Today, the Permanent University Fund derived from that land is worth nearly $34 billion. Thatโs thanks to oil, of course, which has been flowing from the universityโs trust lands since 1923. In 2022 alone, Texas trust lands produced $2.2 billion in revenue.
The Kiowa and Comanche were ultimately paid about 2 cents per acre for their land. The Mescalero Apache received nothing.
Texas A&M did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
For more than a century, logging has been the main driver of Washington State Universityโs trust land income, on land taken from 21 Indigenous nations, especially the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. About 86,000 acres, more than half of the surface trust lands allocated to Washington State University, or WSU, are located inside Yakama land cessions, which started in 1855. Between 2018 and 2022, trust lands produced nearly $78.5 million in revenue almost entirely from timber.
But it isnโt a straight line to the universityโs bank account.
โThe university does not receive the proceeds from timber sales directly,โ said Phil Weiler, a spokesperson for WSU. โLands held in trust for the university are managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, not WSU.โ
In 2022, WSUโs trust lands produced about $19.5 million in revenue, which was deposited into a fund managed by the State Investment Board. In other words, the state takes on the management responsibility of turning timber into investments, while WSU reaps the rewards by drawing income from the resulting trust funds.
โThe Washington legislature decides how much of the investment earnings will be paid out to Washington State University each biennium,โ said Weiler. โBy law, those payouts can only be used to fund capital projects and debt service.โ
This arrangement yielded nearly $97 million dollars for WSU from its two main trust funds between 2018 and 2022, and has generally been on the rise since the Great Recession. In recent decades, the money has gone to construction and maintenance of the institutionโs infrastructure, like its Biomedical and Health Sciences building, and the PACCAR Clean Technology Building โ a research center focused on innovating wood products and sustainable design.
That revenue may look small in comparison to WSUโs $1.2 billion dollar endowment, but it has added up over time. From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands provided Washington State University with roughly $1 billion in revenue when Grist adjusted for inflation. But those figures are likely higher: Between 1971 and 1983, the State of Washington did not produce detailed records on trust land revenue as a cost-cutting measure.
Meanwhile, WSU students have demanded that the university divest from fossil fuel companies held in the endowment. But even if the board of regents agreed, any changes would likely not apply to the schoolโs state-controlled trust fund, which currently contains shares in ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and at least two dozen other corporations in the oil and gas sector.
โWashington State University (WSU) is aware that our campuses are located on the homelands of Native peoples and that the institution receives financial benefit from trust lands,โ said Weiler.
In states with trust lands, a reasonably comfortable buffer exists between beneficiaries, legislators, land managers, and investment boards, but that hasnโt always been the case. In Minnesotaโs early days, state leaders founded the University of Minnesota while also making policy that would benefit the school, binding the stateโs history of genocide with the institution.
Those actions still impact Indigenous peoples in the state today while providing steady revenue streams to the University.
Henry Sibley began to amass his fortune around 1834 after only a few years in the fur trade in the territory of what would become Minnesota, rising to the role of regional manager of the American Fur Company at just 23. But even then, the industry was on the decline โ wild game had been over-hunted and competition was fierce. Sibley responded by diversifying his activities. He moved into timber, making exclusive agreements with the Ojibwe to log along the Snake and Upper St. Croix rivers.
His years in โwild Indian countryโ were paying off: Sibley knew the land, waterways, and resources of the Great Lakes region, and he knew the people, even marrying Tahshinaohindaway, also known as Red Blanket Woman, in 1840 โ a Mdewakanton Dakota woman from Black Dog Village in what is now southern Minneapolis.
Sibley was a major figure in a number of treaty negotiations, aiding the U.S. in its western expansion, opening what is now Minnesota to settlement by removing tribes. In 1848, he became the first congressional delegate for the Wisconsin Territory, which covered much of present-day Minnesota, and eventually, Minnesotaโs first governor.
But he was also a founding regent of the University of Minnesota โ using his personal, political, and industry knowledge of the region to choose federal, state, and private lands for the university. Sibley and other regents used the institution as a shel corporation to speculate and move money between companies they held shares in.
n 1851, Sibley helped introduce land-grant legislation for the purpose of a territorial university, and just three days after Congress passed the bill, Minnesotaโs territorial leaders established the University of Minnesota. With an eye on statehood, leaders knew more land would be granted for higher education, but first the land had to be made available.
That same year, with the help of then-territorial governor and fellow university regent Alexander Ramsey, the Dakota signed the Treaty of Traverse De Sioux, a land cession that created almost half of the state of Minnesota, and, taken with other cessions, would later net the University nearly 187,000 acres of land โ an area roughly the size of Tucson.
Among the many clauses in the treaty was payment: $1.4 million would be given to the Dakota, but only after expenses. Ramsey deducted $35,000 for a handling fee, about $1.4 million in todayโs dollars. After agencies and politicians had taken their cuts, the Dakota were promised only $350,000, but ultimately, only a few thousand arrived after federal agents delayed and withheld payments or substituted them for supplies that were never delivered.
The betrayal led to the Dakota War of 1862. โThe Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state,โ said Governor Ramsey. Sibley joined in the slaughter, leading an army of volunteers dedicated to the genocide of the Dakota people. At the end of the conflict, Ramsey ordered the mass execution of more than 300 Dakota men in December of 1862 โ a number later reduced by then-president Abraham Lincoln to 39, and still the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
That grisly punctuation mark at the end of the war meant a windfall for the University of Minnesota, with new lands being opened through the stateโs enabling act and another federal grant that had just been passed: the Morrill Act. Within weeks of the mass execution, the university was reaping benefits thanks to the political, and military, power of Sibley and the board of regents.
Between 2018 and 2022, those lands produced more than $17 million in revenue, primarily through leases for the mining of iron and taconite, a low-grade iron ore used by the steel industry. But like other states that rely on investment funds and trusts to generate additional income, those royalties are only the first step in the institutionโs financial investments.
Today, Sibley, Ramsey, and other regents are still honored. Their names adorn parks, counties, and streets, their homes memorialized for future generations. While there have been efforts to remove their names from schools and parks, Minnesota, its institutions, and many of its citizens continue to benefit from their actions.
Less than half of the universities featured in this story responded to requests for comment, and the National Association of State Trust Lands, the nonprofit consortium that represents trust land agencies and administrators, declined to comment. Those that did, however, highlighted the steps they were making to engage with Indigenous students and communities.
Still, investments in Indigenous communities are slow coming. Of the universities that responded to our requests, those that directly referenced how trust lands were used maintained they had no control over how they profited from the land.
And theyโre correct, to some degree: States managing assets for land-grants have fiduciary, and legal, obligations to act in the institutionโs best interests.
But that could give land-grant universities a right to ask why maximizing returns doesnโt factor in the value of righting past wrongs or the costs of climate change.
โWe can know very well that these things are happening and that weโre part of the problem, but our desire for continuity and certainty and security override that knowledge,โ said Sharon Stein of the University of British Columbia.
That knowledge, Stein added, is easily eclipsed by investments in colonialism that obscure university complicity and dismiss that change is possible.
Though itโs a complicated and arduous process changing laws and working with state agencies, universities regularly do it. In 2022, the 14 land-grant universities profiled in this story spent a combined $4.6 million on lobbying on issues ranging from agriculture to defense. All lobbied to influence the federal budget and appropriations.
But even if those high-level actions are taken, itโs not clear how it will make a difference to people like Alina Sierra in Tucson, who faces a rocky financial future after her departure from the University of Arizona.
In 2022, a national study on college affordability found that nearly 40 percent of Native students accrued more than $10,000 in college debt, with some accumulating more than $100,000 in loans. Sierra is still in debt to UArizona for more than $6,000.
โI think that being on Oโodham land, they should give back, because itโs stolen land,โ said Sierra. โThey should put more into helping us.โ
In January, Sierra enrolled as a full-time student at Tohono Oโodham Community College in Sells, Arizona โ a tribal university on her homelands. The full cost of attendance, from tuition to fees to books, is free.
The college receives no benefits from state trust lands.
CREDITS
This story was reported and written by Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee, Amanda Tachine, An Garagiola, and Audrianna Goodwin. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose and Clayton Aldern, with additional data analysis and visualization by Marcelle Bonterre and Parker Ziegler. Margaret Pearce provided guidance and oversight.
Original photography for this project was done by Eliseu Cavalcante and Bean Yazzie. Parker Ziegler handled design and development. Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Marty Two Bulls Jr. and Mia Torres provided illustration. Megan Merrigan, Justin Ray, and Mignon Khargie handled promotion. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.
This project was edited by Katherine Lanpher and Katherine Bagley. Jaime Buerger managed production. Angely Mercado did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the projectโs data.
Special thanks to Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Jon Parmenter, Susan Shain, and Tushar Khurana for their additional research contributions. We would also like to thank the many state officials who helped to ensure we acquired the most recent and accurate information for this story. This story was made possible in part by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.
The Misplaced Trust team acknowledges the Tohono Oโodham, Pascua Yaqui, dxสทdษwสabลก, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, puyalษpabลก, Tulalip, Muwekma Ohlone, Lisjan, Tongva, Kizh, Dakota, Bodwรฉwadmi, Quinnipiac, Monongahela, Shawnee, Lenape, Erie, Osage, Akimel Oโodham, Piipaash, Oฤhรฉthi ล akรณwiล, Dinรฉ, Kanienสผkehรก:ka, Muh-he-con-ne-ok, Pฮฑnawฮฌhpskewi, and Mvskoke peoples, on whose homelands this story was created.
The amount of acreage under management for land-grant universities varies widely, from as little as 15,000 acres aboveground in North Dakota to more than 2.1 million belowground in Texas. Combined, Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.7 million in todayโs dollars for these lands, but in many cases, nothing was paid at all. In 2022 alone, these trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion for their schools. Between 2018 and 2022, the lands produced almost $6.7 billion. However, those figures are likely an undercount as multiple state agencies did not return requests to confirm amounts.
Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality acknowledges years of built-up pollution from Moneta Divide field but has no plan to remove black sludge 6 feet deep
Two creeks tainted by decades of dumping from Moneta Divide oilfield drillers are officially โimpairedโ and unable to sustain aquatic life, state regulators say in a new report.
Parts of Alkali and Badwater creeks in Fremont County are polluted to the point they donโt meet standards for drinking, consumption of resident fish or sustaining aquatic life, a report by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality states. The agency listed 40.8 miles of the creeks as impaired in aย biannual reportย required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The project is being developed by Aethon Energy Management and Burlington Resources Oil and Gas Company. Aethon Energy Management and its partner RedBird Capital Partners acquired the Moneta Divide assets from Encana Oil and Gas in May 2015. The environment impact assessment (EIA) process of the Moneta Divide field was commenced in 2011, while the final environmental impact statement (EIS) and resource management plan (RMP) for the project were released in February 2020. Photo credit: NS Energy
Parts of the creeks are polluted by oilfield discharges, including hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and chloride. The industrial activity is responsible for low levels of oxygen in the water, turbidity and a black sludge that critics say is up to 6 feet deep.
Arsenic also is present, but state monitoring couldnโt determine its origin.
The report catalogs pollution downstream of discharge points where produced water โ effluent from natural gas and oil production โ flows from the 327,645-acre energy field operated mainly by Aethon Energy Operating in Fremont and Natrona counties.
The โimpairedโ listings are a good thing that set the table for action, said Jill Morrison, who works on the pollution issue for the conservation group Powder River Basin Resource Council. But the listing comes only after years of badgering an agency that now should look to clean up the creeks.
โWhat we are saying is โthank youโ for stepping up to address these issues,โ Morrison said. โWe wish it was done sooner. Youโve got enforcement power; what steps are you taking to make Aethon clean this up?โ
Wyoming rivers map via Geology.com
Environmental stewards
The DEQ issued a revised permit to the private Dallas company in 2020 allowing it to discharge oilfield waste into Alkali Creek, which flows into Badwater Creek and the Boysen Reservoir, a source of drinking water for the town of Thermopolis. The permit calls for monitoring and testing, among other things.
About a year ago, however, the DEQ sent the company a letter of violation for โreoccurring exceedancesโ of water quality standards for sulfide, barium, radium and temperature. Thatโs a violation of the Wyoming Environmental Quality Act, state rules and regulations, and the permit itself.
The April 28 letter states that the DEQ hopes to resolve the violation through โconference and conciliation.โ DEQ wants Aethon โto show good faith efforts toward resolving the problem and to prevent the need for more formal enforcement action by this office.โ
The alleged kid-glove treatment rankles Powder Riverโs Morrison. โThey trade, back and forth, nice conversations and nothing happens,โ she said.
An Aethon pump jack in the Moneta Divide oil and gas field east of Shoshoni. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr./WyoFile)
DEQ asked Aethon for a response within 30 days. WyoFile requested on March 6 that the agency provide a copy of Aethonโs response but had not received it by publication time. Aethon typically does not respond to media questions regarding regulatory enforcement and did not answer a recent request for comment.
The 2020 permit also requires Aethon to dramatically reduce the amount of chloride โ salty water โ it pumps onto the landscape. DEQ said the company is preparing to meet a late-summer deadline for that standard.
โAethon continues to diligently work toward resuming treatment of effluent using the Neptune reverse osmosis treatment plant,โ DEQ said in an email, โin accordance with the established chloride compliance schedule.โ
Aethonโs website says the company has a โcommitment to protect the environment and our people [and] operate responsibly.โ The company is a โsteward of the environment,โ the website states.
Black sludge
The DEQโs โimpairedโ listing addresses surface water in the two creeks through whatโs known as a draft Integrated 305 (b) report. It is open for comments through March 25.
But thereโs another issue that rankles critics, including the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the Powder River group โ black sludge.
DEQ surveys of the creeks revealed โbottom depositsโ containing mineral deposits, iron sulfides and dissolved solids, all contributing to low oxygen levels that kill aquatic life. After a phone conference with DEQ in February, Powder Riverโs Morrison said she learned that the bottom deposit of black sludge extends for about three miles and is from 6 inches to 6 feet deep.
A retired University of Wyoming professor who worked with the Powder River group analyzing Aethonโs permit called the sediments โtotally loaded.โ Harold Bergman said โthat contaminated sediment will be leaching out contaminants into Boysen Reservoir for decades to come.โ
He and Joe Meyer, a retired chemist who also worked with the conservation group, wrote that DEQโs Aethon permit did not require enough testing for deleterious substances, did not consider what impact the mix of substances together has on aquatic life, and allowed as much as five times the proper amount of dissolved solids to flow out of the oilfield.
โYou would not have that black gunk sediment if it werenโt for the Aethon discharge,โ Meyer said.
A report of monitoring between 2019-โ22 shows that aluminum exceeded discharge standards up to 17% of the time. Other than that, thereโs still a question of what else is in the sludge.
This image of Alkali Creek shows flows downstream of the Frenchie Draw oil and gas field discharge point in October 2021, according to the image title. The Powder River Basin Resource Council obtained this and other public records through a request to Wyoming DEQ. (DEQ)
โWe donโt know about individual organic chemicals,โ Meyer said. Reports only mention โthe gross measures of organic compounds,โ he said.
โThat doesnโt tell us about individual chemicals,โ Meyer said. How much, if any, BTEX chemicals โ Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene and Xylenes that are harmful to humans โ are in the sludge โwe have no way of knowing.โ
He stopped short of accusing DEQ of avoiding the question. For now, โthey just wanted to get an overview analysis,โ he said.
DEQ said it has a plan for the sludge. โDEQโs Water Quality Division is monitoring any sediment flow in lower Badwater Creek to determine if there are any sediments that may mobilize towards Boysen Lake,โ an agency official said in an email.
For Morrison, โthe big question is what DEQ is going to require Aethon to do to clean up this mess,โ she wrote in an email. Meyer and Bergman say simply dredging up the sludge is likely too dangerous because such an operation would dislodge substances and send them downstream. A more complex plan would be needed, they said.
Morrison criticized what she sees as the DEQโs priorities. โTheyโre not putting the health and safety of these streamsโ water quality, fish and downstream water users above the interests and profits of Aethon.โ
The shiny new cold-weather air source heat pump installed during summer 2023 at Coyote Gulch Manor.
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Alison F. Takemura):
Installing a heat pump now is better for the climate, even if it’s run on U.S. electricity generated mostly by fossil fuels. Hereโs why.
March 17, 2024
This story was originally published by Canary Media.
You might consider heat pumps to be a tantalizing climate solution (they are) and one you could adopt yourself (plenty have). But perhaps youโve held off on getting one, wondering how much of a difference they really make if a dirty grid is supplying the electricity youโre using to power them โ that is, a grid whose electricity is generated at least in part by fossil gas, coal, or oil.
Thatโs certainly the case for most U.S. households: While the grid mix is improving, itโs still far from clean. In 2023, renewable energy sources provided just 21 percent of U.S. electricity generation, with carbon-free nuclear energy coming in at 19 percent. The other 60 percent of power came from burning fossil fuels.
So do electric heat pumps really lower emissions if they run on dirty gridย power?
The answer is an emphatic yes. Even on a carbon-heavy diet, heat pumps eliminate tons of emissions annually compared to other heating systems.
The latest study to hammer this point home was published in Joule last month by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The team modeled the entire U.S. housing stock and found that, over the applianceโs expected lifetime of 16 years, switching to a heat-pump heater/โAC slashes emissions in every one of the contiguous 48 states.
In fact, heat pumps reduce carbon pollution even if the process of cleaning up the U.S. grid moves slower than experts expect. Theย NRELย team used six different future scenarios for the grid, from aggressiveย decarbonizationย (95ย percent carbon-free electricity byย 2035) to sluggish (onlyย 50ย percent carbon-free electricity byย 2035, in the event that renewables wind up costing more than their current trajectories forecast). They found that depending on the scenario and level of efficiency, heat pumps lower household annual energy emissions on average byย 36 percent toย 64 percent โ orย 2.5ย toย 4.4ย metric tons ofย CO2ย equivalent per year per housing unit.
Thatโs aย staggering amount of emissions. For context, preventingย 2.5ย metric tons ofย CO2ย emissionsย is equivalent toย not burningย 2,800ย pounds of coal. Or not driving for half aย year. Or switchingย to aย vegan dietย forย 14ย months. And at the high end of the studyโs range,ย 4.4ย metric tons ofย CO2ย is almost equivalent to the emissions from aย roundtrip flight from New York City to Tokyo (4.6ย metric tons).
Eric Wilson, senior research engineer at NREL and lead author of the study, told me, โโI often hear people saying, โโOh, you should wait to put in a heat pump because the grid is still dirty.โโ But thatโs faulty logic. โโItโs better to switch now rather than later โ and not lock in another 20 years of a gas furnace or boiler.โ
Emissions savings tend to be higher in states with colder winters and heaters that run on fuel oil, such as Maine, according to the study. (Maine seems to be one step ahead of the researchers: Heat pumps have proven so popular there that the state already blew past its heat-pump adoption goal two years ahead of schedule.)
A dirty grid, then, doesnโt cancel out a heat pumpโs climate benefits. But heat pumps can generate emissions in the same way standard ACs do: by leaking refrigerant, the chemicals that enable these appliances to move around heat. Though itโs being phased down, the HVAC standard refrigerant R-410A is 2,088 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, so even small leaks have an outsize impact.
Added emissions from heat-pump refrigerant leaks barely make aย dent, however, given the emissions heat pumps avoid, theย NRELย team found. Typical leakage rates of R-410A increase emissions on average by onlyย 0.07ย metric tons ofย CO2ย equivalent per year, shaving the overall savings ofย 2.5ย metric tons by justย 3ย percent, Wilson said.
A 2023 analysis from climate think tank RMI further backs up heat pumpsโ climate bona fides. Across the 48 continental states, RMI found that replacing a gas furnace with an efficient heat pump saves emissions not only cumulatively across the applianceโs lifetime, but also in the very first year itโs installed. RMI estimated that emissions prevented in that first year were 13 percent to 72 percent relative to gas-furnace emissions, depending on the state. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
Both the RMI and NREL studies focused on air-source heat pumps, which, in cold weather, pull heat from the outdoor air and can be three to four times as efficient as gas furnaces. But ground-source heat pumps can be more than five times as efficient compared to gas furnaces โ and thus unlock even greater greenhouse-gas reductions, according to RMI.
How much could switching to aย heat pump lowerย yourย homeโs carbon emissions? For aย high-level estimate,ย NRELย put outย an interactive dashboard. In theย โโstatesโ tab, you can filter down to your state, building type and heating fuel. For instance, based on aย scenario of moderate grid decarbonization in my state of Colorado, aย single-family home that swaps out aย gas furnace for aย heat pump could slash emissions by aย whoppingย 6ย metric tons ofย CO2.
One final takeaway Wilson shared: If every American home with gas, oil, or inefficient electric-resistance heating were to swap it right now for heat-pump heating, the emissions of the entire U.S. economy would shrink by 5 percent to 9 percent. Thatโs how powerful a decarbonizing tool heat pumps are.
Natural gas flares near a community in Colorado. Colorado health officials and some legislators agree that better monitoring is necessary. Photo credit the Environmental Defense Fund.
Click the link to access the article on the Nature website (Evan D. Sherwin, Jeffrey S. Rutherford, Zhan Zhang, Yuanlei Chen, Erin B. Wetherley, Petr V. Yakovlev, Elena S. F. Berman, Brian B. Jones, Daniel H. Cusworth, Andrew K. Thorpe, Alana K. Ayasse, Riley M. Duren, & Adam R. Brandt). Here’s an excerpt:
As airborne methane surveys of oil and gas systems continue to discover large emissions that are missing from official estimates, the true scope of methane emissions from energy production has yet to be quantified. We integrate approximately one million aerial site measurements into regional emissions inventories for six regions in the USA, comprising 52% of onshore oil and 29% of gas production over 15โaerial campaigns. We construct complete emissions distributions for each, employing empirically grounded simulations to estimate small emissions. Total estimated emissions range from 0.75% (95% confidence interval (CI)โ0.65%, 0.84%) of covered natural gas production in a high-productivity, gas-rich region to 9.63% (95% CI 9.04%, 10.39%) in a rapidly expanding, oil-focused region. The six-region weighted average is 2.95% (95 % CI 2.79%, 3.14%), or roughly three times the national government inventory estimate. Only 0.05โ1.66% of well sites contribute the majority (50โ79%) of well site emissions in 11 out of 15โsurveys. Ancillary midstream facilities, including pipelines, contribute 18โ57% of estimated regional emissions, similarly concentrated in a small number of point sources. Together, the emissions quantified here represent an annual loss of roughly US$1โbillion in commercial gas value and a US$9.3โbillion annual social cost. Repeated, comprehensive, regional remote-sensing surveys offer a path to detect these low-frequency, high-consequence emissions for rapid mitigation, incorporation into official emissions inventories and a clear-eyed assessment of the most effective emission-finding technologies for a given region.
Happy Agricultural Census time! Last week, the USDA released the 2022 Census of Agriculture โ a once-every-five-year event โ and, as always, itโs chock full of data on the state of the nationโs farming. I like to peruse the numbers and compare them to those from previous censuses to try to get a sense of how the Westโs agricultural landscape is changing, and to get answers to questions like: How are farmers responding to aridification? Is residential development really gobbling up all the farmland?
The report only offers numbers, without a lot of context. So drawing firm conclusions isnโt possible. But the data are interesting, and sometimes enlightening, nonetheless. Letโs start with an overview:
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
I gotta say, I had to double- then triple-check the numbers on this one. New Mexico has way more farmed acres than California โ Say what!? But yeah, they do. Keep in mind that this is not cropland, but farm land, which can include sprawling ranches and just land that someone is calling agricultural for tax reasons. So take it with a grain of salt. Farm acreage is decreasing in all the states, which is hardly surprising.
But before you freak out about the death of American farming, consider this: The total number of farms has increased everywhere since 1997 except in California.
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Other data suggest that small farms are making a big comeback, especially in Colorado (though there was a slight dip in farm numbers between 2017 and 2022).
Now letโs look at alfalfa, since hay is not only fodder for horses but also for fighting over these days, especially in the Colorado River Basin. We hear a lot about how much water alfalfa uses and about how the federal government is paying farmers in the Lower Colorado River Basin not to grow the stuff. And so, one might expect to see a big drop in alfalfa production in those places.
That didnโt happen. In fact, several places produced significantly more alfalfa in 2022 than in 2017. It seems weird, but there are a few things to consider. First, even though the Colorado River Crisis was well under way by 2022, most of the programs paying farmers to stop farming hadnโt yet kicked in in 2022. Also, farmers arenโt really being paid to stop farming or plow up their crops. Theyโre being paid to use less water. Or, another way to look at it: The feds are leasing the farmersโ water from them in order to keep it in the reservoirs. Which means farmers can keep growing if they want; they just canโt irrigate as much. And alfalfa, it turns out, is fairlyย drought tolerant, unlike, say, almonds or lettuce or broccoli. So it makes some sense to see alfalfa production hold steady or even climb during a drought.
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Once again, Imperial County, California, is the Westโs biggest alfalfa producer. And the Imperial Irrigation District remains the largest single water user on the Colorado River. Maricopa County, Arizona, is in second place for alfalfa tonnage, which just goes to show that Phoenix sprawl may be gobbling up farm- and desert-land, but the hayfields endure (and Maricopa County is ginormous). And alfalfa production increased substantially between 2017 and 2022 in those places, though it fell in most of the other counties surveyed.
And hereโs something else that doesnโt show up on the graph: Eddy County, New Mexicoโs alfalfa acreage and production fell by more than 50% between 1997 and 2022. I donโt know the reason, but I wouldnโt be surprised if it had to do with the Permian Basin oil and gas drilling boom, some of which surely is taking place on farmland. Just a guess. It also might have to do with ongoing drought, I suppose.
Of course, most of that alfalfa is going to feed livestock, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. And a surprisingly (for me, at least) large percentage of that livestock in the West are dairy cattle. So eschewing beef, alone, in order to save water ainโt gonna be enough. You gotta ditch the whole enchilada, cheese and all! (Ainโt happening).
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
California, especially Tulare and Merced Counties, is dairy country. The state is home to nearly 1.7 million dairy cattle. Idaho runs a distant second for the West, with a mere 664,000. Nearly a half-million dairy cattle call New Mexico home, while Maricopa County has about 103,000 dairy cows. Montana is the Westโs beef-cow leader, with California, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico rounding out the top five, in that order. Weld County, Colorado, (home of the Greeley stench) is the beefiest county in the West, with Fresno, Kern, and Tulare in California up there, too.
$36 million; $14 million; $45 million: Amount spent in 2018 on energy for on-farm irrigation-pumping in the Rio Grande; Upper Colorado; and Lower Colorado watersheds, respectively.
626,000; 1.4 million Acres of almond orchards in California in 2002 and 2022, respectively. (Aridification ainโt keeping these water hogs at bay, apparently!)
546; 1176 Number of farms in Colorado harvesting vegetables for sale in 1997; 2022, respectively. (A small-farm/farmers market revolution?)
$671,000; $2 million Average value of a Colorado farmโs land and buildings in 1997; 2022, respectively (That amounts to $618/acre then vs. $2,401/acre now, meaning itโs a lot more expensive to get into farming these days if you donโt already have any land).
37; 105 Number of farms in Nevada harvesting vegetables for sale in 1997; 2022, respectively.
85,446; 58,831ย Acres of potatoes harvested in Colorado in 1997; 2022, respectively.ย (Thatโs a big drop. I plan to look into this one a bit more in a future dispatch).
2,038,456; 606,105cwt (approx. 100 lbs) of dry beans harvested in Colorado in 1997; 2022, respectively (Ack! Whatโs going on?!)
6.8 million; 9.4 million Bushels of corn produced in Arizona in 1997; 2022, respectively. (Another counterintuitive one. Warrants further investigation!)
860,000; 313,000 Bales of cotton harvested in Arizona in 1997; 2022, respectively.
73,603; 58,492 Acres of land in orchards in Arizona in 1997; 2022, respectively. (Those citrus groves have been displaced by subdivisions, Iโm afraid).
2.7 million; 4.1 million Acres of land in orchards in California in 1997; 2022, respectively. (Wow! A lot of these acres are planted with almonds, surely.)
2.6 million; 1.8 million Number of hogs and pigs sold by Utah operations in 2012; 2022, respectively. (Yes, Utah is hog-farm central. Smithfield Foods contracts with a bunch of factory hog farming operations in Beaver County. They are cutting back operations, however.)
And the most heartbreaking data point? Dove Creek isnโt even close to being the Pinto Bean Capital of the World anymore. Hell, itโs not even the bean capital of Colorado. Dolores and Montezuma Counties together produced about 25,000 cwt of dried beans in 2022. Yuma County, Colorado, harvested 270,000 cwt. Okay, granted, thatโs for alldry beans, not just pintos (the census doesnโt break them out by variety). Still โฆ How the mighty have fallen!
Are you curious about specific ag stats for your county or state? Drop the Land Desk a line or put your question in the comments below and weโll try to track down an answer.
Golf course at Page, Arizona, with Glen Canyon Dam and the diminished Lake Powell in the background. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
In recent weeks I’ve written a piece or Two about Alfalfa. My thesis: As the biggest single water user in the Colorado River Basin, the crop must plan an equally large role in contributing two the cuts necessary to keep the river from drying out. I know, it doesn’t seem like a hot-button topic. I mean, it’s just hay, after all.
This cool map by the Grand Canyon Trustโs Stephanie Smith shows how these projects usually work and gives a sense of scale and impacts. Source: Grand Canyon Trust.
When I wrote earlier this week that federal regulators hadย nixed all of the still active proposals for pumped hydropower energy storage facilities on the Navajo Nation, I overlooked one: the proposed Big Canyon Pumped Storage Project on a tributary of the Little Colorado River. Seems that when the Phoenix-based companyย surrendered permitsย for two other Little Colorado projects back in 2021, it kept a third proposal alive. Since I hadnโt heard anything about it, I had assumed it had simply faded away. Not quite.ย
Confluence of the Little Colorado River and the Colorado River. Climate change is affecting western streams by diminishing snowpack and accelerating evaporation. The Colorado Riverโs flows and reservoirs are being impacted by climate change, and environmental groups are concerned about the status of the native fish in the river. Photo credit: DMY at Hebrew Wikipedia [Public domain]
This week FERC issued a notice seeking public input on the Pumped Hydro Storageโs application for a preliminary permit for the project, which would be located on Navajo Nation lands.
So why didnโt FERC reject this project like it did the other proposals? Because back in 2020, when the application was initially submitted, the tribe intervened in the case, but didnโt express outright opposition. Now they have the chance to do so, which presumably would result in the permitโs rejection per FERCโs new policy.ย The Hopi Tribe has alsoย weighed in on FERC policyย and these projects.
Gov. Mark Gordon spoke with Advance Casper members Feb. 13 2024 in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Dustin Bleizeffer):
February 14, 2024
Governor Mark Gordonโs push for carbon capture at coal-fired power plants and for pumping planet-warming carbon dioxide underground to produce more oil isnโt a climate crusade, he told business leaders Tuesday in Casper. Itโs an acknowledgment of where policies outside Wyoming have driven markets.
Wyoming, the nationโs top coal producer and among its top oil and natural gas producers, can help meet the goal โ and the market reality โ of reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere, he said. But the state doesnโt have to abandon its fossil fuels to do it.
Instead, Gordon is on a mission to prove that integrating carbon capture with fossil fuel production and use is not only economically and technically viable, itโs necessary to fill in the energy-availability gaps that renewable energy introduces into the western electricity grid when the sun doesnโt shine and the wind doesnโt blow.
And if people are honest about the full cost and complete carbon life cycles of both renewables and fossil fuel energy, more states will get on board, he said.
Gov. Mark Gordon visits with Casper business leaders Feb. 13 2024 in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
โIf we can extend the life of these coal plants [by retrofitting them to capture carbon] for a period of time, we can meet that gap,โ Gordon told members of Advance Casper, the cityโs business and economic development group.
Gordon has been aggressively sharing his energy vision of late. He spoke last fall at Harvard University, which drew a strong rebuke from Wyomingโs far right. He also appeared on โ60 Minutes,โ where the governor discussed making the state carbon-negative.
One challenge, Gordon explained to members of Advance Casper, is that states that are demanding low-carbon or carbon-free electricity are not fairly distributing those costs, which include the loss of viewsheds and wildlife habitat from wind and solar farms in Wyoming. At the same time, those states donโt want to help pay to capture carbon at Wyoming coal plants, despite their own carbon policies that push costs onto Wyoming ratepayers.
โWe need to be able to have the grid pay for the desire to reduce carbon emissions โ thatโs consumers acrossโ the West, Gordon said.
To that end, Gordon has been lobbying his counterparts in the Western Governors Association. Gordon was elected WGA president last summer, and he established โDecarbonizing the Westโ as his signature initiative during his one-year tenure.
A sticker at Nerd Gas Co. in Casper. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
The initiative spans an all-of-the-above energy strategy, from nuclear and geothermal power to smarter siting of wind and solar development. Bringing some of those western state leaders onboard with his ideas for adding carbon capture to fossil fuels is still a challenge, Gordon said.
Meantime, the Biden administration โ although itโs onboard with Wyomingโs carbon capture research efforts โ continues to present existential threats to the stateโs struggling fossil fuel industries through restrictive rulemakings to cut carbon emissions, the governor maintains.
State of the stateโs energy
In his State of the State address on Monday at the Capitol, Gordon said the Legislatureโs task of crafting a state budget for the next two years is particularly challenging under the weight of federal policies that the Biden administration continues to pile on fossil fuels โ an industry that has โanchored our economy for over a century,โ Gordon said.
The weight of Wyomingโs fossil fuel economic anchor has varied greatly in recent years, and itโs the largest factor in setting the stateโs budget โ in boom times and in bust. Although revenue from Wyomingโs carbon-based energy industries rebounded after the economic shock of the pandemic, markets have begun to settle back into broader trends that point to aย continued decline in Wyoming coal consumptionย and the potential forย even more volatilityย for oil and natural gas.ย
Gov. Mark Gordon gives his State of the State address Feb. 12, 2024, at the Capitol in Cheyenne. (Ashton J. Hacke/WyoFile)
They also represent a federal policy agenda that is โmisguided,โ โwarpedโ and โunwiseโ โ and, borrowing from a phrase by Gulf War military leader Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, they amount to โpure, unadulterated โbovine scatology,’โ Gordon declared.
โWyoming people know how these policies have left our nation more vulnerable to put our economy โ our very way of life โ at risk,โ Gordon said.
Mauna Loa is WMO Global Atmosphere Watch benchmark station and monitors rising CO2 levels Week of 23 April 2023: 424.40 parts per million Weekly value one year ago: 420.19 ppm Weekly value 10 years ago: 399.32 ppm ๐ท http://CO2.Earthhttps://co2.earth/daily-co2. Credit: World Meteorological Organization
A first of its kind U.N. study by conservation scientists finds nearly half of internationally protected migratory species are on their way to extinction.
Humans are driving migratory animalsโsea turtles, chimpanzees, lions and penguins, among dozens of other speciesโtowards extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of migratory species ever carried out.
The State of the Worldโs Migratory Species, a first of its kind report compiled by conservation scientists under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programmeโs World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found population decline, a precursor to extinction, in nearly half of the roughly 1,200 species listed under the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), a 1979 treaty aimed at conserving species that move across international borders.
The reportโs findings dovetail with those of another authoritative U.N. assessment, the 2019ย Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, that found around 1 million of Earthโs 8 million species are at risk of extinction due to human activity. Since the 1970s, global biodiversity, the variation of life on Earth, has declined by a whopping 70 percent.
Scientists and economists use complicated models to try to predict how fast the world can transition away from fossil fuels. The Washington Post analyzed 1,200 modeled pathways for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world hitting the 1.5C target without substantially overshooting or using speculative technology (like large-scale carbon capture) that doesnโt yet exist. At this point, many experts believe that the economy is too stuck on fossil fuels to transition fast enough for 1.5 degrees.
Does that mean weโll pass catastrophic tipping points?
Arctic Ocean. Photo credit: The European Commission
Thatโs a more difficult question. Scientists donโt know exactly when certain tipping points โ like theย collapse of the Greenland ice sheetย or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost โ will occur. Itโs very hard to predict and model these types of catastrophic changes.
And 1.5C isnโt a magic threshold; itโs not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will grind to a halt. But one thing is certain: For every tenth of a degree of warming, tipping points are more likely. Two degrees is worse than 1.9 degrees, which is worse than 1.8 degrees, and so on.
And at each tenth of a degree, the infrastructure and systems that the world has built โ electric grids, homes, livelihoods โ will become more strained. Our modern world simply was not designed for temperatures this high. At some level, the final temperature of the planet isnโt what matters most. Itโs where countries can actually get carbon emissions to zero โ and stop contributing to future warming altogether.
Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Shannon Osaka). Here’s an excerpt:
Itโs official: For the past 12 months, the Earth wasย 1.5 degrees Celsius higherย than in preindustrial times, scientists said Thursday [February 8, 2024], crossing a critical barrier into temperatures never experienced by human civilizations. According to the European Unionโs Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past 12 months clocked in at a scorching 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) higher on average compared with between 1850 and 1900. At some level, thatโs not surprising โ the past 12 months have been scorching, as a warmย El Niรฑo cycleย combined with the signal ofย human-caused warmingย generated heat waves and extreme weather events around the globe.
โThis El Nino maximum is riding on top of a base climate that is continuously warming due to climate change,โ Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in an email. โThe combination of them is whatโs giving us such hot global temperatures.โ
But does this mean that the worldโs most famous climate goal is out of reach? Not … exactly. Hereโs what you need to know:
In the 2016 Paris climate agreement, almost 200 nations agreed to keep the global average temperature from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels โ and to โpursue effortsโ to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latter addition largely came from pressure from small-island states, who are at risk of disappearing under rising seas if temperatures get much higher. Scientists have shown that holding the temperature riseย to 1.5C could mean the survival of coral reefs, the preservation of Arctic sea ice and less deadly heat waves…
Does this mean we have missed the 1.5C climate goal? No. Thereโs actually someย disagreementย about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold โ but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period. Scientists estimate that without dramatic emissions reductions, that will happen sometime in theย 2030s. But there could be other single years or 12-month periods that cross the line before then.
Can we still avoid passing 1.5C? Most scientists say passing 1.5C is inevitable. โThe 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail,โ Columbia University climate scientist James Hansen said in a call with reporters late last year.
Denver, Colorado, USA – January 12, 2013: The Suncor Energy refinery in Denver, Colorado. Based in Calgary, Alberta, Suncor Energy is a Canadian oil and gas company with revenues of over 35 Billion Canadian Dollars. Photo credit: City of Boulder
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment slapped Suncor Refinery with a $10.5 million fine for air pollution violations from July 2019 through June 2021, the agency announced Monday. The Commerce City refinery must also double the number of air pollution monitors compared to the refineryโs original fenceline monitoring plan, according to the CDPHEโs largest enforcement package against a single facility. Of the $10.5 million Suncor has to pay the state, only $2.5 million of that is related to penalties it accumulated in the time period specified above and includes:
Exceeding sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides emissions limits.
Exceeding hydrogen sulfide concentration limits.
Exceeding opacity and visible emissions standards.
Failing to meet certain operating parameters.
Violations due to causes other than power disruptions.
No less than $8 million will go toward projects Suncor must complete, the CDPHE said in a news release.
