New legislation would ratify #ColoradoRiver water settlements for three #Arizona tribes — Arizona Mirror #COriver #aridification

The traditional homelands of the Navajo (Diné) are marked by four sacred mountains that stretch across modern-day Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Credit: Native Knowledge 360º

Click the link to read the article on the Arizona Mirror website (Shondin Silversmith):

July 9, 2024

A bipartisan coalition of Arizona’s congressional delegation introduced legislation to address one of the longest-running water issues facing three Arizona tribes.

The Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement (NAIWRSA) Act of 2024 would ratify and fund the largest Indian water rights settlement in the country, which will secure water rights for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.

“This legislation and the settlement it ratifies represent a historic step forward in resolving a decades-long water rights dispute, providing certainty and stability for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly said in a written statement.

Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, introduced the act in the U.S. Senate on July 8. Identical legislation was also introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, where it is cosponsored by Reps. Juan Ciscomani (R-Tucson), Raúl Grijalva (D-Tucson), Greg Stanton (D-Phoenix) and David Schweikert (R-Scottsdale).

“Our historic bipartisan legislation delivers real, lasting results for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe by strengthening water security, creating economic opportunities, and providing certainty and stability so their communities can continue to thrive,” Sinema said in a press release.

The Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement will settle the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe’s claims to the main stem of the Colorado River, the Little Colorado River, and relevant groundwater sources in Arizona.

“Securing water rights for these tribes upholds their sovereignty and lays the path for their growth and prosperity through increased investment in water infrastructure,” Kelly said. “Ratifying this settlement honors our commitment to the tribes and helps secure our state’s water future, and we’ll work together as Republicans and Democrats to get it done.”

The bill states that the legislation aims to achieve a fair, equitable and final settlement of all claims to rights to water in Arizona for the three tribal nations.

In addition to settling the tribes’ ongoing water claims in the Colorado River Basin, it includes billions in funding for essential water development and delivery projects for the tribes.

Ciscomani said in a written statement that the settlement and legislation will provide a “long-lasting partnership” between Arizona and the tribes.

“This not only gives much-needed certainty to the Tribes but allows Arizona to better plan for a secure water future while providing for improved water infrastructure throughout the region,” he said.

As part of the settlement, the three tribes would gain access to reliable and safe water for their community through various outlets, including the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River, aquifers, shared washes and water infrastructure development.

“The Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement is a monumental achievement and the product of negotiations spanning almost 30 years,” said Leslie A. Meyers, the associate general manager of water resources for the Salt River Project. “Salt River Project has participated in the negotiations from their inception.”

Meyers said SRP enthusiastically supports the bills because the settlement provides the three tribes with the desperately needed water supplies and infrastructure to secure their futures.

The water settlement authorizes $5 billion to acquire, build, and maintain essential water development and delivery projects, including a $1.75 billion distribution pipeline.

The three tribes would be guaranteed access to over 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water and specific groundwater rights and protections.

Grijalva said that the legislation deserves the full support of Congress because the settlement was the historic culmination of a decades-long effort to bring water to the three tribes.

“As the climate crisis continues to exacerbate an already devastating multigenerational drought, the federal government’s obligation to deliver clean, safe water and water infrastructure to the tribes could not be more pressing,” he said. “I urge my colleagues to move this legislation to the president’s desk quickly.”

Tribal leaders commend legislation introduction

Leaders from the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe commended the work of everyone involved in writing the settlement and introducing legislation to Congress.

Tribal councils from all three tribes initially passed bills supporting the water settlement in May. However, Congress must approve the settlement before it can go into law.

“For decades, our Navajo people have lived without piped water in their homes, with many of our elders hauling water over 30 miles roundtrip,” Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said during a press conference on Tuesday. “More than 30% of the homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water. This is unacceptable.”

Nygren said that the Navajo people are American people, and no one in America should be denied access to water because of where they live.

“This settlement ensures that the Navajo people will have rightful access to water, providing certainty for our homeland’s future and an equal opportunity for health and prosperity,” he added.

If the act passes Congress, the Navajo Nation water infrastructure it would fund will bring substantial clean, safe and reliable drinking water to Navajo communities in Arizona, according to Nygren’s office. The infrastructure will allow tens of thousands of Navajo people in Arizona to have piped water in their homes for the first time.

“It is a great opportunity here to claim what is ours as Navajo people,” Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley said Tuesday. “Water is essential to every living thing that we possess in the Navajo way.”

She said this is the first time a tribe is bringing this large of a water settlement to Congress, and she said it is unfortunate that the Navajo Nation is one of the last tribes in Arizona to bring its water settlement to a federal level.

Curley said it’s as if the Navajo Nation is going up to Congress with an empty cup and begging for both what is rightfully theirs and what they deserve.

“Without this settlement, our communities will remain disproportionately vulnerable to diseases, and development on the Reservation will continue to be restricted by the lack of water infrastructure,” she said in a press release.

Curley noted how the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Navajo Nation particularly hard due to the tribe’s lack of access to clean water and plumbing.

Through the water settlement, the Navajo Nation would gain access to 44,700 acre-feet per year of the Upper Basin Colorado River Water and 3,600 acre-feet per year of the Lower Basin Colorado River Water.

The Navajo Nation will also lease, exchange, and accrue long-term storage credits for its Arizona water as part of the settlement. The tribe could store Arizona water in two reservoirs in New Mexico and aquifers on the Navajo Navajo for later recovery.

The Navajo Nation would also be able to engage in inter-basin transfer of Colorado River water in Arizona and divert its water from New Mexico and Utah for use in Arizona. [ed. emphasis mine]

Explorer John Wesley Powell and Paiute Chief Tau-Gu looking over the Virgin River in 1873. Photo credit: NPS

The San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, which spans Arizona and Utah, will not only receive water rights from the settlement but also ratify the treaty and create their reservation boundaries.

“We are so thankful to Senator Kelly and Senator Sinema for introducing legislation that will not only provide our Tribe with water but will also ratify a treaty negotiated and entered into by the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe and the Navajo Nation decades ago,” Robbin Preston Jr., president of the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, said in a press release.

“The Tribe has waited far too long to have an exclusive reservation of its own,” Preston added. “The opportunities made available through this legislation will change the lives of our Tribal Members and the trajectory of our Tribe.”

As part of the settlement, the tribe will gain 5,400 acres of land within the Navajo Nation, which will be proclaimed the San Juan Southern Paiute Reservation. The land will be held in trust by the United States.

Preston said the settlement would provide the San Juan Southern Paiute people with reliable electricity, water, and housing.

“Our people will have opportunities that have never been available to us before,” he added. “This legislation is more than a settlement of water rights; it is the establishment of an exclusive reservation for a Tribe that will no longer be forced to live like strangers in our own land.”

For the Hopi Tribe, the settlement guarantees access to 2,300 acre-feet per year of the Upper Basin Colorado River Water and a little over 5,900 acre-feet per year of the Lower Basin Colorado River Water.

Hopi Chairman Timothy Nuvangyaoma expressed his gratitude to the state, tribes and neighboring communities for working to make the settlement a reality.

“Our collective action means a more secure water future for the Hopi Tribe and all of our neighbors in Northern Arizona,” Nuvangyaoma said.

As part of the settlement, the Hopi Tribe can lease, exchange, and accrue long-term storage credits for its water, store it in aquifers on Hopi land for later recovery and engage in inter-basin transfer of the Colorado River within Arizona.

Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR

#ClimateChange’s coal-smudged fingerprints: A survey of heat-related news from across the West — Jonathan P. Thompson #ActOnClimate #coal

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

July 9, 2024

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Writing about weather in the climate crisis-era is like navigating an obstacle course littered with critics. One faction chides me if I write about insane rainstorms and flash flooding without attributing them to human-caused climate change; another blasts me for bringing up climate change too often, whether it’s to explain an especially active avalanche cycle or a long-term drought. Even the spate of “billion-dollar disasters” in recent years could be blamed on climate change, sure, but also on more development and humanity in the path of those disasters.

Quite often those critics are the voices in my own head. Part of this is due to my hankering to learn the history of a place, particularly southwestern Colorado. Every time there’s an “unprecedented” drought or flood, I can look back into my mental archives and find an example of an equally severe one. There was the huge snow year of 1932, when the Durango-to-Silverton train was blockaded for 90 days straight; the great floods of 1911, 1884, 1927, and 1970, which wreaked havoc along the region’s streams and rivers; the dismally dry and warm winter of 1878-79 that preceded the Lime Creek Burn; and the grainy 1918 photo of a water-wagon doing dust control on Silverton’s streets — in January.

Weather is and always has been wacky, with or without human-caused climate change. So I’m always careful before saying some meteorological event is “unprecedented.”

But this heat? Damn. It sure does look unprecedented — if the temperature alone isn’t shattering records, the duration of the heat waves are.

A better term than climate change is climate heating, because that’s exactly what’s happening: The planet is heating up as a result of Industrial (and Information) Age humans spewing oodles of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And while it may be difficult to find climate change’s figurative fingerprints on every incidence of severe weather, its coal-smudged paw-prints appear to be all over the longer and more severe spells of extreme heat we’ve been perspiring through in recent years. No, every record-breaking high temperature cannot be attributed unequivocally to climate change, but climate change does make these events far more likely to occur.

Last year was the warmest year on our planet since global record-keeping began in 1850, clocking in at 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average of 57° F. And guess what? This year will likely be even hotter: This June was the hottest June on record, globally, and the 13th consecutive monthly high temperature record. Eeek.

So, when the mercury in Las Vegas tops out at 120 degrees F and shatters the previous record of 117° F, as occurred last week, I think it’s not a stretch to attribute this specific weather wackiness to the warming climate (with a helping hand from the urban heat island effect, of course). And when this sort of heat stretches across a good portion of the West, follows record-setting, flash-flooding rainfall by a few weeks, and coincides with a hurricane ripping through the Carribean, well, it’s probably safe to assume that it’s all connected, via a warming climate. It is not safe, however, to go outside.

So, with that out of the way, here’s a rundown of some of the wackiness of late:

Phoenix just endured its hottest June on record, with an average monthly temperature of 97°F, or nearly six degrees above the 1990-2020 normal. So far this summer the daily high temperature has reached 110° F or warmer on 21 occasions, and 118° F on two days; the city has received just .02 inches of precipitation since April 2. Maricopa County officials have confirmed heat caused or contributed to 13 deaths so far this year, with another 162 fatalities under investigation. That’s significantly more than last year at this time.

Dozens of monthly maximum high temperature records were broken across the West in June and early July, especially along the West Coast, where the mercury was — and still is — reaching the triple digits day after day. Oregon officials suspect five deaths in the western part of the state in recent days are heat-related.

Las Vegas shattered its all-time high heat record with 120 degrees F on July 7. The previous record was 117.

A new daily record was set in Death Valley, at 129 F. A motorcyclist touring through the national park died of heat exposure.
Sixteen locations in the West set monthly precipitation records in June, including:
- Hovenweep National Monument, with 1.05 inches on June 28;
- Arches National Park, 1.58” on June 28;
- Panguitch, Utah, 1.50” on June 26;
- Quemazon, New Mexico, 5.50” on June 21;
- Arivaca, Arizona, 2.25” on June 24;
- Ely, Nevada, 1.58” on June 26;
- Mormon Mountain, Arizona, 2.30” on June 27.

Major wildfires are burning across the West. Before I get into the details, do spare a thought for the thousands of people fighting these fires. Not only do the flames and smoke threaten their health and lives, but so does the brutal heat. This is a sampling of some of the new starts (stats as of early a.m. July 9):

Silver King in Piute County, Utah, at 10,026 acres, 0% containment;

Deer Springs in Kane County, Utah, (north-northeast of Kanab) at 11,000 acres, 0% containment;

Fisher in Socorro County, New Mexico, at 2,500 acres, 1% containment;

Lake in Santa Barbara County, California, at 21,763 acres, 8% containment;

Shelly in Siskiyou County, California, at 4,203 acres, 0% containment (this one is likely to burn a “carbon offset” forest, where corporations pay the owner to not chop down trees so they can continue polluting). Whoops.;

Salt Creek Rd in Jackson County, Oregon, 1,700 acres, 2% containment;

North in Modoc County, California, 4,380 acres, 50% containment;

Thompson in Butte County, California, which is 100% contained after burning 3,789 acres. I include it here because it forced the shutdown of transmission lines, taking the Oroville Dam hydropower plant offline and depriving the California grid of valuable energy when it needs it to keep air-conditioners running. It’s yet another example of how extreme weather can strain the power grid.

Explainer: Warming planet, failing grid — JONATHAN P. THOMPSON JUNE 16, 2021

A scorcher has settled over the entire Southwestern United States, with highs expected to hit the triple digits for several days in a row from Bakersfield to Las Vegas to Grand Junction. Phoenicians will be doing the Summer Solstice Swelter during that long day and short night—the — Read full story

It’s difficult to see how this is sustainable. Consider for a moment the misery the more than 9,000 unhoused people in Phoenix must be experiencing each and every day this summer. Many of them live on the streets and sidewalks, literally, where the concrete and asphalt can reach 160° F or more, hot enough to cause severe burns. Poorly insulated housing without cooling can be nearly as bad. Public cooling centers provide refuge, of course, but are there enough?

Sure, if you can afford it, you can hunker down in your home and crank up the air-conditioner and simply wait out the heat. But you could be waiting for quite some time these days; meanwhile, the growing fleet of air-conditioners will strain the grid, increasing the risk of a widespread power outage, which literally could be deadly in this heat.

There is a limit to this sort of thing, and it seems as if we must be getting close to the point where some places simply become uninhabitable. But if we’ve already reached that point, a lot of folks aren’t aware of it: Maricopa County remains one of the fastest growing metros in the U.S. And during the 12 months from June 2023 through May 2024, 48,000 building permits were issued in the metro area for new, private housing structures — numbers not seen since the great housing bubble of a couple decades ago.

Surely the housing bubble will burst, as it has in the past, before too long. But what about the air-conditioning bubble? Can it really last forever?

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

Speaking of people moving to hostile environments, the Amangiri resort near Lake Powell (and the polygamist settlement of Big Water) is now selling lots to those who can afford it. But don’t worry! While homeowners can avail themselves of the resort amenities, they are separated from those low-brow folks (who are forking out up to $6,500 per night to stay there) by a big slab of sandstone — saving them from having to rub elbows with the Kardashians next to the pool under 100°+ heat. And it will only cost you between $5 million and $12 million. For the lot, that is. Gross.

Follow Up

Remember my diatribe from a couple weeks ago about data centers’ excessive power use? Well, the pitfalls of all of that are playing out as I write this. Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest utility, predicts its customers collectively will set new electricity-demand records this year. And it’s not because of all those new folks moving in or the new homes being built — efficiency gains have actually led to a 5% decrease in overall residential power consumption. It’s thanks to those data centers, of which there are 79 in the state (71 in Phoenix, seven in Tucson, and one in Nogales). It’s all fine and good until the grid crashes on a 118° F day.

A Dog Day Diatribe on AI, cryptocurrency, energy consumption, and capitalism — JONATHAN P. THOMPSON — June 28, 2024

🐐 Things that get my Goat 🐐 I will begin this rant with a thank you to a kind reader for this little tidbit that appeared in their response to a column of mine: Ironically, reducing energy consumption will be counterp…Read full story

Assessing the U.S. #Climate in June 2024: Record-breaking heat waves impacted several regions and four new billion-dollar weather and climate disasters were confirmed in June — NOAA

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

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:

Key Points:

The average temperature of the contiguous U.S. in June was 71.8°F, 3.4°F above average, ranking second warmest in the 130-year record.

Approximately 24 million people across portions of the West, South and Northeast experienced their warmest June for overnight temperatures.

Heat waves impacted the Southwest, Great Lakes, Northeast and Puerto Rico this month, breaking temperature records and creating life-threatening conditions.

The South Fork fire, one of the most devastating fires in New Mexico history, burned over 17,000 acres, destroyed around 1400 structures and claimed two lives.

Catastrophic flooding occurred in parts of the Midwest after days of heavy rains caused rivers and streams to overflow their banks, forcing residents to evacuate as water destroyed roads and bridges and led to the partial failure of the Rapidan Dam in Minnesota.

On June 30, Beryl became the earliest Category 4 hurricane and the only Category 4 on record during the month of June in the Atlantic Ocean.

Four new Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters were confirmed in June. The year-to-date total currently stands at 15 disasters.

Other Highlights:

Temperature

June temperatures were above average to record warm across much of the contiguous U.S. Arizona and New Mexico each had their warmest June on record with 18 additional states ranking among their top 10 warmest Junes on record.

The Alaska statewide June temperature was 52.8°F, 3.6°F above the long-term average, ranking sixth warmest in the 100-year period of record for the state. Above-average temperatures were observed throughout most of the state, with near-average temperatures observed across much of the Aleutians and South Panhandle.

For the January–June period, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 50.9°F, 3.4°F above average, ranking second warmest on record for this period. Temperatures were above average across nearly all of the contiguous U.S., while record-warm temperatures were observed in parts of the Northeast, Great Lakes, southern Plains and Mid-Atlantic. New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each saw their warmest January–June period. An additional 24 states had a top-five warmest year-to-date period. No state experienced a top-10 coldest event during this six-month period.

The Alaska January–June temperature was 24.6°F, 3.3°F above the long-term average, ranking in the warmest third of the historical record for the state. Much of the state was warmer than average for this six-month period while temperatures were near average across parts of the Panhandle.

Precipitation

June precipitation for the contiguous U.S. was 2.74 inches, 0.18 inch below average, ranking in the driest third of the historical record. Precipitation was below average across much of the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley and across portions of the Plains and California to the Northern Rockies. Portions of the Southeast experienced dry soils, low streamflow and distressed crops in June. Virginia had its driest June on record and North Carolina had its second driest June. Conversely, precipitation was above average across much of the Upper Midwest and Southwest and in portions of the Northeast, Plains and southern Florida. Minnesota had its fourth wettest June, while Wisconsin had its sixth wettest.

Alaska’s average monthly precipitation ranked fifth driest in the historical record. Much of the state was drier than average for the month of June, while near-average precipitation was observed in the North Slope region.

The January–June precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 17.36 inches, 2.06 inches above average, ranking 11th wettest in the 130-year record. Precipitation was above average across a large portion of the Upper Midwest, Northeast and Deep South as well as in pockets across much of the contiguous U.S., with Rhode Island having its second-wettest year-to-date period on record and Minnesota and Wisconsin ranking third wettest. Conversely, precipitation was below average across parts of the Northwest, northern Plains, west Texas and eastern North Carolina during the January–June period.

The January–June precipitation for Alaska ranked in the middle third of the 100-year record, with below-average precipitation observed across parts of the Central Interior, Cook Inlet, Northeast Interior and South Panhandle regions, near-average precipitation in the Aleutians, Northwest Gulf, Northeast Gulf and North Panhandle and above-average precipitation observed across the remaining climate divisions.

Billion-Dollar Disasters

Four new billion-dollar weather and climate disasters were confirmed in June 2024, including two hail events that impacted Texas and Colorado at the end of April and end of May, respectively, one severe weather event that impacted the central, southern and eastern U.S. in mid-May and a tornado outbreak that impacted portions of the Central U.S. in mid-May.

There have been 15 confirmed weather and climate disaster events this year, each with losses exceeding $1 billion. These disasters consisted of 13 severe storm events and two winter storms. The total cost of these events exceeds $37 billion, and they have resulted in at least 106 fatalities.

The U.S. has sustained 391 separate weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2024). The total cost of these 391 events exceeds $2.755 trillion.

Other Notable Events

The Correll Fire, which started on June 1 in San Joaquin County, CA burned over 14,000 acres.

The Darlene 3 Fire, which started on June 25 in Deschutes County, OR burned over 3,800 acres, prompted emergency evacuations and left thousands without power.

On June 2, an extreme rotating thunderstorm dropped cantaloupe-size (>6.25 inches in diameter) hail in the Texas Panhandle—this could be the new state record for largest hail diameter.

A series of heat waves brought record-breaking temperatures to portions of the U.S. during June:

The National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine, issued its first-ever Excessive Heat Warning due to “feels-like” temperatures getting close to 110 degrees on June 19.

For the first time on record, the entire island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were placed under a heat advisory or warning by the National Weather Service on June 24.

Alberto, the first named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, made landfall in Mexico on June 20 as a tropical storm.

Some Texas communities saw nearly three times their June average for rainfall over 48 hours from Tropical Storm Alberto, including the Gulf Coast-area city of Rockport, Texas, which received 9.97 inches of rain from the storm; its June average is 3.66 inches. Similarly, Alice, Texas, received 6.57 inches of rain—nearly triple its June average of 2.32 inches.

Drought

According to the July 2 U.S. Drought Monitor report, about 19% of the contiguous U.S. was in drought, up about 6% from the end of May. Drought conditions expanded or intensified across most of the Southeast, much of the Mid-Atlantic and portions of the Ohio Valley, Tennessee, eastern Oklahoma and northern Plains this month. Drought contracted or was reduced in intensity across much of the Southwest, Kansas, the panhandle of Oklahoma, southern Texas and southern Florida.

Monthly Outlook

Above-average temperatures are favored to impact areas across the western and southern portions of the U.S. in July, while below-average precipitation is likely to occur in the Northwest and south-central Plains. Drought is likely to persist in the Mid-Atlantic, Southwest, Northwest and Hawaii. Visit the Climate Prediction Center’s Official 30-Day Forecasts and U.S. Monthly Drought Outlook website for more details.

Significant wildland fire potential for July is above normal across portions of the Mid-Atlantic, West, Hawaii and Alaska. For additional information on wildland fire potential, visit the National Interagency Fire Center’s One-Month Wildland Fire Outlook

Topsoil Moisture % short/very short (s/vs): 25% of the Lower 48 is s/vs, 3% lower than last week — @NOAADrought

Most of the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast improved. Most of the Northwest, Central Rockies, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic worsened. The 2 states at 90% s/vs: MD and WV.

Column: With its ‘Chevron’ ruling, the Supreme Court claims to be smarter than scientific experts — The Los Angeles Times

The U.S. Supreme Court Building, current home of the Supreme Court, which opened in 1935. By Senate Democrats – 7W9A9324, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92666722

Click the link to read the article on The Los Angeles Times website (Michael Hiltzik). Here’s an excerpt:

July 2, 2024

The case concerned a 40-year-old precedent known as “Chevron deference.” That doctrine held that when a federal law is ambiguous, the courts must defer to the interpretations offered by the agencies the law covers — as long as those interpretations are “reasonable.” On Monday, the court discarded Chevron deference. This may sound like an abstruse legalistic squabble, but it has massive implications for Americans in all walks of life. It could subject agency decisions on scientifically based issues such as clean air and water regulations and healthcare standards to endless nitpicking by a federal judiciary that already has displayed an alarming willingness to dismiss scientific expertise out of hand, in favor of partisan or religious ideologies. The ruling amounts to an apogee of arrogance on the part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But it’s not a new development.

“The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” Kagan wrote; “its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education…. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden.”

Conservatives have had it in for the Chevron doctrine
for a long time; given their current majority on the court, the doctrine’s death has been a foregone conclusion, awaiting only the appearance of a suitable case to use as a bludgeon. Indeed, the majority was so impatient to kill the doctrine that the court’s six conservatives chose to do so by using a case that actually is moot. That case arose from a lawsuit brought by the herring industry, which objected to a government policy requiring herring boats to pay for government observers placed on board to make sure the boats were complying with their harvesting permits. The rule was imposed under the Trump administration, but it was canceled in April 2023 by Biden, who repaid the money that had been taken from the boat owners — so there’s nothing left in it for the court to rule on.

Interestingly, Chevron deference was not always seen as a bulwark protecting progressive regulatory policies from right-wing judges, as it’s viewed today. At its inception, it was seen in exactly the opposite way — as giving conservative policies protection from progressive-minded judges.

Commentary—Project 2025 to Rural America: Let Them Eat Cake (Without a Nutrition Label)

Once settled in Colorado, Audrey and Chris reached out to their local FSA office to apply for a farm ownership loan to purchase their land. Photo courtesy of Billy Goat Hop Farm LLC.

Click the link to read the article on The Daily Yonder website (Edward Strickler Jr.):

July 9, 2024

The Heritage Foundation’s policy document for a second Trump term has more to say about horses than healthcare.

Project 2025 has been so much in the news lately that former President Donald Trump had to respond to the right-wing policy proposals, which the Heritage Foundation put together in hopes of implementation under another Trump presidency.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump said. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

In a familiar rhetorical pattern, Trump says two contradictory things at the same time: Parts of Project 2025 are “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and “anything they do I wish them luck.”

Well, there is a third contradictory thing: “I know nothing about it.”

But anyone reading through the nearly 1,000 pages of Project 2025 might easily be two-minded, or three-minded, about it. It is vast and dense.

Nevertheless, there is a predominant theme threaded throughout: Federal government must be downsized, decentralized, and disempowered as much as possible, as rapidly as possible, just as soon as conservatives gain control the federal government. And embedded within this theme is a prominent second thread: that the enemy – variously named “that institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars,” “LGBT advocates,” “the pursuit of racial parity,” “racial and gender ideologies,” etc. — must be vanquished.

You may see different patterns, but this is what I discerned. Readers should look for themselves. Find the chapter(s) that matter to you. You may choose from sections titled “Taking the Reins of Government,” “The Common Defense,” “The General Welfare,” “The Economy,” and “Independent Regulatory Agencies,” with each major federal government agency discussed. I spent a couple days reading through the 1,000 pages to glean what is being proposed to support healthy rural populations and thriving rural communities. Not very much.

In fact, the entire subsection “Rural Health” (Chapter 14, Department of Health and Human Services, at p. 449) is shorter than the subsection on “Wild Horses and Burros” (Chapter 16, Department of the Interior, at p. 528). Empathy for the four-footed ungulates is conveyed by discussion of their “iconic presence” described as “not a new issue … not just a western issue- it is an American issue.” We two-footed humans rate similar patriotic rhetoric – “seeking space for one’s family and cultivating the land are valued goals that are deeply rooted in America’s fabric” – but the paltry few policy proposals – less than one page out of nearly 1,000 – are insulting.

For example, to increase the supply of health care providers by reducing regulatory burdens on “volunteers wishing to provide temporary, charitable services across state lines,” and to encourage “less expensive alternatives to hospitals and telehealth independent of expensive air ambulances,” Challenge me if I am wrong, but these proposals explicitly, in writing, advise that rural communities can, at best, expect “second class,” maybe just “third class,” treatment from Project 2025 Conservative elites. But at least Project 2025 doesn’t advise “humane disposal” for sick rural folks as it does for the horses and burros.

Moving on to some other rural concerns Project 2025 advises:

Mobile technologies: “[W]idespread deployment of infrastructure for 5G adoption in rural and exurban areas, which will be a key factor in future economic competitiveness for these under-served communities” [Note: Those charitable volunteers may not come help us without that.]

Veterans: Department of Veterans Affairs should “reimagine the health care footprint in some locales, and spur a realignment of capacity through budgetary allocations,” for example “Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) as an avenue to maintain a VA footprint in challenging medical markets without investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses” and “facility-sharing partnerships between the VA and strained local health care systems to reduce costs by leveraging limited talent and resources” [Note: The context of these proposals is aging facilities and declining patient numbers, particularly in rural areas, that are too expensive and inefficient to replace; but considering the weak proposals for rural health care, these proposals are not likely viable and rural veterans will be treated like other rural residents, “second” and “third” class.]

Farms: Numerous programs that moderate risk faced by family farms are axed: “Elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program. Farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land. … The USDA should work with Congress to eliminate this overbroad program.”

And “repeal the ARC (Agriculture Risk) and PLC (Price Loss) programs. … The ARC program is especially egregious because farmers are being protected from losses, which is another way of saying minor dips in expected revenue. This is hardly consistent with the concept of providing a safety net to help farmers when they fall on hard times.” [ note: there is considerable curiosity in distant elites advising farmers about “hard times” and the risks of farming]

Food security: Numerous proposals in Project 2025 intend to reduce numbers and eligibility for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known commonly as the food stamp program) and for school meals [Note: Food insecurity is rising faster in rural areas.]

Eliminating nutritional labeling and dietary guidelines: “There is no shortage of private sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs. This includes working with their own health professionals.” [Note: Rural residents are less likely to have “their own health professionals” or reliable access to any health professional, or other specific dietary advice.]

Throughout Project 2025’s 1,000 pages are hundreds upon hundreds of proposals. But perhaps these few gleanings advise that despite bashing progressive elites, Project 2025’s conservative elites know and care little about rural realities, problems, values, and priorities.

Aspinall Unit operations update July 10, 2024

Morrow Point Dam, on the Gunnison River, Aspinall Unit. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):

Releases from the Aspinall Unit will be increased from 1600 cfs to 1900 cfs between Wednesday, July 10th and Thursday, July 11th. Releases are being increased in response to declining river flows on the lower Gunnison River.

Flows in the lower Gunnison River have been dropping quickly towards the baseflow target of 1500 cfs. River flows are expected to continue to decline over the next couple weeks.

Pursuant to the Aspinall Unit Operations Record of Decision (ROD), the baseflow target in the lower Gunnison River, as measured at the Whitewater gage, is 1500 cfs for July and then drops to 1050 cfs in August.

Currently, Gunnison Tunnel diversions are 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon are around 600 cfs. After this release change Gunnison Tunnel diversions will still be 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon will be near 900 cfs. Current flow information is obtained from provisional data that may undergo revision subsequent to review.

New Songbird Habitat Study Unlocks Benefits for the Monarch Butterfly — USDA

Monarch butterfly on milkweed. Photo credit: USDA

Click the link to read the article on the USDA website (Jocelyn Benjamin):

June 13, 2024

A new study reveals that managing habitat for songbirds like the golden-winged warbler also benefits insect pollinators like the at-risk monarch butterfly.

Exploring the young forests and shrublands within the eastern deciduous forests of the United States, this study, which was highlighted in a Science to Solutions report by the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, thoroughly unravels the co-benefits that managing for early-successional habitat offers to both the golden-winged warbler and monarch butterfly. Managing for forest-age diversity improves the overall long-term health of forest communities and wildlife habitat. This research will help USDA strengthen conservation solutions for the Monarch butterfly and other pollinators.

Golden-winged Warbler Male and Female (Vermivora chrysoptera). By Louis Agassiz Fuertes. – 300 ppi scan of the National Geographic Magazine, Volume 31 (1917), page 308, panel C., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167346

Common management solutions promoting early-successional communities like shrublands and young forests, are expensive, due to the management tools needed to simulate natural disturbances like wildfire, beaver activity, and severe weather that revert older sites to early-successional young forest conditions.

To combat these challenges, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offers cost-effective management tools and technical assistance to private landowners through the Working Lands for Wildlife (WLFW) initiative.

WLFW offers management planning to improve forest stand quality and structure while promoting conservation benefits for specific wildlife species, which may also impact non-focal species. In this case, the golden-winged warbler is a focal species for multiple NRCS working lands programs in the Appalachian Mountains and Great Lakes, and shares common habitat goals with pollinators, including butterflies and native bees.

The report outlines several recent studies that assessed how pollinator species respond to avian-focused early successional habitat management in the Great Lakes and provides evidence that breeding habitat management efforts for the Warbler not only benefit pollinators but also many other non-focal species of conservation concern, including the American Woodcock and Eastern Whip-poor-will.

The monarch butterfly populations have declined significantly over the past few decades due to critical population stressors, including reductions in milkweed and nectar plant availability, driven by the loss and degradation of habitat across its range.

This drastic decline has sparked concerted efforts to create and enhance monarch habitat. The studies found that abundant blooming plants within forested landscapes, with emergent herbaceous wetlands nearby, combine habitat components for pollinators by containing pollen and nectar at a single site. Given that many disturbance-dependent flowering herbaceous plants like goldenrod colonize recently managed golden-winged warbler sites, coupling insect pollinators with warbler habitat creation benefits multiple species.

NRCS continues to offer this multispecies benefits approach through its working lands initiative, which nets a win-win for songbirds, pollinators, and owners and operators of working forests.

Learn more about NRCS conservation outcomes for the golden-winged warbler by watching “Outcomes from NRCS Golden-Winger Warbler Conservation Efforts” or how NRCS can help you create or enhance habitat for monarch butterflies on your working lands.

More Information:

NRCS will host a free, one-hour Conservation Outcomes Webinar during National Pollinator Week that shares findings on the value of voluntary conservation practices to support pollinators nationwide. Additional details are available on the Conservation Outcomes Webinar Series webpage.

A monarch caterpillar on a common milkweed leaf. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Lee Walston.)

A year of record breaking global temperatures — @Ed_Hawkins #ActOnClimate

A year of record breaking global temperatures pic.twitter.com/HhMCKKXvbJ
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) July 8, 2024

Town of #Kiowa files lawsuit against developer on water provider’s board: Legality of Tim Craft’s position on Kiowa water authority at question in suit — Elbert County News

Kiowa Creek. Photo credit: The Town of Kiowa

Click the link to read the article on the Elbert County News website (Ellis Arnold). Here’s an excerpt:

June 25, 2024

Because the town argues that Craft was not qualified to serve on the water provider’s board, the complaint says that legally, “a vacancy existed since his appointment in 2022 by the Town.” The Kiowa Board of Trustees — the equivalent of a town council — object to Craft’s activity on the water provider’s board, according to the suit.

“Mr. Craft has publicly stated an intent to unlawfully terminate a separate operating agreement between the Town and KWWA,” the complaint says. “Mr. Craft’s actions create a risk of irreparable harm to the Town of Kiowa and the Board of Trustees, because he is exercising authority and duties to which he has no lawful right.”

According to the complaint, in order to serve on the water provider’s board, a person must meet one of three criteria:

• They are a resident of the town who is registered to vote in Colorado;

• They own “real property” within the town boundaries;

• Or they are the person designated by the owner of real property within the boundaries of the town to be qualified to serve on the board by such owner. (The designation by an owner does not require that the person be appointed to the board.)

Craft’s designation to serve did not meet the third criteria, the complaint argues.

How Do Beaver Dams Affect Water Quality? — Environmental Protection Agency

A beaver dam on the Gunnison River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the EPA website (Melissa Payne):

June 11, 2024

Considered nature’s engineers, beavers build dams across streams to create ponds. The lodges within these dams can only be accessed through underwater entrances, keeping beavers safe from predators like bears and wolves. After historical overhunting, beaver populations are growing—in part because of recent reintroduction programs—and are settling down in places they’ve never been found before, including Tierra del Fuego and the Arctic. Beavers are a keystone species because of their significant impact on streams, the movement of water, water quality, and the other animals that live there. Beavers can alter their environments in many ways, especially through dam construction. The effects of these dams can be different in geographical regions (also known as biomes), but scientists do not have a clear understanding of how they impact water quality, habitat, and sedimentation in floodplains.

“Due to limited study in many biomes, some research scientists and land use managers must make decisions on how the conservation, expansion, and reintroduction of beavers can alter their local streams based on findings from ecosystems that are more frequently studied and better understood,” said EPA researcher Ken Fritz.

The Scientific Question

Because stream ecosystems are complex, it can be difficult to understand how disturbances and changing environmental conditions will impact the ecosystem. Additionally, the impacts of beaver dams may vary widely across biomes because the underlying watershed characteristics are different.

EPA scientists Ken Fritz, Tammy Newcomer-Johnson, Heather Golden, and Brent Johnson, in collaboration with researchers from Miami University, Ohio, conducted a scientific literature review to better understand how beaver dams impact stream systems across different biogeographical regions. Their paper, “A global review of beaver dam impacts: Stream conservation implications across biomes,” used 267 peer-reviewed studies to quantify the effects of beaver dams. Literature reviews summarize the main points of scientific research already published on a specific topic, which helps determine future efforts. The paper provides a current understanding for environmental managers on how the conservation, expansion, and reintroduction of beavers can alter streams in different geographical locations.

Fig. 1. Distribution of beaver home ranges (A) and studies examined across biomes by category; B) morphology, C) hydrology, D) water chemistry, E) aquatic biota, F) habitat. Home range distribution data was attained from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (https://www.iucnredlist.org/).

What the Scientists Discovered

The literature review found that beaver dams had significant environmental effects across all studied biomes. The impacts on stream morphology (the shape of river channels and how they change in shape and direction over time) and stream hydrology (water movement) were similar across geographical regions. Stream integrity, or health, also appeared to improve with beaver conservation in all biomes. The geographical region influenced how water quality and plant and animal life changed in response to beaver dams.

Specifically, results show that while nitrate and suspended sediments (which block the sunlight that bottom-dwelling plants need to survive) decreased downstream from beaver dams, pollutants like methyl mercury, dissolved organic carbon, and ammonium concentrations increased. Total nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations tended to not be affected by beaver dams. The effects beaver dams have on pollutants vary depending on environmental conditions —like temperature, sunlight, water velocity and depth – that aid in changing and transporting certain pollutants. EPA scientist Heather Golden noted that “the effects of beaver dams on water quality can often vary with time of year, or season.”

On a larger scale, beaver dams slow water flow and increase sedimentation, and most pollutants likely settle out of the water into sediments upstream of the beaver dam. These areas could become zones of high concentration of some pollutants and harmful hotspots for exposed wildlife. For certain pollutants like nitrogen, this temporary storage can provide time for microbes to convert nitrate pollution into harmless nitrogen gas, a process known as microbial denitrification.

“When you clean your drinking water in your home, you throw away the dirty filter and put in a new one. This doesn’t happen with beaver dams,” said EPA researcher Tammy Newcomer-Johnson. “Dams slow the flow of water so that heavier particles settle out. Over time, storms and floodwaters can damage the dams and wash the sediments stored behind them downstream.”

The paper found that beaver dams can significantly influence the areas around them. These findings can be useful for stream conservation and restoration efforts that introduce or protect beavers. The review also found that the impacts of beaver dams were most often studied in temperate forests. Additional studies are needed in dry or cold biomes historically occupied by beavers and in new environments where beaver populations are currently expanding.

Learn More About the Science

Read the journal article: A global review of beaver dam impacts: Stream conservation implications across biomes

The next Aspinall Unit Operations meeting is August 15, 2024

Blue Mesa Reservoir. MichaelKirsh / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):

July 8, 2024

The next Aspinall Operations meeting is officially scheduled for Thursday, August 15th. We have moved from the August 22^nd date due to the conflict with Water Congress. Start time will be the usual 1:00pm

The meeting will be held at the Western Colorado Area Office in Grand Junction. Due to the ongoing repairs of the US50 bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir we have decided not to hold the meeting at the desired location of the Elk Creek Visitor Center at Blue Mesa Reservoir.

A String of Supreme Court Decisions Hits Hard at Environmental Rules — The New York Times #ActOnClimate #WOTUS

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

June 29, 2024

This term, the court’s 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 agencies 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 “good neighbor rule.” 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 it struck down a proposed E.P.A. rule 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 court sharply limited the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions 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…

For example, the court’s decision to curtail the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate wetlands and so-called ephemeral streams means that about half the nation’s wetlands could be polluted or paved without federal penalty, potentially harming thousands of species of plants and animals. In addition, new research has shown that the court’s decision also makes major American river basins vulnerable to pollution.

Ditch “inefficiencies” give us wetlands — Writers on the Range

Since 1917, five generations have lived along the Animas Consolidated Ditch outside of Durango, CO, Patty Zink pictured, courtesy Dave Marston

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Richard Knight):

June 24, 2024

Imagine Westerners waking up one morning only to discover that many of their most cherished wetlands have dried up, gone. This is not fiction during these times of determining the true value of water.

Most wetlands in the arid West owe their existence to the “inefficiencies” of unlined irrigation canals and flood irrigation. But when well-intentioned urban folks insist that irrigation companies use water more efficiently by piping their ditches, the result may be more about loss than water “saved” for rivers.

One of the least-known truths in the West is that many of our wetlands are the result of irrigated agriculture. For example, an irrigation company in northern Colorado irrigates about 24,000 acres, thanks to 146 miles of ditches.

The area served by the irrigation company also has approximately 1,300 acres of wetlands, and it’s no accident that most of those wetlands lie below a leaking ditch. A study by Colorado State University discovered this connection using heavy isotopes to create hydrographs of groundwater wells, ditch levels and precipitation. This is a West-wide issue.

We all know that climate change has been causing hotter, drier weather, and that helps reduce the flow of the Colorado River that 40 million Westerners depend on. In the Laramie Basin of Wyoming, 67% of its wetlands are attributed to agriculture. In North Park, Colorado, close to 75% of all wetlands are byproducts of irrigated agriculture.

Decades ago, Aldo Leopold wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One, you think that heat comes from the furnace and two, you think that breakfast comes from the grocery store.”

May I add a third? We don’t know much about the water we depend on.

Farmers and ranchers produce two “goods,” a private good and a public good. They’re compensated for the private one by producing food. Their public goods, ecosystem services, are not compensated, though they include wetlands, biodiversity and plants sequestering carbon.

But knowing that rural agriculture uses 79% of the Colorado River’s water, our urban neighbors tell their rural counterparts to conserve water or, better yet, sell it to them.

Meanwhile, the environmental community would like rural agriculture to use less water so more could stay in the rivers to help fish and provide recreational opportunities.

Clearly, there are too many demands for the West’s diminishing water supply. Drinking water, ag water, river health. Where do wetlands fit in?

Wetlands cover 1% of the West’s land surface, yet half of our threatened and endangered species rely on them. Wetlands serve a similar function to our kidneys: They filter out impurities from human land uses, making our environment healthier.

Perhaps it’s time for all of us to wise up a little. Many of these wetlands are human created; that is, they were created by farmers and ranchers and are not “natural.” Many will disappear in the pursuit of water conservation. Must it be water conservation and efficiency at all costs?

Will we prioritize water for urban uses, including urban sprawl? Or will we support more water staying in our rivers to create a healthier environment? Will water for food production be considered a necessity? Do green lawns trump healthy rivers and wetlands?

With more informed conversations about our region, talks between rural and urban neighbors, perhaps we could pursue a triple bottom line: water for food production, water for urban uses, and, yes, water for our region’s rivers, streams and wetlands

Wouldn’t we all like that? Let’s figure out how to make that happen.

Rick Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that seeks to spur lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.

Geothermal Collegiate Competition Winners Partner With Osage Nation To Address Energy Sovereignty — NREL #ActOnClimate

NREL researcher Diana Acero-Allard presents the University of Oklahoma Team GeoTribe with their first-place certificate for the 2023 Geothermal Collegiate Competition. Photo by University of Oklahoma

Click the link to read the release on the NREL website (Kelly MacGregor):

June 10, 2024

The University of Oklahoma Won 2023 Technical Track With Their Design for Sustainable Greenhouse Heating and Cooling Using Geothermal Energy

How can we sustainably keep greenhouses cool in the summer and warm in the winter?

On May 2, 2024, the first-place team in the Technical Track of the 2023 Geothermal Collegiate Competition held a community event to showcase its innovative geothermal system, developed in partnership with the Osage Nation, which aims to do just that.

The team designed a system of geothermal wells in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, to heat and cool the Tribe’s 40,000-square-foot greenhouse, supporting efforts for native food sovereignty.

The proposed geothermal system design would help alleviate the challenge of maintaining a constant year-round growing temperature, which is critical in an area recognized as a food desert.

“The Harvestland greenhouse was created to provide the Osage Nation access to fruits and vegetables, especially during the food shortage during the pandemic,” said Jose Aramendiz, a Ph.D. candidate in petroleum engineering at The University of Oklahoma and a member of the GeoTribe team. “Helping the greenhouse be self-sufficient could lead to cut energy costs, allowing redirection of funds to increase the benefits the greenhouse provides to the community.”

Nabe Konate, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oklahoma, explains the team’s winning project, which included partnership with the Osage Nation. Photo by University of Oklahoma

Through a geothermal resources assessment, the team found there is enough energy at about 2,000 feet below the surface to directly heat and cool the 40,000-square-foot greenhouse, as well as a nearby fish farm.

The team also investigated converting inactive oil and gas wells near the site, but they were not suitable because of their age and disrepair. But these wells could provide a great deal of information about the geological deposition and temperature of the site, helping inform the geothermal system design.

The students—Cesar Vivas, Nabe Konate, Jose Aramendiz, Gurban Hasanov, and Vagif Mammadzada—received $10,000 as a first-place prize, as well as additional funding to host the May 2 event. Their stakeholder engagement event included a networking session, presentations by the team and school leadership, and a tour of the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering laboratories.

“In our experience, the stakeholders were a key part of our success,” said Konate, University of Oklahoma Ph.D. candidate and Team GeoTribe member. “Stakeholder engagement is important because it aligns people with common interest in working together to develop geothermal energy.”

“The most important aspect was listening to the Tribal community’s past experiences, concerns, and advice,” said Aramendiz, also a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Oklahoma and a member of Team GeoTribe. “Learning from them and integrating their beliefs into our concept was key for our group to understand how we could collaborate respectfully.”

Administered by NREL and funded by the Geothermal Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, the Geothermal Collegiate Competition is an annual challenge that offers college students experience in the renewable energy industry and the chance to win cash prizes for developing real-world geothermal solutions.

The next Geothermal Collegiate Competition will open for registration in August 2024—sign up for the competition newsletter to stay up to date.

Yavapai-Apache Nation reaches water settlement after change in state policy — AZCentral.com

C.C. Cragin (Blue Ridge) Reservoir. Photo taken March 30, 2017 by Deborah Lee Soltesz. Credit: USFS Coconino National Forest. Learn more about the C.C. Cragin (Blue Ridge) Reservoir and the Coconino National Forest.

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:

July 2, 2024

The Yavapai-Apache Nation approved its water rights settlement June 26, which will bring new water supplies to the Verde Valley and settle the tribe’s decades-long water rights claims. The settlement is the latest after Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs reversed a state policy that complicated tribes’ efforts to claim their rights to water. Yavapai-Apache Chairwoman Tanya Lewis said the agreement, which was negotiated with local communities, the Salt River Project, and state and federal officials will bring real “wet” water to her tribe. At the center of the settlement: constructing a pipeline from the C.C. Cragin Reservoir on the Mogollon Rim along Forest Service roads to the Verde Valley. SRP manages the reservoir and the water it holds…

In the deal, the pipeline will deliver dedicated sources of water from the Cragin Reservoir to the Yavapai-Apache Nation. It will also allow the tribe to exchange 1,200 acre-feet of its Central Arizona Project water with SRP for an additional delivery of water from C.C. Cragin in the same amount. The settlement will also confirm the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s historic irrigation rights as well as certain rights to pump groundwater, including when C.C. Cragin Reservoir levels are low. The tribe also has the right to acquire future water rights under the settlement. The Yavapai-Apache Nation will also waive, among other things, claims for damages to water rights against existing water users in the Verde River watershed and against the United States.

Gila River watershed. Graphic credit: Wikimedia

Failure to fix New Mexico’s #RioGrande delivery shortfall could force drastic water cuts on central #NewMexico — John Fleck (InkStain.net)

Elephant Butte Dam is filled by the Rio Grande and sustains agriculture in the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico. Sarah Tory

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (John Fleck):

July 5, 2024

Central New Mexico’s Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

We’re currently 121,500 feet behind in deliveries, up from basically zero six years ago. If our debt rises above 200,000 acre feet, according to the letter:

To be clear, this is separate from the ongoing Texas v. New Mexico litigation on the Lower Rio Grande. This is the scary new Compact threat that Norm Gaume and others have been warning about as the Compact debt creeps inexorably higher.

The full letter is included at the tail end of Monday’s (7/8/2024) MRGCD board packet, and is on the agenda for a possible discussion at that meeting.

#GrandJunction finishes work on Carson Lake dam project — The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

Click the link to read the release on City of Grand Junction website:

June 28, 2024

The City of Grand Junction will host a ribbon cutting on Tuesday, July 2 at 1 p.m. celebrating the reopening of Carson Lake (also known as Hogchute Reservoir) on the Grand Mesa now that improvements are complete and the reservoir has been refilled. Carson Lake is part of the City of Grand Junction’s water supply network. Following the ribbon cutting, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), in collaboration with the city, will restock Carson Lake with fish.

In 2021, the City initiated the dam improvement project for Carson Lake which included proactive measures to preserve the life of the dam, improve operations, and enhance safety for residents in the Kannah Creek basin. The improvements required the draining of the reservoir and included reconstructing the outlet pipe assembly and the overflow spillway and channel. An early warning telemetry system was also added to provide real-time monitoring and communication to emergency services agencies and the public should there be a dam emergency. The work was funded in part with a low-interest, $4.3 million loan from the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

In addition to having to drain the reservoir, during construction, the U.S. Forest Service closed National Forest System Road #108 between Land’s End Road and Carson Lake, the parking lot and access to upper trails that start at Carson Lake which have now reopened.

Albuquerque made itself drought-proof. Then its dam started leaking — Grist #RioGrande

El Vado Dam and Reservoir back in the day. Photo credit: USBR

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Jake Bittle):

July 6, 2024

Mark Garcia can see that there’s no shortage of water in the Rio Grande this year. The river flows past his farm in central New Mexico, about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. The rush of springtime water is a welcome change after years of drought, but he knows the good times won’t last.

As the summer continues, the river will diminish, leaving Garcia with a strict ration. He’ll be allowed irrigation water for his 300 acres just once every 30 days, which is nowhere near enough to sustain his crop of oats and alfalfa.

For decades, Garcia and other farmers on the Rio Grande have relied on water released from a dam called El Vado, which collects billions of gallons of river water to store and eventually release to help farmers during times when the river runs dry. More significantly for most New Mexico residents, the dam system also allows the city of Albuquerque to import river water from long distances for household use.

New Mexico water projects map via Reclamation

But El Vado has been out of commission for the past three summers, its structure bulging and disfigured after decades in operation — and the government doesn’t have a plan to fix it.

“We need some sort of storage,” said Garcia. “If we don’t get a big monsoon this summer, if you don’t have a well, you won’t be able to water.”

The failure of the dam has shaken up the water supply for the entire region surrounding Albuquerque, forcing the city and many of the farmers nearby to rely on finite groundwater and threatening an endangered fish species along the river. It’s a surprising twist of fate for a region that in recent years emerged as a model for sustainable water management in the West.

“Having El Vado out of the picture has been really tough,” said Paul Tashjian, the director of freshwater conservation at the Southwest regional office of the nonprofit National Audubon Society. “We’ve been really eking by every year the past few years.”

Surface water imports from the El Vado system have generally allowed public officials in Albuquerque to limit groundwater shortages. This echoes the strategies of other large Western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, which have enabled population growth by tapping diverse sources of water for metropolitan regions and the farms that sit outside of them. The Biden administration is seeking to replicate this strategy in water-stressed rural areas across the region, doling out more than $8 billion in grants to support pipelines and reservoirs.

“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall

But the last decade has shown that this strategy isn’t foolproof — at least not while climate change fuels an ongoing megadrought across the West. Los Angeles has lost water from both the Colorado River and from a series of reservoirs in Northern California, and Phoenix has seen declines not only from the Colorado but also from the groundwater aquifers that fuel the state’s cotton and alfalfa farming. Now, as Albuquerque’s decrepit El Vado dam goes out of commission, the city is trying to balance multiple fragile resources.

El Vado is an odd dam: It’s one of only four in the United States that uses a steel faceplate to hold back water, rather than a mass of rock or concrete. The dam has been collecting irrigation water for Rio Grande farmers for close to a century, but decades of studies have shown that water is seeping through the faceplate and undermining the dam’s foundations. When engineers tried to use grout to fill in the cracks behind the faceplate, they accidentally caused the faceplate to bulge out of shape, threatening the stability of the entire structure. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the dam, paused construction and is now back at the drawing board.

Without the ability to collect irrigation water for the farmers, the Bureau has had no choice but to let the Rio Grande’s natural flow move downstream to Albuquerque. There’s plenty of water in the spring, when snow melts off the mountains and rain rushes toward the ocean. But when the rains peter out by the start of the summer, the river’s flow reduces to a trickle.

“We run really fast and happy in the spring, and then you’re off pretty precipitously,” said Casey Ish, the conservation program supervisor at the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the irrigation district that supplies water to farmers like Garcia. “It just creates a lot of stress on the system late in the summer.” The uncertainty about water rationing causes many farmers to forego planting crops they aren’t sure they’ll be able to see to maturity, Ish added.

Construction crews attempt to repair the El Vado dam along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The federal government has been unable to find a way to stop seepage behind the steel faceplate dam. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

The beleaguered dam also plays a critical role in providing water to the fast-growing Albuquerque metropolitan area, which is home to almost a million people. As the city grew over the past 100 years, it drained local groundwater, lowering aquifer levels by dozens of feet until the city got a reputation as “one of the biggest water-wasters in the West.” Cities across the region were mining their groundwater in the same way, but Albuquerque managed to turn its bad habits around. In 2008, it built a $160 million water treatment plant that allowed it to clean water from the distant Colorado River, giving officials a new water source to reduce their groundwater reliance.

The loss of El Vado is jeopardizing this achievement. In order for Colorado River water to reach the Albuquerque treatment plant, it needs to travel through the same set of canals and pipelines that deliver Rio Grande water to the city and farmers, “riding” with the Rio Grande water through the pipes. Without a steady flow of Rio Grande water out of El Vado, the Colorado River water can’t make it to the city. This means that in the summer months, when the Rio Grande dries out, Albuquerque now has to turn back to groundwater to supply its thirsty residential subdivisions.

This renewed reliance on groundwater has halted the recovery of local aquifers. The water level in these aquifers was rising from 2008 through 2020, but it slumped out around 2020 and hasn’t budged since.

“We have had to shut down our surface water plant the last three summers because of low flows in Albuquerque,” said Diane Agnew, a senior official at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which manages the region’s water. Agnew stresses that aquifer levels are only flattening out, not falling. Still, losing El Vado storage for the long run would be detrimental to the city’s overall water resilience.

“We have more than enough supply to meet demand, but it does change our equation,” she added.

The Bureau of Reclamation is looking for a way to fix the dam and restore Rio Grande water to Albuquerque, but right now its engineers are stumped. In a recent meeting with local farmers, a senior Reclamation official offered a frank assessment of the dam’s future.

“We were not able to find technical solutions to the challenges that we were seeing,” said Jennifer Faler, the Bureau’s Albuquerque area manager, in remarks at the meeting.

The next-best option is to find somewhere else to store water for farmers. There are other reservoirs along the Rio Grande, including one large dam owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, but repurposing them for irrigation water will involve a lengthy bureaucratic process.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Reclamation told Grist that the agency “is working diligently with our partners to develop a plan and finalize agreements to help alleviate the lost storage capacity” and that it “may have the ability to safely store some water” for farms and cities next year.

In the meantime, farmers like Garcia are getting impatient. When a senior Bureau official broke the bad news at an irrigation district meeting last month, more than a dozen farmers who grow crops in the district stood up to express their frustration with the delays in the repair process, calling Reclamation’s announcement “frustrating” and “a shock.”

“If we don’t have any water for the long term, I have to let my employees go, and I guess start looking for ramen noodles someplace,” Garcia told Grist.

Even though there are only a handful of other steel faceplate dams like El Vado in the United States, more communities across the West are likely to experience similar infrastructure issues that affect their water supply, according to John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico.

“We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow of rivers, and we’re likely to see more and more examples where infrastructure we’ve come to depend on no longer functions the way we planned or intended,” he said.

As the West gets drier and its dams and canals continue to age, more communities may find themselves forced to strike a balance between groundwater, which is easy to access but finite, and surface water, which is renewable but challenging to obtain. The loss of El Vado shows that neither one of these resources can be relied upon solely and consistently — and in an era of higher temperatures and aging infrastructure, even having both may not be enough.

The headwaters of the Rio Grande River in Colorado. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

The University of #Colorado #Boulder secures $750K to improve #drought preparedness in Western U.S.

Click the link to read the release on the University of Colorado website (Susan Glairon):

June 25, 2024

The University of Colorado Boulder has earned a major grant to boost drought monitoring and prediction on the Colorado River.

The $750,000 award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) on campus and the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) is part of $4.9 million in funding being distributed nationally by the Biden-Harris Administration to help western communities better prepare for droughts.

The project, “Improving Hydroclimate Forecasts by Multi-Model Combination Approaches for Enhanced Reservoir Operations on the Colorado River,” aims to develop models that will help water managers and stakeholders enhance the reliability of water supply in the Colorado River Basin. CEAE Professor Rajagopalan Balaji, who is also a CIRES fellow, serves as the principal investigator of the project.

Balaji said the Colorado River’s water supply, the “lifeblood of the southwestern U.S. socio-economy,” has been under severe stress since 2000 due to streamflow reduction from the Millennium Drought and increasing demand.

Professor Rajagopalan Balaji. Photo credit: University of Colorado

“The lack of skillful streamflow forecasts beyond a season has likely contributed to suboptimal water management during this prolonged dry period, exacerbating the water supply stress,” he said. “Developing a skillful streamflow forecasting system is crucial for enabling efficient water resource management and ensuring a sustainable and reliable water supply in the river basin.”

The CEAE-led project will develop new Colorado River Basin streamflow forecast models at 0-24 months lead time. The project will use NOAA’s advanced seasonal prediction systems and new machine learning techniques to improve lead predictions key to water management in the Basin. In addition, the forecasts will be used in the Colorado River Basin Operational Prediction Testbed and with stakeholder engagement to enable efficient water resources decisions.

Additional collaborators on the project include the CU Boulder Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems, NOAA Climate Prediction Center, NOAA Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

How heat domes cause heat waves and high temperatures in the U.S. — The Washington Post #ActOnClimate

Hot air masses, born from the blazing summer sun, expand vertically into the atmosphere, creating a dome of high pressure that diverts weather systems around them. These heat domes can stall and persist over the same region for days to weeks at a time. By U. S. National Weather Service/National Ocean Service

Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Jason Samenow, Artur Galocha and Diana Leonard). Here’s an excerpt:

June 17, 2024

Hot air masses, born from the blazing summer sun, expand vertically into the atmosphere, creating a dome of high pressure that diverts weather systems around them. These heat domes can stall and persist over the same region for days to weeks at a time. As high-pressure systems become firmly established, subsiding air beneath them heats the atmosphere and dissipates cloud cover. The high summer sun angle combined with those cloudless skies then further heat the ground.

But amid drought conditions, the vicious feedback loop doesn’t end there. The combination of heat and a parched landscape can work to make a heat wave even more extreme, intensifying the risk of wildfires as well. With very little moisture in soils, heat energy that would normally be used on evaporation — a cooling process — instead directly heats the air and the ground. Jane Wilson Baldwin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, explains how feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere combine to make heat domes worse.

“When the land surface is drier, it can’t cool itself through evaporation, which makes the surface even hotter, which strengthens the blocking high [heat dome] further,” she said in an interview.

Navajo Dam operations update: Releases bumped to 500 cfs July 3, 2024 #SanJuanRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

The outflow at the bottom of Navajo Dam in New Mexico. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):

As the forecast weather becomes warmer and drier again, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 350 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 500 cfs for tonight, July 3rd, at 9:00 PM.

Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.

This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please contact Susan Behery (sbehery@usbr.gov or 970-385-6560), or visit Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website athttps://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html

#ColoradoRiver Flowing in Its Delta Again, But Restoration Hangs in the Balance: Revived river depends on consensus in binational and domestic negotiations for river management after 2026 — Audubon @audubonsociety #COriver #aridification

Ridgway’s Rail. Photo: Robert Groos/Audubon Photography Awards

Click the link to read the release on the Audubon website (Jennifer Pitt):

May 21, 2024

The Colorado River is flowing again in its delta. While this is welcome news for birds and people, the long-term progress to keep the Colorado River alive in Mexico with habitat restoration and water deliveries depends on high stakes negotiations currently underway.

For the third time since 2021, the United States and Mexico are collaborating to deliver water to improve conditions in the long-desiccated delta. Environmental water deliveries began mid-March and will continue into October, ensuring the river flows through the summer’s heat, making restored riverside forests and wetlands more hospitable to birds like Abert’s Towhees and Crissal Thrashers and other wildlife including beavers and lynxes. We know that birds rely on water in the Delta as they migrate to locations all over the United States.

Restoration in the Colorado River Delta is implemented by Raise the River, a coalition of NGOs including Audubon, in partnership with U.S. and Mexican federal agencies. Funds, water, and collaboration for this work were committed first in Minute 319 and again in Minute 323, the United States–Mexico treaty agreements that have been widely hailed for modernizing Colorado River management with a host of benefits to water users in both countries including rules for sharing water shortages, as well as work to use relatively small volumes of water to revive the delta for wildlife and people. The terms of Minute 323 sunset in 2026, but delta restoration efforts remain a work in progress.

The good news: the United States and Mexico are poised to negotiate a successor agreement to Minute 323 in parallel with new federal rulemaking in the United States for Colorado River management. Domestic Colorado River rules, like the binational agreements, have for decades been the result of consensus-based negotiations, in this setting between the seven Colorado River Basin States with concurrence of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. This domestic rulemaking also has a 2026 deadline.

The bad news: at the moment, the Colorado River Basin states appear to be nowhere near consensus, with disagreements about which states, and which water users, will cut back when there’s not enough to satisfy all. These are difficult and high stakes negotiations. Failure to reach agreement increases the risk of water supply crises and could even throw the dispute in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

That brings me back to the Abert’s Towhees and Crissal Thrashers, the beavers and lynxes in the Delta. If the Colorado River Basin states fail to reach consensus, there’s considerable risk that the work of restoring the Colorado River in its delta comes to a halt. Delta restoration depends on binational consensus, and binational consensus depends on a U.S. domestic consensus. It’s an extraordinarily complex decision-making framework for governance of water supply for 40 million people. The failure to reach consensus may create problems for some people who use Colorado River water, but it is certain to create collateral damage in Colorado River ecosystems including the Delta.

The Tule River Tribe of California recruits an old ally in its fight against wildfires: Beavers — Grist

American beaver, he was happily sitting back and munching on something. and munching, and munching. By Steve from washington, dc, usa – American Beaver, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963858

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Taylar Dawn Stagner):

June 28, 2024

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Beavers were once abundant in North America. Bringing them back could have serious climate benefits.

After a decade of work, the Tule River Tribe has released nine beavers into the nation’s reservation in the foothills of California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains. The beavers are expected to make the landscape more fire and drought resistant. Beaver dams trap water in pools, making the flow of water slower so the surrounding ecosystem can reap the benefits of the moisture while making it more difficult for forest fires to start. They can also help a forest heal after a fire by rehydrating the area.

“We’ve been through numerous droughts over the years,” Kenneth McDarmet said, who is a Tule River tribal member and former councilman. “It’s going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing.”

Around 80 percent of the Tule River Reservation’s drinking water comes from the Tule watershed. Because the area is so important for the health of the community, the tribe has been preparing the area since 2014, building man-made dams to help the new beavers adapt more quickly.

Temperatures worldwide are expected to get hotter, increasing drought and creating conditions that make wildfires bigger and more deadly. In California, some of the worst wildfires on record have happened in the last five years partly due to drought. In 2020, three fires burned almost a million acres in the Sierra Nevada Forest, and in 2021 a wildfire burned an additional 1.5 million acres. Bringing beavers back may offer a break.

Prior to colonization, the North American beaver population was estimated to be around 200 million. But in the 1800’s, beavers were hunted for their pelts by settlers, decimating the population, while farmers and landowners viewed — and still view them — as pests. Today, the beaver population is estimated to be about 12 million.

But in recent years there has been a growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge from tribes, and the beaver has become celebrated as an ecological engineer.

In 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, secured funding for the Beaver Restoration Program, a program designed to restore the beaver population and support conservation efforts. In 2023, the CDFW recognized beavers as a keystone species, an animal that affects other animals on the landscape like bison or bees, and thus influences the ecosystem in major ways. Their absence typically has negative effects on the landscape and its interconnected ecosystems.

Today, the CDFW program partners with tribes, non-profit organizations, land-owners, and state and federal entities to restore beaver populations and habitats in an effort to improve climate change, drought, and wildfire resilience in California.

“We expect better habitat conditions for native critters on the land,” said Krysten Kallum, a public information officer with the CDFW. “It creates a refuge for plants and wildlife.”

More water means more plants that can attract other types of animals to the area. The CDFW expects to see better habitat development for amphibians like the western pond turtles, southern mountain yellow-legged frogs, and southwestern willow flycatchers, which will help increase biodiversity.

McDarment, of Tule River, said that tribal pictographs show beavers living in the area, and it’s good to see them here again.

“My hope is to have beaver throughout the reservation,” he said.

Map showing the Tulare Lake Basin in Central California, USA. Shaded relief data from USGS. Solid blue: Perennial streams Dashed blue: Seasonal streams Dashed light blue: Man-made aqueducts Beige: Dry lake beds. By Shannon1 – PNG version of File:TulareBasinMap.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46989267

Workers begin raising the dam at Gross Reservoir — News on Tap

Click the link to read the article on the Denver Water website (Jay Adams):

June 6, 2024

Take an animated tour of the unique construction process.

Raising the height of a dam involves many steps, literally and figuratively.

After two years of excavation and preparation work on the canyon around Gross Dam, workers in May began placing concrete, starting the three-year process of raising the height of the dam itself.

Denver Water is raising the height of Gross Dam by 131 feet as part of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. Once complete, the dam will be able to store nearly three times as much water in Gross Reservoir, which will add more resiliency and flexibility to Denver Water’s water storage system.

Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Raising the dam is being done by building 118 steps made of roller-compacted concrete. Each step will be 4 feet wide with a 2-foot setback. The existing dam is 340 feet tall. The completed dam will be 471 feet tall.

Check out this animated video to see how the process works.

This animation shows how Denver Water plans to raise the height of Gross Dam in Boulder County, Colorado, as part of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. #grossreservoir #civilengineering #howtoraiseadam

The construction site at the bottom of Gross Dam with equipment used to place concrete and build the new steps. Photo credit: Denver Water.

It will take roughly three years to complete all the steps, with a final completion date set for 2027.

The dam raise process begins at the bottom of the dam using roller-compacted concrete to build the new steps that will go up the face of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Planning and permitting for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project began in 2002. Take a look at this video to learn about the process and major accomplishments.

Denver Water is raising the height of Gross Dam in Boulder County, Colorado as part of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. This video looks at the history of the project and the work being done to raise the dam.

Hurricane Beryl’s rapid intensification and Category 5 winds are alarming: Here’s why more tropical storms are exploding in strength

Hurricane Beryl hit the island of Carriacou, Grenada, on July 1, 2024, with 150 mph sustained winds. NOAA

Brian Tang, University at Albany, State University of New York

Hurricane Beryl was the latest Atlantic storm to rapidly intensify, growing quickly from a tropical storm into the strongest June hurricane on record in the Atlantic. It hit the Grenadine Islands with 150 mph winds and a destructive storm surge on July 1, 2024, then continued to intensify into the basin’s earliest Category 5 storm on record.

The damage Beryl caused, particularly on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, was extensive, Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell told a news briefing. “In half an hour, Carriacou was flattened.”

Beryl’s strength and rapid intensification were unusual for a storm so early in the season. This year, that is especially alarming as forecasters expect an exceptionally active Atlantic hurricane season.

Rapidly intensifying storms can put coastal communities in great danger and leave lasting scars. In 2022, for example, Hurricane Ian devastated portions of Florida after it rapidly intensified. To this day, residents are still recovering from the effects. As Beryl continued across the Caribbean Sea on July 2, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands were under hurricane warnings.

Two satellite images show how the storm became more organized around the eye over a short period of time. — Two satellite images of Beryl taken on June 29, left, and June 30: As Beryl rapidly intensified, an eye formed, and deep thunderstorms wrapped around it. Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere

What causes hurricanes to rapidly intensify, and has climate change made rapid intensification more likely?

I research hurricanes, including how they form and what causes them to intensify, and am part of an initiative sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to better understand rapid intensification. I also work with scientists at the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration to analyze data collected by reconnaissance aircraft that fly into hurricanes. Here’s what we’re learning.

How did Hurricane Beryl intensify so quickly?

Rapid intensification occurs when a hurricane’s intensity increases by at least 35 mph over a 24-hour period. Beryl far exceeded that threshold, jumping from tropical storm strength, at 70 mph, to major hurricane strength, at 130 mph, in 24 hours.

A key ingredient for rapid intensification is warm water. The ocean temperature must be greater than 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius) extending more than 150 feet below the surface. This reservoir of warm water provides the energy necessary to turbocharge a hurricane.

Scientists measure this reservoir of energy as ocean heat content. The ocean heat content leading up to Beryl was already extraordinarily high compared with past years. Normally, ocean heat content in the tropical Atlantic doesn’t reach such high levels until early September, which is when hurricane season typically peaks in activity.

A chart shows ocean heat content over the main development region for hurricanes in the Atlantic much higher in 2024 than any year of the past decade. — Ocean heat content of the Atlantic Ocean region where a large proportion of hurricanes form. The bold red line is 2024’s ocean heat content, and the blue line is the 2013-2023 average. Brian McNoldy/University of Miami

Beryl is a storm more typical of the heart of hurricane season than of June, and its rapid intensification and strength have likely been driven by these unusually warm waters.

In addition to the high ocean heat content, research has shown other environmental factors need to typically align for rapid intensification to occur. These include:

Low vertical wind shear, where the winds steering the hurricane do not change much in strength or direction over the depth of the storm. Strong wind shear makes it difficult for a storm to stay organized and maintain its strength.
A moist atmosphere surrounding the storm, with heavy precipitation encircling the developing eye.

My research has shown that when this combination of factors is present, a hurricane can more efficiently take advantage of the energy it gathers from the ocean to power its winds, versus having to fight off drier, cooler air being injected from around the storm. The process is called ventilation.

Simultaneously, there is an increase in air being drawn inward toward the center, which quickly increases the strength of the vortex, similar to how a figure skater pulls their arms inward to gain spin. Rapid intensification is akin to a figure skater pulling in both their arms quickly and close to their body.

Has climate change affected the likelihood of rapid intensification?

As oceans warm and ocean heat content gets higher with climate change, it is reasonable to hypothesize that rapid intensification might be becoming more common. Evidence does suggest that rapid intensification of storms has become more common in the Atlantic.

Additionally, the peak intensification rates of hurricanes have increased by an average of 25% to 30% when comparing hurricane data between 1971–1990 and 2001–2020. That has resulted in more rapid intensification events like Beryl.

This increase in rapid intensification is due to those environmental factors – warm waters, low vertical wind shear and a moist atmosphere – aligning more frequently and giving hurricanes more opportunity to rapidly intensify.

A chart shows an increase in rapidly intensifying hurricanes over 36 years. — Two long-term datasets show an upward trend in the proportion of Atlantic hurricanes that rapidly intensified from 1982 to 2017. Bhatia et al. (2022)

The good news for anyone living in a region prone to hurricanes is that hurricane prediction models are getting better at forecasting rapid intensification in advance, so they can give residents and emergency managers more of a heads-up on potential threats. NOAA’s newest hurricane model, the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, shows promise to further improve hurricane forecasts, and artificial intelligence could provide more tools to predict rapid intensification.

This article has been updated with Cayman Islands hurricane watch upgraded to a hurricane warning.

Brian Tang, Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science, University at Albany, State University of New York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What’s next after Supreme Court curbs regulatory power: More focus on laws’ wording, less on their goals — The Conversation

Two fishing companies challenged regulations that required Atlantic herring fishers to pay some costs for observers on their boats. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Robin Kundis Craig, University of Kansas

Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law.

The reversal came in a ruling on two fishery regulation cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce.

This decision means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. What’s not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense.

While courts and judges will vary, as a scholar in environmental law, I expect that the demise of Chevron deference will make it easier for federal judges to focus on the exact meaning of Congress’ individual words, rather than on Congress’ goals or the real-life workability of federal laws.

Who decides what the law means?

Chevron deference emerged from a 1984 case that addressed the Environmental Protection Agency’s interpretation of the term “stationary source” in the Clean Air Act. The EPA asserted that a “source” could be a facility that contained many individual sources of air pollutant emissions. This meant, for example, that a factory with several smokestacks could be treated as a single source for regulatory purposes, as if it were enclosed in an imaginary bubble.

In upholding the EPA’s decision, the Supreme Court created a two-step test for deciding whether to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute that it administers.

In Step 1, the court asks whether Congress directly addressed the issue in the statute. If so, then both the court and the agency have to do what Congress directs.

In Step 2, however, if Congress is silent or unclear, then the court should defer to the agency’s interpretation if it is reasonable because agency staff is presumed to be experts on the issue. Justice John Paul Stevens reportedly told his colleagues, “When I am so confused, I go with the agency.”

The central question in both the Loper Bright and Relentless cases was whether the U.S. secretary of commerce could require commercial fishers to pay for onboard observers they were required to bring on some fishing voyages to collect catch data. Lower courts in these cases deferred to the agency’s interpretation that, under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, it could require fishers to pay.

However, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court majority concluded that Chevron deference contradicts the Administrative Procedure Act. This broad law governs both the procedures that federal agencies must follow and, more importantly, the standards that federal courts must use to review agency actions.

As the majority pointed out, under the Administrative Procedure Act, “courts must ‘decide all relevant questions of law’” – explicitly including interpreting statutes.

Curbing the administrative state

Since 1984, Chevron deference has become pervasive in federal administrative law. By the Supreme Court’s count, 70 of its own decisions in that time have turned on Chevron deference.

More importantly, thousands of lower federal court decisions – more than 400 a year on average – have deployed Chevron deference on issues ranging from Social Security benefits to workplace safety standards, immigration eligibility and environmental protection requirements.

Chevron deference gave many federal agencies broad flexibility to use laws to address new and emerging problems that Congress did not anticipate. But some members of the current Supreme Court – as well as some federal appellate judges – criticized this doctrine, for two key reasons.

First, it authorized executive branch agencies to interpret federal law and forced courts to accept agencies’ reasonable interpretations. However, since the Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, it has been the duty of courts – not federal agencies – to say what the law is.

Second, Chevron deference arguably allowed federal agencies to grab more regulatory authority than Congress intended them to have, usurping the legislative branch’s responsibility to make law and delegate authority.

EPA infographic outlining the regulatory process. — Regulatory agencies take general directions written in laws from Congress and develop specific policies to achieve the goals Congress defined. EPA

How much does Loper Bright undo?

The court majority emphasized that prior court decisions upholding agency interpretations based on Chevron deference cannot be challenged solely because of that fact. As Roberts wrote, these holdings “are still subject to statutory stare decisis.”

Stare decisis, or “the thing is decided,” is legalese for why courts will respect prior decisions. In other words, no challenger can go back to a court that relied on Chevron deference and ask the court to change its original decision that the agency’s interpretation was OK.

That’s good so far as it goes. However, many agency interpretations of statutes can be challenged multiple times.

For example, the Clean Water Act protects “waters of the United States.” In 2023, the Biden administration issued new regulations interpreting which bodies of water the law covers. Challengers who disagree with that interpretation can attack the regulations directly and argue that the agencies’ reading of the law is wrong, as the fishing companies did in the Loper Bright cases.

However, under many laws, businesses and individuals can also challenge an agency interpretation at the moment when the agency decides that a general regulation applies specifically to them. These are called “as applied” challenges. After Loper Bright, any time an agency that benefited from Chevron deference goes to apply its interpretation to a new regulated entity, that regulated entity can challenge the agency interpretation – and this time the agency won’t get Chevron deference.

Will federal courts still listen to regulators?

Eliminating Chevron deference will likely worsen an existing division among judges, and justices, about how to go about interpreting statutes. It centers on how much a statute’s purpose and context should matter – or, instead, how much the judge should focus on the “plain meaning” of the particular words that Congress chose to use.

Suppose, for example, that a federal court faced the issue of how to define a vegetable for purposes of determining whether import taxes apply to imported tomato sauce. A plain meaning approach would emphasize that Congress decided to tax vegetables and that tomatoes are fruits; hence, tomato sauce is not subject to the import tax.

An approach focused on Congress’ purpose, in contrast, would emphasize that Congress wanted to tax all imports of savory foods that the public generally considers to be vegetables. Using this approach, the Supreme Court in 1893, in fact, decided that tomatoes were vegetables subject to import taxes.

Federal agencies typically take Congress’ purpose and the context in which regulators act very much into account when they decide what laws mean. For example, when the Food and Drug Administration had to distinguish proteins, which qualify as biologics for regulatory purposes, from chains of amino acids, which qualify as drugs, it focused on Congress’ reasons for creating the two categories. Ultimately, the agency decided that a molecule made up of amino acids had to have a certain level of complexity to qualify as a protein, and hence a biologic.

In contrast, ever since the late Justice Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986, federal judges – and especially Supreme Court justices – have taken an increasingly “plain meaning,” or textualist approach, to statutory interpretation. The current Supreme Court, for example, would almost certainly never have allowed a tomato to be a vegetable.

Dissenting Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, along with many other legal experts, foresee serious problems for future cases that turn on highly technical issues. What will happen when a statute’s nonexpert plain meaning makes no practical sense in a highly technical or scientifically nuanced regulatory regime, such as the FDA classifying biologics and drugs?

Gorsuch, seated, gestures during testimony. — Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, shown during his confirmation hearing on March 22, 2017, argued in 2022 that Chevron deference ‘deserves a tombstone no one can miss.’ AP Photo/Susan Walsh

How long will the APA matter?

This ruling also may signal that the court plans to pay greater attention to the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act’s primacy in federal administrative law. This statute had been in place for almost 40 years when the Supreme Court decided Chevron in 1984, and the Chevron majority did not see it as a problem at the time.

Now, however, it has become a reason to overturn Chevron deference. Other court-created glosses on administrative law may also be dead doctrines walking.

Congress can and has created different standards of review in other statutes, including the Clean Air Act that led to the Chevron decision. What if a future Congress specifically directs that the implementing agency should take the lead in interpreting a particular statute?

I expect that the Supreme Court would reach for the Constitution and declare any such delegation unconstitutional. In other words, it is probably only a matter of time before Loper Bright’s overruling of Chevron deference becomes a matter of federal constitutional law.

This is an updated version of an article originally published January 17, 2024.

Robin Kundis Craig, Professor of Law, University of Kansas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Farmers in El Paso area cope with hotter weather, drier days

by Priscilla Totiyapungprasert, El Paso Matters
June 27, 2024

CLINT, Texas – When pecan farmer Guadalupe Ramirez glanced up at the overcast skies last Friday morning, he felt a sense of relief. The drizzle that came wasn’t much, he said, not like the burst of rainfall parts of El Paso received earlier that week. But still, he welcomed the light sprinkle of rain and cooler temperatures – a break, finally, from the relentless stretch of dry, 100-plus degree weather.

“The skies were gray, but not gray in sadness,” Ramirez said. “I thought ‘Oh, this is nice. It’s going to be a nice day.’”

Ramirez was flood irrigating his trees at Ramirez Pecan Farm that morning. The family-run farm, located in the small town of Clint east of the El Paso city limits, has 300 trees whose fruit are small and green in the summer. As the pecans ripen, the husks will turn brown and crack open, ready for harvest in late fall and winter.

But if the trees don’t get enough water, the pecans drop too early. Last summer’s brutal, record-breaking heat could even affect the quality of this year’s pecans if the orchard doesn’t experience a decent monsoon season, Ramirez said.

El Paso is already on track to have a summer that’s hotter than historical average. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture updated its plant hardiness zone map based on decades of temperature data. El Paso shifted half a zone up because of warmer winters.

New pecans, tiny and green, appear in the foliage of trees at Ramirez Pecan Farm, June 21, 2024. Co-owner Lupe Ramirez says that o save resources, a tree stressed by heat and drought may drop its pecans early, leaving him with a far-reduced crop. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

As climate change and human activities cause higher temperatures, longer heat waves and lower water levels, local farmers have no choice but to adapt if they want to keep their crops alive.

Longer stretches of hotter days “not a one-time deal”

About 9 miles north of Ramirez Pecan Farm, the Loya family also received a sprinkle – not the amount of rain they wanted. Ralph and Marty Loya manage Growing with Sara Farms in Socorro, selling fruit and vegetables from their farm store Bodega Loya, as well as through Desert Spoon Food Hub in El Paso.

Their farm has lost a couple rows of squash already. Workers will have to replant the lost crops, which requires more seed and compost, Marty said.

This June, workers had to harvest crops more quickly because the food can’t sit out in the sun, Marty said. Some food will dry out. Other foods, such as okra, grow bigger and harder. Timing is more critical than ever.

Ralph Loya finds ripe tomato on the vine at Growing With Sara farm, where he employs growing practices he learned from his father and grandfather. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

It’s not just the timing of harvest. The timing of planting has also affected some crops, said Raymond Flores, farm assistant at La Semilla Food Center in Anthony, New Mexico, just west of El Paso.

Last year the first crop of corn planted in early spring didn’t do well, he said. The area experienced a streak of more than five consecutive weeks of triple-digit temperatures in June and July. Prolonged heat stress sterilized the pollen and affected the flowers, which couldn’t produce much corn.

The second planting around the end of May fared better, Flores said. The extreme heat wave had begun to subside by the time the corn stalks began flowering.

Tomato fertility is also particularly sensitive to the heat, he added. Last year’s tomato harvest came later than usual because the plants couldn’t produce until it cooled down. Workers use shade covers for the tomatoes.

Farmers in general are resilient and have already made changes because of the ongoing drought,” said Tony Marmolejo, operations development manager at Desert Spoon Food Hub. But the duration of last year’s high temperatures caught people off guard.

“When we got hit with the heat wave last year, everyone knew it wasn’t a one-time deal,” Marmolejo said. “Local farmers started making adjustments before this one came about.”

A basket of locally-grown carrots at Desert Spoon Food Hub on May 31, 2023. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

Marmolejo coordinates with suppliers, mostly organic farms in El Paso and New Mexico, to place orders based on what they have available.

Desert Spoon Food Hub would usually get baby carrots around this time from a farm in Vado, New Mexico. But the carrots came earlier in the year and for a shorter time, Marmolejo said. So far, he’s seen less tomatoes and asparagus coming in. The squash and peaches aren’t coming in as early either.

“Not everybody got rain,” Marmolejo said of the recent break in weather patterns. “They have to use more water because there’s less moisture in the air, less moisture in the soil. But there’s less water supply, so it’s a no-win situation here.”

The El Paso area normally receives an inch of rain from May through June, but has only received 0.07 inches in the past two months, according to National Weather Service data.

Dwindling water supply also a concern

While most of the Ramirez farm is dedicated to pecan trees, it also grows alfalfa for livestock. But Ramirez said they stopped planting alfalfa in the last couple years because they need to save all the water for the pecan trees.

A grackle flies through an irrigated orchard at Ramirez Pecan Farm, June 21, 2024. The water that floods the orchards attracts animals in the summer heat. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

To plan ahead, workers trim down the trees in the winter so, come summer, there’s less branches to hydrate. It’s a balancing act of quantity and quality. When water is limited, Ramirez has to be efficient if he wants his trees to produce quality pecans.

Ramirez waters his trees through flood irrigation every two to three weeks.

Letting the soil get too dry and start cracking will stress the roots and make it difficult to retain moisture, he said. Older trees have deeper roots that can tap into the underground water basin, but if it’s a dry year, the water basin level also goes down.

If he receives less water from his allotment, he reduces irrigation to just enough to keep the trees alive, but that’s not enough to have the healthiest trees, he said.

His water allotment fluctuates depending on water levels at Elephant Butte reservoir in New Mexico. The reservoir feeds the Rio Grande canal system from which he and other El Paso farmers draw their water.

Lupe Ramirez, co-owner and manager of Ramirez Pecan Farm, shows the size difference between what he says is an average-sized pecan leaf and a leaf whose growth is stunted by heat and drought, June 21, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

Rain helps in ways beyond water conservation. Rainwater has a different profile of nutrients, which includes nitrates, a form of nitrogen, Ramirez explained. The rain also knocks down pests such as aphids from the leaves, he added.

“Maybe it’s wishful thinking,” Ramirez said. “I’m hoping for a good wet season, but climate is changing.”

Monsoon, when the region normally receives the majority of its rainfall, runs from June 15 to Sept. 30. Last year, El Paso received 4 inches of rain, below its historic annual average of 9 inches.

Farmers plan for the future

Ralph Loya has had to water his crops more than usual this past month, using flood irrigation with canal water for the fruit trees and drip irrigation with municipal water for the vegetables. Like Ramirez, he also depends on his allotment from the Rio Grande – a river that’s been a source of irrigation for centuries, but has been choked by increasing development.

His wife, Marty, said they’re considering putting more shade structures on their produce fields as well as a new cover on their greenhouse next year. The shade creates cooler temperatures, which help the soil retain moisture.

Ramirez said he has a shallow well and has thought about installing a deeper well. But wells come with a hefty price tag and don’t address tightening water restrictions, he said.

Lupe Ramirez, co-owner and manager of Ramirez Pecan Farm, poses for a portrait in front of his farm store, where he sells homemade pecan candies and baked goods and raw, unshelled pecans, June 21, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)

If drought and extreme heat waves continue, small farms with less capital and access to resources could get pushed out of the industry, Flores said.

“The best time to take action against climate change is as soon as possible, but there’s only so much we can do,” Flores said. “It’s a giant system. It’s going to take the collective effort of everyone to change.”

This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Opinion: Hoping for a miracle to save the #OgallalaAquifer? Prepare for the new Dust Bowl — The #KansasReflector

In this archive photo, an ATV races along the dry bed of the Arkansas River at Dodge City, Kansas. Because of irrigation and other factors, the river has been dry since the late 1970s. Max McCoy

Click the link to read the guest column on the Kansas Reflector website (Max McCoy):

June 30, 2024

In the summer of 1894, a curious railway car plied the tracks of western Kansas, a chemical soup wafting to a sky ruled by a demon sun and chastened by moisture-devouring winds. At the helm of this experiment on wheels, owned by the Rock Island railroad, was a 32-year-old train dispatcher who had convinced railway officials and town leaders across the state that he had the secret to make it rain.

The aspiring rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, was an instant celebrity in a parched land thirsting for heroes. Rock Island officials were so confident of his ability they eventually designated three cars for his rain-making experiments, which by their count had succeeded in all of 52 attempts.

Jewell kept the concoction of chemicals he sent to the sky a closely held secret and scoffed at others who said they had achieved similar results with his method. In an 1895 letter to his hometown newspaper, the Topeka State Journal, he boasted that if only he had the necessary equipment he would “wager my life itself that I could produce rain in ten minutes in the clearest of skies.”

Jewell traversed western Kansas in his rainmaking car during the worst drought in Kansas that anybody could remember and the seventh straight year of crop failures. The drought had lasted an agonizing 20 months. The resulting economic chaos had ruined farmers and threatened the businesses, like railroads, that depended on profits from hauling and selling crops.

At Clay Center, W.I. Allen, assistant general manager of the Rock Island line, had in April sat in his private car at Clay Center, and surveyed the dry Kansas prairie.

“We will stop this thing,” Allen declared, as reported by the Kinsley Mercury. “We will send our rainmakers into southern and western Kansas, temper this heat and save the corn crop.”

But no relief was to come.

Map of the Arkansas River drainage basin. Created using USGS National Map and NASA SRTM data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79039596

“The great Arkansas Valley, one of the richest west of the Missouri River, with its great underflow of water, is to-day a vast desolate waste,” reported the New York Times in August 1894. “Hundreds of square miles of fine crops have been burned up in less than three days, and the cornstalks are scarcely worth cutting for fodder, as all the blades will fall to pieces when handled.”

The harsh reality of agriculture beyond the 100th Meridian, which runs through Dodge City and roughly separates the arid western third of the state from its more humid majority, was already well known. John Wesley Powell, the Grand Canyon explorer and director of the U.S. Geological Survey during the late 19th century, had argued that plans for settlement and development west of the line should be different because of the lack of water. Powell’s warning was ignored, according to Wallace Stegner’s 1954 book on Powell and the West, “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.”

After the Civil War, a myth took hold on the Great Plains that “rain follows the plow.” This phrase, which expanded on previous notions that once broken the sod would absorb rain like a sponge, was coined in 1881 by Charles Dana Wilber, a journalist and land speculator. Simply planting lush green crops, Wilber wrote, would cool the earth and attract showers.

Many homesteaders staked their futures on the belief that simply breaking ground for crops would attract enough precipitation to allow rain beyond the 100th Meridian, and for a few years it seemed to work. Then came trials that must have seemed Biblical in nature: the locusts and the periodic droughts and terrifying twisters. The economic spasms of bust and boom continued until the Dust Bowl of the 1930s wiped just about everyone out, with southwest Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle at the center of the disaster.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s wiped out Midwestern farmers and prompted a mass migration. (Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress)

The Dust Bowl was the result of severe drought, economic collapse, and poor soil conservation. It was an environmental crisis made worse by greed and bad decisions, and it prompted one of the largest migrations in American history. By 1940, some 2.5 million people had abandoned the plains states. Powell’s warning about settlement west of the 100th Meridian had proven true.

After World War II, technology provided a solution to the problem of farming in the arid West: irrigation.

Flood irrigation — photo via the CSU Water Center

In western Kansas and most of the Great Plains in the first decades of the last century, irrigation meant “flood irrigation.” It was an inefficient method of flooding cropland by diverting the flow of water from a river by way of a canal (or “ditch” as they are mostly called in the West). Ditches are still used to move water from one place to another, but by far the most water used in agriculture in western Kansas is groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer. The aquifer is one of the world’s largest and lies beneath eight states, from South Dakota to Texas.

McGuire, V.L., and Strauch, K.R., 2022. Data from U.S. Geological Survey.

In the 1950s, it was thought the water in the aquifer was inexhaustible. More and more wells were drilled to reach the aquifer and new delivery methods, chiefly center point irrigation, revolutionized farming. But unlike surface water such as that found in a river, with a relatively quick recharge from rain and snow, the groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer is prehistoric. It is recharged on a geological time scale. Now we know the aquifer is not inexhaustible. In some places, such as beneath the community of Jetmore, north of Dodge City, the aquifer is already nearing depletion. That depletion is accelerated by climate change and continued over pumping of water.

Once the water is gone, it’s gone for the rest of our lifetimes — and because geologic recharge is so slow, several hundred or perhaps thousands of lifetimes to come. Kansas Reflector’s Allison Kite, in partnership with Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy, reported in May that despite the grim prognosis, one of the state’s locally controlled water management districts has resisted adopting meaningful water conservation methods.

Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District 3, perched just above the Oklahoma panhandle in the extreme southwest corner of Kansas, is under fire for its travel expenses, lack of a formal conversation policy and its alienation of farmers who would like to conserve water. Despite a budget of $1 million, it has spent little of it on conservation, although executive director Mark Rude argues everything the district does is in the name of conservation. But in contrast to other districts, District 3 is clearly lagging.

The state’s five groundwater management districts were established in the 1970s, according to the Kansas Geological Survey. In 2020, for example, Groundwater Management District 1 used a state law that allows for the creation of “Limited Enhanced Management Areas” to commit farmers to reduce consumption by 50% over seven years.

By 2026, according to a new state law, all districts — including District 3 — will be forced to submit reports to the Legislature and file a water conservation action plan with the state’s chief engineer.

Much of the resistance in District 3 is cultural. Locals like being in control, dislike being told what to do, and consider their legacy water rights sacred. On the district’s website you can read about how the district was organized to “provide for the stabilization of agriculture by establishing the right of local users to determine their own destiny with respect to the use of groundwater.”

Such declarations ignore the rest of us, who have a reasonable right to expect that prehistoric groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer should belong to us all. But Kansas water rights are based on the “first in time — first in right” principle, which means the earliest users are given priority.

Kansas Aqueduct route via Circle of Blue

Perhaps the thinking of District 3 officials is best represented by a couple of stunts in which thousands of gallons of Missouri River water was trucked 400 miles to southwest Kansas. The project was meant to drum up support for an aqueduct that would take water from the Missouri River in northeast Kansas to a reservoir in Utica. Since water flows downhill, and taking water to the west in Kansas is literally an uphill battle, 15 pumping stations would be required. The ground-hugging aqueduct — really, just a glorified ditch — would cost an estimated $18 billion to build and another billion a year in ongoing costs.

The Kansas aqueduct is a nutty idea, but one that has taken root among some individuals in western Kansas desperate for a solution to continue irrigation after the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. Aside from its expense and impracticality, it is a regressive idea that harkens back to the days of ditches and avoids a conversation about us having squandered the resource beneath our feet. It also ignores any objections the folks on the other side of the Missouri River, in Iowa and Missouri, might have to say about us taking water from a river we share.

Sprinklers irrigate a field in Hamilton County, Kansas, where some farmers have petitioned to be removed from a local groundwater management district. State lawmakers are pressuring the district to do more to conserve water in the Ogallala Aquifer. (Allison Kite/Kansas Reflector)

The aqueduct is something our 1890s rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, might have understood. At least, he might have appreciated how desperate some folks are to believe in a solution that doesn’t really address the problem.

The problem is that agriculture in the state is unsustainable beyond the 100th Meridian without irrigation. Instead of an anomaly, the magnitude of drought that drove the Dust Bowl can be expected to occur with alarming frequency.

“Paleoclimatic data collected for western Kansas indicate a drought as severe as the Dust Bowl occurs there, on average, three to four times a century, according to a Kansas Geological Survey circular. “Based on that probability, there is a 35% chance for a severe drought year in any decade, a 70% chance within a 20-year span, and a 100% chance over the estimated 40-year working lifetime of a western Kansas farmer.”

The new law that requires District 3 to deliver a water conservation action plan was passed in response to the Kansas Water Authority saying last year that the state’s longstanding policy of simply slowing depletion was insufficient to protect the Ogallala aquifer. The law is a step toward the state taking control of water management from local districts if consumption continues to outpace conservation.

The battle over the aquifer’s decline pits good policy against powerful agricultural and political interests. Add to the mix the independence that seems woven into the cultural fabric of southwestern Kansas, and you have the ingredients for a water war that might define the region for decades to come.

But this is one war we may already have lost.

We’ve already killed the Arkansas River in western Kansas, leaving just a dry bed behind. Every other river and stream and creek in that third of the state has also vanished. The natural recharge just isn’t enough to keep water in them. Worse, climate change appears to be driving the arid zone to the east, creating an even bigger water crisis.

About a third of Kansas counties are currently in a moderate to severe drought, with some of the worst conditions in the area served by District 3, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The drought puts pressure on farmers to pump more water instead of voluntarily committing to conserve. It’s difficult to get people to do the right thing when it’s against their economic interests.

If only Jewell’s apparatus had really worked.

The rainmaking railway car was inspected in 1892 by a newspaper reporter who described the mysteries within.

“Inside the laboratory part of the car a wide shelf about two feet from the floor extends from one end to the other,” the correspondent wrote. “On this are many curious-looking bottles and boxes said to contain the chemicals from which the rain producing gases are made.”

There were also pipes, bottles, other laboratory apparatus, and a 24-cell battery. Jewell said the gases produced would rise to 8,000 feet, then condense, creating a vacuum that would be filled with moisture — and produce rain.

“There are many thinking people in Kansas who believe absolutely in Jewell’s rain-making system, and they are encouraging him in every possible way,” wrote the observer. In other quarters, however, Jewell’s work was received with skepticism, and sometimes superstition, as those who prayed for rain regarded his apparatus as the work of the devil.

Jewell died in Coffeyville in 1906, aged 44, from pneumonia.

“For two or three seasons Mr. Jewell did little else besides operating this (rainmaking) car and apparatus,” noted his obituary in the Topeka Capital, “but it was finally abandoned.”

No rainmaker, no aqueduct, and no prayer will save western Kansas from the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The best we can hope for is to reduce consumption, buy a little more time, and adjust to a changing climate and economy. It is time to heed the warning John Wesley Powell gave us so long ago — and prepare for the new Dust Bowl.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

#Aurora defends plans to export #ArkansasRiver Basin water — Heart of the Rockies Radio

Rocky Mountain vista from State Highway 82 near Twin Lakes, Colorado, U.S.A. Photo credit: Joe Stone/Heart of the Rockies Radio

Click the link to read the article on the Heart of the Rockies Radio website (Joe Stone):

July 1, 2024

Multiple officials with the City of Aurora, the third-largest municipal water provider in Colorado, attended the June board meeting of the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District in Salida to discuss their recent purchase of water rights in the Arkansas River Basin.

Aurora paid $80.4 million to buy an Otero County farming operation, including water rights used to irrigate 4,806 acres – about 7,500 acre-feet of water per year, depending on the annual conditions like snowpack and streamflows. Most of those rights are shares in the Catlin Canal Co.

The purchase has been condemned by Chaffee County and the Upper Ark Conservancy District as well as the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District. Both conservancy districts claim that exporting the water to Aurora will violate various terms of intergovernmental agreements, or IGAs, signed in 2003.

The 2003 IGA between Aurora and the Southeastern District states, “Aurora shall not initiate or seek to implement any further permanent transfer of water rights … from sources in the Arkansas River basin” for the next 40 years.

Interruptible Water Supply Agreements

During the meeting, Rick Kienitz, Arkansas Basin water resources manager for Aurora, acknowledged that the city plans to export its newly acquired water three out of every 10 years for at least 30 years using an Interruptible Water Supply Agreement, or IWSA.

IWSAs allow the State Engineer (Division of Water Resources) to approve temporary changes of water use for three out of 10 years without the due process provided by Water Court, which provides a higher degree of protection for water rights that could be injured by changes in water use.

In 2003, the same year that Aurora signed its IGAs with the Southeastern and Upper Ark water conservancy districts, the General Assembly passed legislation (HB 03-1334) allowing these temporary changes of water use.

IWSAs allow water rights owners to lease water for uses other than the court-approved use for that water – e.g., a farmer who owns an irrigation right can lease his water to a city for municipal or industrial use. In this case, Aurora is leasing out the farm and promising to keep the water on the farm for seven out of 10 years.

Prior to 2003, changes of water use had to be approved in Water Court. HB 03-1334 circumvented Water Court, and 10 years later, HB 13‐1130 allowed for IWSAs to be re-approved twice for a total of 30 years.

Aurora was a major supporter of this legislation, which allows the city to export 30% of its Ark Basin water out of the basin over the course of 30 years, and as Kienitz noted, Aurora already gets 25% of its municipal water from the Arkansas Basin.

At the Upper Ark meeting, board member Mike Shields emphasized that Aurora’s plans would take 30% of its newly purchased water out of the basin for decades, which seems to be at odds with the IGAs.

Kienitz asserted that the transfer of this water does not violate the IGAs because it is temporary.

Upper Ark board member Tom Goodwin, who also serves on the Southeastern District board, said the original intent of the IGAs was that “Aurora would not buy more water in the Arkansas Valley.”

Aurora’s plan “seems like a shell game,” Goodwin said. “It gives the impression that, ‘We’ll try to manipulate this any way we can.’ And a lot of our constituents are saying very loudly, ‘Don’t let Aurora take another drop of water.’”

Upper Ark attorney Kendall Burgemeister pointed out that state law does not allow Aurora to use an IWSA “in perpetuity. So eventually, you’ll have to go to Water Court.”

Kienitz said Aurora would “go to the legislature to address that” in order to avoid Water Court, essentially admitting that Aurora will continue to use its political influence to erode state water law enshrined in the Colorado Constitution* – i.e., to continue taking 30% of its Ark Basin water for as long as possible.

Moving Water Upstream

When Upper Ark General Manager Terry Scanga asked if Aurora is planning on drying up all 4,800 acres of farmland in a single year, Kienitz replied, “We can’t rotate acreage” for more than 4,000 acres because the IGAs are more restrictive than the IWSA legislation.

Scanga asked how Aurora plans to move that much water out of the basin in a single year.

“When this is needed, it will be a dry year,” Kienitz responded. “There should be storage space in reservoirs.”

Aurora needs reservoir storage because the process of transferring water from Aurora’s Otero County farming operation into the city’s municipal water system is complicated.

First, it requires a “reservoir exchange” of water – i.e., Catlin Canal water is traded for water stored upstream in Pueblo Reservoir, normally Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water.

Moving water upstream through an administrative or decreed physical exchange is only possible when river flows are sufficient to permit the exchange without injuring senior water rights between the two exchange points.

In dry years exchange potential is limited, but Kienitz did not address this limitation when responding to Scanga’s question.

Little by little, when river flows allow, Aurora can exchange its water into Pueblo Reservoir, built as part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which brings water into the Arkansas River from the West Slope.

Once Aurora exchanges its Catlin Canal water into Pueblo Reservoir, it plans to trade that water for Fry-Ark Project water in Twin Lakes.

From Twin Lakes, the water could then be diverted and pumped into the South Platte Basin through the Otero Pipeline, jointly owned by Aurora and Colorado Springs.

As stated in the Upper Ark District’s resolution opposing Aurora’s plan, trading water from Pueblo Reservoir for water in Twin Lakes and then exporting it through the Otero Pipeline would reduce Arkansas River flows between Twin Lakes and Pueblo Reservoir.

Preserving Agriculture

Kienitz repeatedly emphasized Aurora’s commitment to preserving agriculture in the Arkansas Basin. He said Aurora plans to maintain ag production on the newly acquired Otero County property by leasing it to “a farming company.”

Upper Ark board member Bill Donley, a rancher in Custer County, asked Keinitz, “How do you keep an alfalfa field if you dry it up?” (Alfalfa is a perennial crop, but in Colorado, it requires irrigation to survive year-to-year.)

“You can’t,” Kienitz replied, so we’ve addressed that through the lease with the farmer to compensate for that loss,” adding that the farmer could also look at growing dryland crops.

According to long-time farmers like Matt Heimrich, attempts at dryland farming on dried-up Ark Basin farmland have not succeeded.

Heimrich farms in Crowley County, which borders Otero County, and he said he’s never seen a dryland crop in Crowley County, nor has his family, which came to the county in the 1950s.

Heimrich told the Colorado Springs Gazette that dryland farming “is a terrible challenge” because soils change after decades of farming. “It’s not that healthy, native soil that you would see on the prairie. … It’s very silty, and when the ground has been used for crop rotation, its ability to sustain dryland seeding or farming is diminished.”

Farmer vs. Developer

The “farmer” with whom Aurora has contracted to run a profitable agricultural business is C&A Companies.

C&A Companies is registered with the State of Colorado as a “holding company,” and its website identifies C&A as “a diversified real estate firm based in Denver.”

The website also states, “C&A and its stakeholders currently own and control one of the largest privately owned water holdings in the West. … The principals … sit on the boards of various metropolitan districts,” which include municipal water operations.

One of those principals is C&A co-founder Karl Nyquist, whose background is in real estate and investment banking.

As Marianne Goodland wrote in a 2018 Colorado Springs Gazette article, “Nyquist isn’t a farmer. He’s a developer with a portfolio of multimillion dollar deals all along the Front Range. He’s also been generous with political contributions over the past half-dozen years.”

Writing for the Pueblo Chieftain in 2011, Chris Woodka reported that Nyquist attempted to export up to 12,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Arkansas Basin to growing Front Range communities in the South Platte Basin.

Nyquist proposed building a $350-million, 150-mile pipeline to move the water but withdrew the proposal in the face of stiff opposition from Lower Ark Basin farming communities.

“Mr. Nyquist claims his pipeline would benefit Prowers County,” reads a Chieftain editorial from 2011. “We think he’s peddling snake oil.”

The Chieftain criticized another of Nyquist’s efforts to remove water from Ark Basin farmland in 2016, stating, “Nyquist has a notorious history of diverting agricultural water from the Arkansas River Valley to the Northern Colorado cities surrounding Denver. … We don’t trust Nyquist.”

Photo: Twin Lakes Reservoir is part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. For Aurora to use its newly acquired water, it will need to get the water into Twin Lakes and then pump it into the South Platte River Basin through the Otero Pipeline.

* During the past 15 years, Ken Baker’s reports to the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District have warned that legislative efforts to bypass Water Court are undermining constitutional water law. Baker played a key role in establishing the District, served as its attorney for many years, and consulted with the District on legislative matters until his recent retirement.

Related coverage:
Conservancy District opposes major water purchase by Aurora
Upper Ark District, Chaffee County condemn Aurora water plans

How conservative judges secured a ‘chain saw’ to derail environmental rules — The Washington Post

Coyote Gulch’s Leaf charging at Red Rock Hyundai in Grand Junction May 23, 2023. The Biden administration’s effort to boost sales of electric vehicles while cutting emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles could face a tough test in the courts

Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Maxine Joselow). Here’s an excerpt:

July 1, 2024

Three years ago, President Biden promised to “deliver a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis,” including by making half of all new cars electricby 2030. Now the Supreme Court has imperiled that broad agenda — and possibly other climate and environment rules for decades to come. In recent rulings, particularly two last week, the high court added obstacles tothe government’s ability to regulate air pollution, water pollution and the greenhouse gases that are heating Earth. The decisions could empower conservative judges on lower courts throughout the country to block even more environmental regulations — not only under Biden but presidents who follow him. The recent rulings are “especially valuable for conservative judges who are inclined towards striking down [environmental] regulations,” said Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at the environmental law firm Earthjustice. “They had a knife before; they have a chain saw now.”

On Thursday, the Supreme Court put on hold the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan for cutting industrial air pollution that wafts across state lines. On Friday, the justices overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine, severely limiting the power of federal agencies to regulate fundamental aspects of American life, including the environment. And court rulings in 2022 and 2023 targeted the EPA’s authority to curb greenhouse gases and to protect wetlands from runoff. Together, the decisions underscore how a multiyear campaign by industry and conservative groups is successfully weakening the power of the administrative state, and the EPA in particular.

Group to focus on water for the environment: State officials want more flow targets in stream management plans — @AspenJournalism #EagleRiver

The Eagle River, left, flows into the Colorado River near Dotsero. The Eagle River Coalition recently completed its community water plan, which outlines environmental flow deficits, but does not make recommendations on how to get more water into rivers. CREDIT: BETHANY BLITZ/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Bethany Blitz):

June 13, 2024

In an effort to elevate the needs of the environment in water management, the state of Colorado is convening a new committee that is scheduled to begin meeting this summer.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board and Boulder-based nonprofit River Network are creating a pilot program known as the Environmental Flows Cohort, which will assess how much water is needed to maintain healthy streams and how to meet these flow recommendations. The cohort will include not just environmental advocates, but agricultural and municipal water users, who may initially feel threatened by environmental flow recommendations.

The goal of the program is to address the barriers that lead to these recommendations being excluded from local stream management plans. The cohort was one of the recommendations in a January 2023 analysis of SMPs by the River Network.

“The idea is how can the environmental and recreation side of things better partner with the agricultural users on trying to find win-win projects for keeping more water in the stream,” said Brian Murphy, director of the healthy rivers program at the River Network. “An emphasis on making sure stream management plans identify and prioritize projects that include environmental flows, that’s been kind of a shortfall.”

An objective of Colorado’s 2015 Water Plan was to create SMPs for most of the state’s important streams by 2030. SMPs are meant to focus on water for the environment and recreation, which are “nonconsumptive” needs where “using” the water means that it stays in streams. The idea is that these flow targets could then result in projects designed to get that agreed-upon amount of water in streams.

SMPs were originally intended as a tool to legitimize and enhance the role of environmental and recreation groups in water management, but a 2022 report by the River Network found that focusing on water to maintain a healthy environment was inconsistent, problematic and unpopular among the stakeholders who were creating the SMPs. Just 6% of project recommendations at the time focused on environmental flow targets and only 1% focused on recreation flow targets, even though SMPs were supposed to have been a tool specifically for the benefit of nonconsumptive water uses.

In some cases, the SMPs broadened in scope and morphed into Integrated Water Management Plans that included an agricultural water needs assessment and ditch inventories.

“One of the big challenges, it was found, was just a lot of perceived negativity regarding flow recommendations,” said Andrea Harbin Monahan, a watershed scientist with CWCB. “There’s a perceived animosity between the recreation community versus agriculture, for example. Figuring out a way to get all those people into one room and start those conversations early and build trust early in the process are hopefully the outcomes of this environmental cohort.”

Under the bedrock principle of Colorado water law, the oldest water rights, which belong to agriculture and cities, get first use of rivers and other user groups have historically had trouble making inroads. The actions of the biggest irrigators often have an influence on how much water is left flowing in the stream, and there are few ways to guarantee there is enough for ecosystems and wildlife. The CWCB holds instream flow water rights intended to “preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree.” But the oldest of these date to the 1970s — about a century younger than the most powerful agricultural water rights, which limits their effectiveness.

As climate change squeezes water supply and creates shortages for all users, it also ratchets up the tension between groups that take water out of the river and groups that want to leave it in.

Homestake Creek is a tributary of the Eagle River. The Eagle River Coalition recently completed its community water plan, which outlines environmental flow deficits, but does not make recommendations on how to get more water into rivers. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Eagle River Community Water Plan

The Eagle River Coalition is an organization dedicated to advocating for the health of the Eagle River. After five years of community meetings and technical work, the group recently released the Eagle River Community Water Plan. The plan provides an assessment of current conditions on the Eagle and its tributaries, and what conditions may look like with future risks such as climate change, more municipal water demands and new reservoir projects that take more water to the Front Range.

“The main takeaway to me is that we’re going to see low flows and less water in the river, so we as a community have to figure out how are we going to prioritize keeping our river flowing,” said James Dilzell, executive director of the Eagle River Coalition. “Figuring out how to have more water in the river is going to be absolutely critical.”

The plan is meant, in part, to provide an understanding of environmental and recreational needs gaps and how they are affected by high and low flows and increasing demands for water in Eagle County and on the Front Range.

But although the plan includes a section about environmental flow deficits, which is the amount of water that would be needed to meet the CWCB’s instream flow water right during a typical year, it — like most SMPs — does not set a target amount for flows.

This map in the Eagle River Community Water Plan shows the environmental flow deficits on the Eagle River and its tributaries. The EDFs reflect the amount of water that would be needed to meet the Colorado Water Conservation Board Instream Flow water right in a typical year. CREDIT: EAGLE RIVER COMMUNITY WATER PLAN

Seth Mason, a hydrologist with Carbondale-based Lotic Hydrological, helped author the Eagle River plan and will be participating in the cohort. He said putting a number on exactly how much water the river needs at different times of year under different future climate and development scenarios is complicated. For example, it might be the case that the only way for a section of river to meet a certain flow target is to build a reservoir to control releases, but a new reservoir project could be at odds with what the community wants.

“What we didn’t do was develop a prescriptive flow regime,” Mason said. “And that, I think, is what a lot of people end up looking for. … I think providing the nuance necessary for people to do critical thinking about trade-offs is more valuable than drawing the perfect stream flow regime, which there is no such thing.”

Dilzell said he is interested in learning more about flow recommendations on the Eagle River and its tributaries, and the completion of the community water plan is just the first step in local watershed management.

Still, river flows can be a proxy for ecosystem health, and some say target recommendations are essential. Bart Miller, healthy rivers director with environmental group Western Resource Advocates, said stream flow recommendations are the bedrock for protecting the environment. WRA is helping to facilitate the cohort.

“Flow has an impact on water quality, temperature, habitat — everything from spawning cues for fish to just keeping them alive when flows are getting low at the end of the summer,” Miller said. “There’s a wide range of benefits from having a clear picture of what stream needs are and articulating recommendations on how to improve or protect what the flows look like.”

Although they are not required in order to get state funding for SMPs, CWCB officials would still like the groups that develop SMPs to come up with flow recommendations. Harbin Monahan said the cohort will be a way to work through barriers, understand the contentious nature of the topic and build trust among stakeholders so that more SMPS can have flow recommendations in the future.

“The entire idea behind stream management plans was to help support the environment and recreation community and help them meet the flow needs for specific uses,” she said. “It’s OK if stream management plans don’t come out with a flow recommendation. It’s not typically required, but it is a desired outcome.”

The River Network and CWCB are taking applications for the Environmental Flows Cohort and plan to choose 15 to 20 participants to begin meeting in July. The cohort plans to meet five times between July and next spring and will develop a training program for local watershed groups to follow when they create SMPs.

This story ran in the June 17 edition of The Aspen Times and the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent, the Craig Daily Press, the Steamboat Springs Pilot & Today and the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

Map of the Eagle River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69310517

In #Colorado, new scrutiny and possible fixes coming for drinking water in mobile home parks: State officials got a head start on a new testing program at one community in Western Colorado — The Water Desk

New Castle back in the day via the Red Slipper Diary

Click the link to read the article on The Water Desk website (Eleanor Bennett):

May 16, 2024

In western communities, mobile home parks provide a more affordable place to live, but residents often face problems with their drinking water.

In Colorado, a new law gives the state authority to test water quality in these communities and force owners to fix any issues.

The state plans to start testing the water at hundreds of parks across the state this summer. Officials have already gotten a head start at one community in Western Colorado that helped spur the legislation.

Apple Tree Park sits on the banks of the Colorado River just across from the town of New Castle.

Silvia Barragán moved to the park in 2015. Her street is lined with trees and she has a big yard with a garden.

“Some people might look at this as just a trashy mobile park, but it’s not,” Barragán said. “It’s a nice, nice neighborhood. There’s a lot of kids in the summer running around and there’s a lot of elderly people that have lived here most of their lives.”

Barragán is originally from Michoacán, Mexico, and she raised her family in western Colorado. Her experience at Apple Tree Park over the last decade has mostly been positive.

“Since I moved here, I felt peaceful and at home,” Barragán said. “My neighbors are great neighbors and I haven’t had any issues in Apple Tree except the water.”

For years, Barragán and her neighbors have been speaking out about the discolored water that comes out of their taps.

“It’s kind of brownish, yellowish. It’s kind of nasty,” she said. “It’s like river water, like if I’m camping and I go get river water, that’s what it looks like.”

Barragán only wears black now because the water stains her clothes and laundry, and it ruins her appliances.

It has an unpleasant smell and taste, so she fills up water jugs at the local grocery store.

“I buy water,” Barragán said. “I buy water for cooking, I buy water for drinking, I buy water for the dogs.”

When the state tested the water at Apple Tree Park, they found it meets federal EPA standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act, passed in 1974, but it has higher than normal levels of heavy metals such as iron and manganese. The park is supplied by groundwater wells, and is outside the limits of the nearby town of New Castle, which draws the majority of its drinking supply from a nearby creek.

Joel Minor used to manage the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s environmental justice program, and said Apple Tree’s situation — of heavy metals showing up in underground well water — is pretty common.

“Because of the taste and color and odor of the water, it can be unpleasant to drink and can cause other issues,” Minor said. “We recognize that that creates challenges for park residents and may require them to spend money on things like bottled water or repairing or replacing appliances.”

While Apple Tree’s overall water system meets federal health standards for drinking, a recent round of testing this winter found that a few samples out of the 200 taken had manganese levels that were above the EPA’s health advisory for infants. High levels of manganese can negatively impact babies’ brain development.

When the state got the test results back in February, they worked with the park owner—Utah-based company Investment Property Group (IPG)—to notify residents and local health officials about the issue.

“What we want folks to know is to be cautious about using tap water from the park for making formula for infants under the age of six-months-old,” Minor said. “These particular locations where this occurred seem to be spots where maybe the water isn’t being flushed quite as well.”

With the passage of the Mobile Home Park Water Quality Act in 2023, the state’s been working with IPG to do more regular testing and to fix the water issues. The company didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

In 2020, IPG bought the mobile home park from the local Talbott family, which had owned the park since its inception. The company has properties across 13 states, including more than 110 mobile home parks, according to the Mobile Home Park Home Owners Allegiance’s online database.

The state has been having regular meetings with IPG, Garfield County health officials, local advocacy groups and park residents to come up with a variety of ways to improve the water.

“One key short-term solution that we’ve been working with the park on is flushing the water system more frequently, which can help remove iron and other metals that have accumulated in the system,” Minor said. “We’ve also worked with that same coalition to put on an informational webinar about how to do in-home flushing for appliances like water heaters and pipes so that residents are also able to flush their own water systems.”

Another short-term fix already underway is putting in water stations where residents can fill up jugs for cooking and drinking.

The state is providing direct funding to the park in the form of an assistance grant to help install these stations. One has already been installed at a local school across from the mobile home park that’s also owned by IPG, and the company plans to install a second by early June in a communal area near the entrance to the park.

“That was something we came up with based on feedback from park residents that folks are having to drive across the river and across the highway into New Castle to fill water jugs for drinking and other purposes,” Minor said. “So these are key short-term solutions, but we recognize they don’t address the root cause of the problem.”

To address the root cause, the state is proposing bigger engineering solutions like installing a filtration system, or even connecting Apple Tree to a municipal water supply.

But Apple Tree is just one of about 750 mobile home parks in Colorado. The new legislation gives the state authority to test, but the full scope of just how bad water quality could be at those parks, and the costs to fix the various causes could easily begin to rise as testing ramps up.

There is additional funding available for park owners to make these system-wide changes, and if they don’t, the state could impose fines until the problem is fixed.

“We are really trying to prioritize solutions that won’t increase rent for park residents by either looking at lower cost options or ways of getting outside funding that can ensure that some of those costs don’t get passed on to residents,” Minor said. “We know that passing along the cost could potentially make the equity challenges that are already at play worse if residents have to pay more for their water bills or their space rents.”

Alex Sanchez leads the Glenwood Springs-based Latine advocacy nonprofit Voces Unidas, which worked with Apple Tree residents and Democratic Colorado House Representative Elizabeth Velasco of Glenwood Springs to pass the water quality legislation.

“We’re not opposed to getting state dollars and federal dollars to be able to support or incentivize some of these solutions,” Sanchez said. “But ultimately, we believe it’s the responsibility of those corporate owners who have been making a lot of profit off the backs of hardworking folks without having access to, you know, quality water, potentially sidewalks, infrastructure and other benefits that many of us take for granted.”

For Sanchez and Voces Unidas, the new law is just the first step in addressing a widespread environmental justice issue — many people living in these communities have lower incomes, don’t speak English as a first language, don’t have access to resources to file complaints, and are Latines or other people of color.

“The issue is not just contained to one or two parks. Something is happening in these mobile home park communities and because they’re not regulated, there’s not a lot of accountability,” Sanchez said. “Many of these communities across Colorado are owned by corporations that are from out of state.”

In a recent statewide poll in Colorado, Voces Unidas found 41% of mobile home park residents surveyed did not trust or drink their water.

Since 2020, the state’s health and environment department has received 66 formal water quality complaints from 42 parks. State officials estimate that it will take them four years to test the water at all of Colorado’s roughly 750 parks.

For her part, Apple Tree Park resident Silvia Barragán is glad that her community is at the top of the state’s list.

“When I bought this place, I thought I was gonna retire here,” Barragán said. “So I would be sad to think that I need to buy another place just because, you know, I haven’t seen any change.”

Barragán hopes the new legislation will speed things up, but she doesn’t know how much longer she can wait for clean water.

This story was produced by Aspen Public Radio, in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

‘Let’s get this river fixed up’: #ColoradoRiver to benefit from restoration efforts proposed as part of land exchange in Summit and Grand counties — Summit Daily #BlueRiver #COriver #aridification

Map of the Blue River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69327693

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

June 8, 2024

The restoration work is proposed along a section of the Blue River near its confluence with the Colorado River in Kremmling

If a land exchange in Summit and Grand counties is completed, this ¾ mile stretch of the river could be Rosgen’s next project. The Bureau of Land Management approved the Blue Valley of Land Exchange last year. After dismissing public protests against the exchange last month, the federal bureau is now queuing up the final steps required to complete the land swap. The land exchange between the federal government and Blue Valley Ranch, which is owned by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones II, has been decades in the making. It was first proposed in some form in 2001 with the stated purpose of addressing the “checkerboard nature” of ownership in the area.

A map shows the existing public and private parcels, left, as well as how the land ownership would change if the Blue Valley Ranch land exchange goes through. `Bureau of Land Management/Courtesy illustration

As part of the deal, the federal government would convey nine parcels totaling 1,489 acres to Blue Valley Ranch, while the ranch would transfer nine parcels of private land totaling 1,830 acres to public ownership. Blue Valley Ranch has also agreed to provide Summit County with $600,000 for new open space acquisitions as well as to construct a seasonal takeout and rest stop near the Spring Creek River Bridge and another rest stop 3 miles downstream. But Rosgen said what makes the land exchange a “win-win,” in his eyes, is Blue Valley Ranch’s commitment to cover the costs of river restoration work on that ¾ mile stretch, and the creation of the Confluence Recreation Area, which would have more than 2 miles of new walking trails and offer wheel-chair accessible fishing.

#Colorado Governor Polis: #Geothermal could be 4%-8% of electricity — Allen Best (@BigPivots)

Colorado Governor Polis during a meeting at the McNichols Building in Denver with a delegation from Iceland. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

June 26, 2024

Colorado governor had made Heat Beneath Our Feet his signature initiative during his year as chair of the Western Governors’ Assocation

Geothermal comes in primarily two kinds. There’s heat for warming buildings, which Colorado already has, if in limited areas, most notably Colorado Mesa University.

But can it also get reliable generation of electricity?

In a meeting with a delegation from Iceland, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis suggested that geothermal wells could provide at least part of the answer as Colorado stretches to decarbonize its electricity with near-zero carbon emissions by 2040. He said that Colorado hopes to get to 96% or 97% carbon-free electricity by 2040.

When he ran for governor in 2018, said Polis, he adopted a platform of 100% renewables by 2040. “At the time, people thought that was very hard and that we would never achieve it. Our plans show we will certainly be in the high 90s percentile by 2040, hopefully in excess of 96% or 97%.”

The last coal plant will close no later than the end of 2030. (At the meeting on June 20 in Denver, Polis said 2029). And Colorado hopes to mostly squeeze natural gas out of its system.

Colorado has a lot of wind and solar, he explained, and he called them the “lowest-cost workhorses of the clean energy economy. We can probably get to 80-85%, maybe with some storage as high as 90% with solar and wind.”

What gets it the rest of the way to 365 days of no or low carbon?

Hydro is about 3% of Colorado’s grid; Polis said it might grow to 4%. “We don’t have a lot of water here,” he noted. In Iceland, hydro provides about 40%.

“The biggest opportunity that exists today is around geothermal. And that’s why we are so excited about how this can be 4 or 6 or 8% of our energy by 2040. Currently, it’s 0%.”

More on what was said at this meeting at the McNichols Building in Denver in the next issue of Big Pivots.

Geothermal Electrical Generation concept — via the British Geological Survey

#ColoradoRiver officials propose tracking conserved water: Upper basin water managers exploring how to protect water in #LakePowell — @AspenJournalism #COriver #aridification

The main boat ramp at Wahweap Marina was unusable due to low water levels in Lake Powell in December 2021. Upper Colorado River Basin water managers took a step this week toward protecting water saved through conservation programs in Lake Powell. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

June 28, 2024

Water managers in the upper Colorado River basin took another step this week toward a more formal water conservation program that they say will benefit the upper basin states.

Representatives from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico unanimously passed a motion Wednesday at a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission to explore creating a way to track, measure and store conserved water in Lake Powell and other upper basin reservoirs.

The motion directed staff and state advisers to prepare a proposal that lays out criteria for conservation projects and creates a mechanism for generating credit for those projects. The deadline for the proposal is Aug. 12, and commissioners plan to consider it at a late-summer meeting.

With an infusion of federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, the UCRC in 2023 rebooted the System Conservation Pilot Program, which pays water users — most of them in agriculture — to leave their fields dry for the season and let that water run downstream. Over two years, system conservation is projected to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of about $45 million.

But how much of that water actually made it to Lake Powell is anyone’s guess. Despite one of the stated intentions of the program being to protect critical reservoir levels, SCPP has, so far, not tracked the conserved water, a process known as shepherding. The laws that govern water rights allow the next downstream users to simply take the water that an upstream user leaves in the river, potentially canceling out the attempt at conservation.

Some water managers and users have criticized SCPP for this lack of accounting, saying the water conserved by the upper basin is simply being sent downstream to be used by the lower basin. The UCRC’s motion Wednesday for a proposal is an attempt to remedy that.

“We have heard from water users and others across the Upper Basin that there is interest in ‘getting credit’ for conserved water — in other words, protecting this water in Lake Powell,” Amy Ostdiek, the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s Interstate, Federal & Water Information section chief said in a prepared statement. “What the commissioners directed staff to do was simply to explore opportunities to do so.”

This Parshall flume on Red Mountain measures the amount of water diverted by the Red Mountain Ditch. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Tracking, measuring and storing the water saved by the upper basin states in Lake Powell is not a new idea. The concept was part of the 2019 Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan. The DCP created a special 500,000-acre-foot pool in Lake Powell for the upper basin to store water saved through a temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation program known as demand management. Demand management is conceptually the same as system conservation, with the main difference being that system conservation water simply becomes part of the Colorado River system with no certainty about where it ends up, while demand management water would be shepherded, measured and stored in Lake Powell for the benefit of the upper basin.

“We can do things like the System Conservation Program, and if we set up an account such that we can put that conserved water into a pool, that can then accrue over time,” New Mexico Commissioner Estevan Lopez said at Wednesday’s meeting. “That can be a very useful tool when things get really dry in the system. Overall, we can make that water available to continue operations with additional stability.”

The goals of demand management were to help boost water levels in Lake Powell, allow for continued hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam and, perhaps most important, help the upper basin states meet their obligations to deliver a minimum amount of water to the lower basin states under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. As climate change continues to rob rivers of flows, it becomes more likely that the upper basin won’t be able to deliver the 7.5 million acre-feet annually that is the lower’s basin’s share of the Colorado River, even if upper basin use doesn’t increase.

The conserved water “could be for compact compliance, or it could be for simply greater storage volume in the upper basin reservoirs to provide resilience against future dry years,” said Anne Castle, federal appointee and chair of the UCRC. “It would be credited to the benefit of the upper basin, and that’s a little vague, but it’s because we haven’t designed that mechanism yet.” [ed. emphasis mine]

This field of alfalfa is grown near Carbondale. Upper Colorado River Basin water managers are continuing to make tweaks to a program that pays agricultural water users to conserve.CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

In line with upper basin proposal

After two decades of drought, climate change and overuse, water levels in Lake Powell fell to their lowest point ever in 2022, threatening the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. Officials scrambled for solutions, with the UCRC putting forth a “5-Point Plan,” one arm of which was restarting SCPP, which was originally tried from 2015-18.

Upper basin officials have long maintained that the responsibility for a solution to the Colorado River crisis rests with the lower basin states: California, Arizona and Nevada. And they are still reluctant to say that Wednesday’s motion is a move toward a long-term conservation program for the upper basin.

“I wouldn’t say that we’re on the cusp of a permanent program, but rather that this is an evolving overall conservation effort that is incorporating what we’ve learned from the previous iterations,” Castle said.

The Upper Basin’s alternative, summed up. Source: Upper Colorado River Commission.

Wednesday’s motion was also the beginning of making good on a promise laid out in the upper basin’s alternative proposal for how the river and reservoirs should be operated in the future. The proposal says the four states will pursue “parallel activities” that include voluntary, temporary and compensated reductions in use, such as conservation programs that store water in Lake Powell.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge that this is in line with the parallel activities component of the upper division state’s alternative,” said Colorado Commissioner Becky Mitchell. “However, as I’ve always said, we cannot be doing conservation work to prop up overuse, and so I think this is in line with the commitments that we’ve made, but to remember that that was part of a larger package that requires responsible management.”

The authorization for system conservation runs out at the end of 2024, but earlier this month, U.S. senators from Colorado, Utah and Wyoming introduced a bill to extend the SCPP through 2026. UCRC commissioners would still have to approve continuing the program past this year.

Flying with LightHawk: A Welcome New Perspective on the #ColoradoRiver — Getches-Wilkinson Center #COriver #aridification

Longs Peak June 5, 2024. Photo credit: Lighthawk

Click the link to read the post on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Oliver Skelly):

June 28, 2024

Water, it is safe to say, is of the moment. Safer yet, the drought-stricken Colorado River is center stage. Seemingly overnight, the water beat has transcended from dusty backroads and Southwestern capitols to the front page of mainstream media outlets. Giving rise to that newfound coverage are the conferences and events that produce the soundbites and backroom deals that make the latest scoop in Western water such a juicy one.

Yet like many stories about natural resource issues, what can often feel missing is a sense of place; after all, slide shows and headlines can only spur so much. For water in particular, geography is everything—a factoid we know very well here in Colorado.

Enter LightHawk, an organization whose mission is “dedicated to accelerating conservation success through the powerful perspective of flight.” LightHawk does so by seeking out conservation projects and partners that could benefit from aviation, then leveraging their team of 300 volunteer pilots to provide zero cost flights. The organization’s focus areas include climate resilience, rivers and wetlands, and wildlife conservation.

On June 5^th, the day before the Getches-Wilkinson Center’s 2024 Conference on the Colorado River, LightHawk and the GWC teamed up to find that elusive sense of place. That morning a group of 15 participants boarded three separate planes to take an aerial tour of Front Range water projects, including the Gross Reservoir expansion and Chimney Hollow Reservoir construction, as well as a look at the Colorado River headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park and the infrastructure that makes up the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.

The passenger list comprised professionals from many different backgrounds, all sharing a focus on water and, more specifically, the Colorado River. There were tribal leaders, water lawyers, ranch managers, reporters, policy analysts, river advocates, foundation directors, GWC staff, and one very luck law student in myself. And that diversity of backgrounds was precisely the point: Come gather ‘round a birds-eye view of this imperiled river’s headwaters and let us see where the conversation goes.

As a student eager to find his way in the world of western water, this was a dream experience. The more casual setting (if you can call being a mile above the Earth in a little piston jet casual) allowed for plenty of quips, insights, and hard-hitting questions on all that construction going on down there. For me, the conversation highlighted how inherently political and value-based decisions on the River are, and how that is nothing to shy away from. Moreover, I gained a new appreciation for the number of different stakeholders and the good ideas they each bring—the flight itself atop that list.

Diverse and impressive of backgrounds as they were, nobody’s professional resume quite prepared them for how bumpy a ride Cessnas can deliver. The thermals coming off the foothills made for a turbulent ascent into the alpine. And the calamity of red lights and alarm noises coming from the cockpit certainly didn’t help settle the group’s collective stomach. But fortunately for your correspondent’s plane, all one had to do for a sigh of relief was look to pilot Mike Schroeder, cool as a cucumber at the helm.

Then, touchdown on the tarmac (coolest part of the day, IMHO) and back to business casual, powerpoints and panel presentations. Alas. However, with a subject matter like the Colorado River, two things are granted. First, a vast majority of folks working in this world also play in this world, and their sense of place is long-established. Second, a gathering of the minds to discuss the future of the River will be informative and provocative regardless of whether an airplane is involved. And sure enough, the conference was a smashing success.

But for me and surely the fourteen other flight members, the LightHawk flight was nonetheless a remarkable experience. The opportunity to fly across the part of the Continental Divide that not only separates the Front Range from the Western Slope but also boasts a colorful history of transbasin projects and state politics, all while chatting with a group of thought leaders in the water space, was truly invaluable. Hats off to LightHawk and all the volunteer pilots that made it possible.

*All photos shared are thanks to aerial support provided by LightHawk.

2024 #COleg: A #Colorado Program the Colorado Way — Audubon Rockies

Click the link to read the release on the Audubon Rockies websiite (Abby Burk):

On May 29, 2024, Colorado Governor Jared Polis stated “Water is life in Colorado and today I was proud to protect our water resources that are essential for our agriculture, our economy, and our way of life.” That day, he signed HB24-1379 Regulate Dredge & Fill Activities in State Waters, making Colorado the first state in the nation to pass legislation that addresses the stream and wetlands protection gap created by the May 2023 Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision. It took a lot of hard work, long days, collaboration, substantive and technical outreach, leaning into complex topics, working through misinformation, and dealing with a competing bill. We had to make some compromises, but ultimately, we came together in the “Colorado way” on a new law that works for Colorado’s unique intermountain waterways and protects wetlands and streams that were put at risk of losing protection by the Sackett decision.

Audubon convened and facilitated conversations to support consensus around a good solution and worked to depoliticize wetland and stream protections. After all, they support all of us. Audubon celebrates our network who submitted 2,248 comments to legislators in support of creating a robust Colorado Dredge and Fill Program that covers all streams and wetlands. Audubon members also made more than 60 contributions to the “What’s Your Wetland?” storymap in support of HB24-1379. Audubon celebrates our critical partnerships with the Protect Colorado Waters Coalition and the Colorado Healthy Headwaters Working Group as we worked together to preserve our critical needs through a storied and challenging process.

The new law—led by Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie (D-Dillon), Senator Dylan Roberts (D-Frisco), Representative Karen McCormick (D-Longmont), and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s (CDPHE) Director of the Water Quality Control Division, Nicole Rowan—is excellent news for Colorado’s birds and communities that critically depend upon clean water. It helps lead the way for other states in their pursuit of wetland and stream protections in the post-Sackett landscape.

House Bill 24-1379 was one of two proposed bills that sought to address the regulatory gap created by the Sackett decision. Senate Bill 24-127, sponsored by Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer (R-Brighton), was the second. Due to the two competing approaches of the two bills, consensus was found after a wild ride of public engagement, testimonies, intense negotiations, and 29 amendments. Notably, Senator Kirkmeyer became a co-sponsor to the amended and final HB24-1379 within the last week of the legislative session, winning bipartisan backing.

Why Was a “Colorado Program” Necessary to Protect Wetlands and Streams?

Wetlands and stream systems are essential for birds and provide ecosystem services such as water purification, wildlife habitat, and flood, wildfire, and drought mitigation. Colorado has lost about 50 percent of its wetlands due to development since statehood, so protecting what remains is imperative.

The Clean Water Act provides authorities for the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to define and regulate different types of water bodies. This includes the 404 Permit Program, which determines which wetlands must be regulated and which kinds of dredge-and-fill activities must be permitted for specific waterways. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. EPA dramatically narrowed the scope of these regulations and undercut waters subject to federal regulation and placed an estimated 60 percent of Colorado wetlands at risk of losing protections. Moreover, all ephemeral streams and a significant portion of intermittent streams in every area of the state would have lost protection if a new state program was not adopted. The United States Geological Survey’s National Hydrography Dataset* (as reported in Colorado’s 2022 Sackett Amicus Brief) estimates that 24 percent of Colorado’s streams are ephemeral and 45 percent are intermittent** meaning over two-thirds of Colorado’s waters are temporary and lack year-round flow.

The Sackett decision opened the doors for development to occur next to and on top of wetlands on private land, so long as there is no surface water connection between them and flowing waterways. House Bill 24-1379 was drafted to moderate the pendulum swings in federal wetland and stream protection levels in Colorado by creating a predictable State permitting and protections program that would work for Colorado’s intermountain semi-arid waterways.

What Does the New Law do for Colorado’s Wetlands, Streams, and Restoration Projects?

The new state Dredge and Fill Permit Program created by HB24-1379 contains many details established in statute, and there are areas where more time and attention is needed to determine outcomes through a rulemaking process. Although the new law contains all of the federal 404 agricultural exemptions and some new exemptions tailored to Colorado needs on irrigation ditches, and much more, the below list pertains to Audubon and the Colorado Healthy Headwater Working Group’s direct work in protecting wetlands and streams and restoration project capabilities.

The new regulatory protections program, with its broad application to Colorado ‘State Waters,’ surpasses the scope of the federal ‘Waters of the United States.’

“State Waters” C.R.S. 25-8-103(19) means any and all surface and subsurface waters which are contained in or flow in or through this state, but does not include waters in sewage systems, waters in treatment works of disposal systems, waters in potable water distribution systems, and all water withdrawn for use until use and treatment have been completed.“

The new permitting program is structured to prioritize avoidance of adverse impacts to State Waters, followed by minimization and, finally, compensatory mitigation of the unavoidable impacts.

Federal 404 guidelines are the floor and not the ceiling for any state rules, allowing Colorado to customize regulations that work for intermountain semi-arid waterways.

The existing Water Quality Control Commission (WQCC) will draft the new rules and review and issue individual permits so that no new regulatory commission will be formed, and reports will be generated detailing the functionality of the new permitting approach.

The new law creates a new definition in the statute of “ecological lift,” which “means an improvement in the biological health, as well as the chemical, geomorphic or hydrologic health of an area that has been damaged, degraded for destroyed.”

This new definition is used as one of several criteria for when certain restoration projects will not be required to obtain a state dredge and fill permit: For ephemeral streams, the WQCC must promulgate rules that include: “An exemption for voluntary stream restoration efforts in ephemeral streams that do not require compensatory mitigation and are designed solely to provide ecological lift where the activity is taking place.” This was one of the provisions that Audubon pressed hard for to maintain the status quo that restoration of rangeland ephemeral drainages to stop erosional headcuts from destroying critical mesic areas could continue to take place without having to obtain a dredge and fill permit (as these areas have always fallen outside of the federal 404 permit jurisdiction). These mesic area restoration projects have been happening for about 10 years in Colorado with great success.

For perennial and intermittent streams, if your restoration project requires a federal USACE 404 Nationwide Permit 27 or other general permit, provided those activities result in net increases in aquatic resource functions and services, then a project proponent will not need a separate permit from the Water Quality Control Division.

What Are the Next Steps?

CDPHE will initiate the rulemaking process starting September 2024 through December 2025 to fully form the regulatory program put in place by HB24-1379. All voices will play a role in both the design and implementation of HB24-1379’s regulatory program, helping to set up Colorado for long-term success. Watch for additional information and engagement from Audubon. Sign up for notifications and learn more here!

Conclusion

Water connects us all, and rivers do not stop flowing at state lines. More must be done to restore federal protections for interstate river health while adequately supporting state wetland and stream protection programs. As a headwater state, Colorado must continue to lead the way for the rest of the West and the nation in terms of what can be accomplished with collaboration and shared vision. HB24-1379 does that and puts Colorado on a path to protect its waterways for future generations. At Audubon, we know the value and connectivity of our watersheds, wetlands, streams, and rivers; these are waterways we all depend upon—birds and people. We also know the value of bringing people together for durable solutions and we cannot do this work without you. Together, we can protect our most precious natural resource, water, and the health of our waterways and continue the Colorado way of coming together to address our most pressing issues.

Thank you for helping us pass this historic legislation.

Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers

Supreme Court overturns Chevron v. NRDC — Western Resource Advocates

West Fork Fire June 20, 2013 photo the Pike Hot Shots Wildfire Today

From email from Western Resource Advocates (Erin Overturf):

June 28, 2024

STATEMENT FROM WESTERN RESOURCE ADVOCATES

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Chevron v. NRDC, one of the most cited cases in American law.

This is just the latest in a series of SCOTUS decisions designed to undermine the effectiveness of federal administrative agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

Today’s far-reaching ruling overturns a 40-year legal framework, marking the culmination of a decades-long effort to undermine federal agencies’ efforts to protect our health and our environment. Overturning Chevron v. NRDC will exacerbate existing dysfunction in federal policymaking, inviting litigation and making it increasingly challenging to secure public health and safety standards – including solutions addressing climate change – at the federal level.

Administrative agencies are the workhorses of our modern system of government. The issues confronting our day-to-day lives are too numerous and too nuanced for the three main branches of government to address alone, but agencies have the technical expertise and flexibility to fill in the gaps.

This decision will make it harder for federal agencies to take action to protect our health and our environment, allowing unelected federal judges with lifetime appointments to reject the policy judgements of agencies with more expertise and replace those agency judgments with their own policy preferences.

“This ruling makes the work we do before state utility regulators and legislatures all the more important. Given the challenging new landscape for federal agencies created by today’s decision, state-level policy on climate action and environmental protection is more critical than ever. The feds will not be able to solve this problem for us. It is time for leadership at the state level.”

In light of this decision, advocacy within our states to protect our health, our environment, and our climate has never been more important. States can and should set their own standards to reduce pollution, conserve water, and protect wildlife.

WRA is committed to continuing to leverage our expertise driving state-level policies that protect our health and fight climate change and its impacts in the Interior West.

Bureau of Reclamation seeks public comment on environmental assessment of proposed water conservation agreement #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

The Salton Sea (pictured above ) straddles the Imperial and Coachella valleys and has long been a sticking point in Colorado River deals. But the federal government recently committed up to $250 million for restoration efforts at the sea. (Source: Water Education Foundation)

Click the link to read the release on the Reclamation website (Mike Boyles):

Jun 28, 2024

BOULDER CITY, Nev. – The Bureau of Reclamation is seeking public comments on a draft environmental assessment analyzing potential impacts of a System Conservation Implementation Agreement between Reclamation and the Imperial Irrigation District. The agreement, administered through the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program and funded in part by the Inflation Reduction Act, supports voluntary system conservation to protect Colorado River reservoir storage volumes amid persistent drought conditions driven by climate change.

As analyzed in the draft environmental assessment, the Imperial Irrigation District has proposed to conserve a volume up to a maximum of 300,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water each year from 2024 through 2026 which will remain in Lake Mead to benefit the Colorado River System and its users.

The draft environmental assessment considers potential impacts from actions taken to implement water conservation, thereby reducing water diversions from the Colorado River at Imperial Dam.

The draft environmental assessment is available at Lower Colorado Region | Bureau of Reclamation (usbr.gov). The public comment period will end July 28, 2024.

Comments should be directed to Reclamation via email to prj-lcr-nepa@usbr.gov or to the mailing address below. 

Bureau of Reclamation, Lower Colorado Regional Office
Attn: Resource Management Office Chief (LC-2000)
P.O. Box 61470
Boulder City, NV 89006

Mailed comments on this notice must be postmarked by July 27, 2024. In your response, please refer to the above public notice title and date. Should no response be received by the above expiration date, a “no comment” response will be assumed. 

Commentary: How Trump lied about his #climate record at the presidential debate — The Los Angeles Times

“I know how to do this job. And I know how to get things done” — President Joe Biden in North Carolina. Screenshot from The New York Times website

Click the link to read the commentary on The Los Angeles Times website (Sammy Roth). Here’s an excerpt:

June 27, 2024

Two-thirds of the way through Thursday night’s presidential debate, CNN journalist Dana Bash finally asked the candidates how they would tackle a challenge that scientists say poses an existential threat to human civilization: climate change. Perhaps unsurprisingly, former President Trump made a series of false claims about his first-term track record. After he spent most of his two-minute response time returning to a previous debate topic, Bash prompted him to say something about global warming. Trump responded that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water” and “absolutely clean air.”

“We were using all forms of energy, all forms — everything,” he said, referring to his first term. “And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever, and my top environmental people gave me that statistic.”

Although planet-warming carbon emissions fell sharply during the final year of Trump’s first term, due to an economy slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they rose slightly from 2016 to 2019. And if Trump could have helped it, emissions would have risen even more. He glorified coal, oil and gas even as they polluted the air and water he claimed to love; bashed solar and wind energy with bogus talking points; and pulled the United States out of the international Paris climate accord. At Thursday’s debate, Trump claimed the Paris accord — which Biden ultimately rejoined — would cost the country $1 trillion. He didn’t cite a source for that number. And he didn’t come close to acknowledging that the heat waves, wildfires, floods, storms, droughts, migrant flows and crop failures already being exacerbated by rising temperatures will cost the U.S. far more than the price of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, in the view of climate and economic experts. Trump also claimed that the Paris agreement will cost China, Russia and India “nothing.” Another lie. All three nations, like every other Paris signatory, have pledged to do what’s necessary to try to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — which scientists say involves slashing carbon emissions 43% by 2030 — a tall order.

In total, the candidates spent about two and a half minutes discussing the climate crisis during Thursday’s debate before the moderators moved on to other topics.

#Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser: Supreme Court ruling threatens to create regulatory uncertainty, higher costs and greater harms

Click the link to read the release on the Colorado Attorney General’s website:

June 28, 2024

Attorney General Phil Weiser released the following statement regarding today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overruling 40 years of regulatory law precedent:

“Under 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.

“With today’s opinion in 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 court’s 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.

“Today’s 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.”

Colorado was part of a coalition of state attorneys general that filed a court brief defending the Chevron doctrine in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

Supreme Court Overturns #Chevron Doctrine: What it Means for #ClimateChange Policy — Inside #Climate News

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Marianne Lavelle):

June 28, 2024

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News (hyperlink to the original story), a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The high court sweeps away a ‘Goliath’ of modern law, weakening agencies’ legal authority as courts weigh Biden’s policies to cut greenhouse gases.

Just as federal regulators move forward with a climate change policy rooted in dozens of complex provisions of law, the Supreme Court on Friday overturned the principle that has guided U.S. regulatory law for the past 40 years.

That principle held that a federal agency’s interpretation of the law should be honored, as long as it is reasonable, in cases where there is any question about the law’s meaning.

Now, the so-called Chevron doctrine has been swept aside by a 6-3 court split along ideological lines. Chief Justice John Roberts, who two years ago authored a major opinion limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, wrote the majority opinion, reining in the power of all federal agencies. The court “gravely erred” in 1984 when it gave the regulators deference to decide what the laws they implement mean, he wrote.

“Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” Roberts wrote. “Courts do.”

In response to the argument by the Biden administration that resolving such ambiguities involves policymaking that is best left to political actors, not to unelected judges, Roberts said Congress—itself a political branch—expects courts to decide the meaning of the law. And Congress can always change the law, he said.

“To the extent that Congress and the Executive Branch may disagree with how the courts have performed that job in a particular case, they are of course always free to act by revising the statute,” Roberts wrote.

But Congress has backed away in recent decades from substantive stand-alone bills like the Clean Air Act, and has included much of its recent health and environmental decision-making in must-pass budget legislation that can leave lawmakers’ intent subject to interpretation. Experts say the end result of the decision to overturn Chevron will be increased power for the courts and less for the executive branch.

The decision to overturn Chevron fulfills a long-held wish of conservative groups that seek a smaller role for the federal government. They are led by a network funded by the Koch family, which made its billions in the petrochemical industry. Although small fishing operations brought the case against federal regulators, they were represented by a titan of conservative law, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, and lawyers for the Cause of Action Institute, which shares an address and personnel with the Koch-funded organization Americans for Prosperity.

Ironically, the 1984 case articulating the deference principle, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, was an anti-regulatory decision. In that case, a unanimous court upheld a Reagan administration air pollution regulation that environmentalists challenged as too weak.

That rule was issued by an Environmental Protection Agency then led by the late Anne Gorsuch, a fierce opponent of regulation. Her son, Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, today wrote a lengthy concurring opinion affirming the wisdom of sweeping away the Chevron precedent, finding the reason in the roots of common law, from ancient Roman law to the efforts of King George to control the American colonies.

“Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss,” Gorsuch wrote. “In doing so, the Court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding.”

In the years since Chevron was decided, courts invoked the doctrine repeatedly to uphold regulations that industries chafed at, making the case one of the most-cited in administrative law (it appears in more than 41,000 cases, according to Google Scholar.) Advocates of unfettered industry began to view the legal principle as a tool of government overreach, and called for the courts to abandon it.

No one articulated that view more memorably than Gorsuch when he was a federal appeals court judge, just months before he was hand-picked by the conservative Federalist Society to be President Donald Trump’s first addition to the Supreme Court.

“What would happen in a world without Chevron? If this Goliath of modern administrative law were to fall?” Gorsuch wrote in a 2016 immigration case. Congress would write laws, agencies would “offer guidance on how they intend to enforce those statutes,” and judges would “exercise their independent judgment” on those laws, not bound by what agencies said they meant, he wrote. “It seems to me that in a world without Chevron very little would change—except perhaps the most important things.”

Chevron’s Climate Stakes

When it comes to President Joe Biden’s effort to put a national climate policy in place, the most important things may well be the outcomes of a slew of lawsuits filed against the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies in the past year.

These lawsuits, most of them in the names of Republican-led states that have been joined by fossil fuel industries, essentially accuse the agencies of overstepping their legal authority with regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions or otherwise address climate change.

The agencies in most cases are applying broad legal authority Congress gave them years before the dangers of climate change were fully recognized or even contemplated. The EPA’s regulations to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s two leading sources—vehicles and power plants—are based on the Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 and amended in 1990. The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking to standardize corporate disclosure of climate risks by relying on Great Depression-era laws that require publicly traded companies to fully inform investors of factors that could affect their financial conditions.

In some cases agencies have more explicit direction from Congress than others—for example, the Clean Air Act provisions on vehicles are more specific than those governing power plants. But in virtually all pending challenges to Biden policy, foes have identified what they see as legal ambiguities, or faults in agencies’ interpretation of the law.

“It’s very hard to write statutes in technical, controversial areas and not have a shred of ambiguity,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor at Georgetown Law School, in an interview prior to the decision. “Even if someone is really trying to be careful, people with enough money and enough lawyers can, after the fact, really bring ambiguity out of something that was intended to be clear.”

Now that Chevron has been overturned, the Supreme Court has placed the onus squarely on judges to interpret regulatory law, which typically involves application of science and knowledge of the latest technological advances.

In a scathing dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan said the court had removed “a cornerstone of administrative law,” upending the structure that supported much of the federal government’s functions.

The Chevron doctrine “has become part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds—to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.”

Contrary to Roberts’ view, Kagan said that Congress has assigned federal agencies to address interpreting the law in regulatory areas, which often involve scientific or technical subject matter. “Agencies have expertise in those areas,” Kagan wrote. “Courts do not.” Now she said such decisions will be made by courts that have no political accountability and no proper basis for making policy.

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she wrote.

A Move Long Coming

But the Supreme Court for years has been moving in the direction of giving less authority to federal agencies; the trend accelerated after Trump gave conservatives a commanding 6-3 majority with his three appointees. Although the lower courts still invoked Chevron often, the high court has not relied on the doctrine in any case since 2016. And without mentioning Chevron, the Court recently has displayed little deference for agencies’ reading of the law.

Two weeks ago, for example, the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on “bump stocks,” rejecting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ technical and legal analysis that the rapid-fire gun accessories convert rifles to machine guns, long banned by federal law. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that a converted rifle wasn’t a machine gun, in an opinion accompanied by a highly unusual set of trigger mechanism illustrations.

“What that opinion looks like is pretty much the court figuring out on its own how guns work,” Heinzerling said. “That decision is a sign of things to come.”

On Thursday, in a 5-4 opinion by Gorsuch, the Supreme Court put a hold on the EPA’s effort to address the difficult problem of smog-forming pollutants that drift across state lines, saying the agency had not adequately explained how it would address the cost-effectiveness of the “Good Neighbor” program over time. (Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett broke from other conservatives in a dissenting opinion, warning the court was downplaying the EPA’s role under the Clean Air Act and leaving “large swaths of upwind States free to keep contributing significantly to their downwind neighbors’ ozone problems for the next several years.”)

Especially relevant to climate law was the court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA case, written by Roberts and also settled 6-3 with Republican-appointed justices in the majority. In that case, the Supreme Court set a new standard of skepticism for federal agency authority on “major questions” of national importance, throwing out the Obama administration’s approach for cutting carbon emissions from power plants.

That case, and now the loss of Chevron deference, could well tip the balance against climate policy in the courts, experts say. A case in point is the litigation (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce) that was before the court, brought by fishing operations against the agency charged with enforcing fishing law in U.S. waters, the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS.

For three decades, NMFS has had a program of putting scientific observers on board fishing vessels to prevent overfishing and ensure compliance with other federal laws, like those to protect endangered species. Lack of observer coverage has been a chronic problem in the underfunded program and in 2020, to increase coverage to address strain on the important Atlantic herring fishery, in part due to climate change, NMFS set new rules requiring that the fishing operations pay the cost of the observers.

The fishing operations ended up being reimbursed for 100 percent of their costs (about $30,000), but the Supreme Court did not focus on such details. Instead, it focused on what it viewed as the correct roles of agencies, Congress and the courts. Roberts wrote that it was an error for courts to give the executive agencies the benefit of the doubt whenever there was a question of the law’s meaning.

“By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are necessarily delegations, Chevron prevents judges from judging,” Roberts wrote.

Tara Brock, Pacific legal director and senior counsel for the advocacy group Oceana, said the result would be less monitoring of the industry at a time when more is needed.

“Things are changing in fisheries,” Brock said. “Suddenly somebody in Alaska is catching species that they historically haven’t. Well, what does that mean for fisheries management? Observers being present and being able to document what we are seeing on the water and having that really critical data is going to become even more valuable as climate change continues to change our oceans.”

But lawyers representing the fishing operations that brought the challenge said that the Supreme Court has restored balance to decision making about federal regulation.

U.S. Supreme Court flips precedent that empowered federal agencies — #Colorado Newsline

Atlantic herring. Credit: NOAA Fisheries/Calvin Alexander

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Jacob Fischler):

June 28, 2024

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 court’s six conservatives reasoned that courts “routinely confront statutory ambiguities” that have nothing to do with the authority of regulatory agencies, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

“Of 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,” Roberts wrote.

Under the 40-year-old precedent, courts gave up their interpretive role and deferred to agencies, Roberts wrote.

But they shouldn’t, he added. Judges should apply their own legal reasoning to reach a sound decision.

“Courts instead understand that such statutes, no matter how impenetrable, do — in fact, must — have a single, best meaning.”

1984 ruling overturned

The decision overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that said courts must defer to federal agencies’ 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 court’s three liberals — not including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in one of the cases, after she recused herself because she’d heard the case as an appeals court judge before joining the Supreme Court — said the majority erred by misunderstanding the roles of three branches of government.

Congress knows it cannot “write perfectly complete regulatory statutes,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent. Interpretation of those statutes is a given, and Congress usually prefers a “responsible agency” instead of a court.

Agencies are more politically accountable and have greater technical expertise in a given issue than courts, she wrote.

“Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice,” Kagan wrote.

Kagan went on to criticize the decision as a power grab by the judiciary at the expense of agency experts.

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she wrote. “In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law.”

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.

“It weakens our government’s 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,” Manish Bapna, president of the environmental group NRDC Action Fund, wrote in a statement.

“Today’s 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,” 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.

“The important role that government plays in ensuring the health and safety of our families and the fairness of our markets could be undermined here,” she said.

The ruling takes power away from the experts on a particular subject of a federal regulation — traffic engineers at the Department of Transportation, disease experts at the Food and Drug Administration or scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, for example — and gives it to the federal judiciary, Weintraub said.

U.S. Rep. Raúl 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.

“For 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,” Grijalva said in a statement.

“But now, thanks to this extremist power-grab, our most fundamental protections will be at the whim of individual judges — many of whom are far-right ideologues — regardless of their lack of expertise or political agenda.”

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.

“The Constitution vests Congress with the sole authority to make law,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a statement. “After 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.”

Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said Friday’s ruling should spur Congress to write more prescriptive laws.

“Congress has sidestepped our legal duties for far too long and today’s ruling puts us back in the driver’s seat when it comes to rulemaking and regulatory authority,” Westerman said in a written statement. “We’re no longer going to let federal agencies fill in the details when it comes to the policies we enact.”

Roman Martinez, an attorney who argued on behalf of the Rhode Island fishing operators, called the ruling a “win for individual liberty and the Constitution.”

“The Court has taken a major step to shut down unlawful power grabs by federal agencies and to preserve the separation of powers,” Martinez said in a statement distributed by the conservative public relations firm CRC Advisors. “Going forward, judges will be charged with interpreting the law faithfully, impartially, and independently, without deference to the government.”

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 “despite our change in interpretive methodology.”

Even prior to Friday’s decision, the court had used Chevron less often. During the oral argument, Roberts cited a study that the court had relied on the precedent sparingly over the past 14 years.

The court’s 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.

“Rolling back Chevron is simply going to mean agencies don’t get the benefit of the doubt in the case of a tie,” Wolff said. “They have to come into the court and persuade the court that they have the better reading of the statute.”

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.

#Drought news June 28, 2024: The Four Corners region experienced several rounds of heavy rainfall, some localized flooding also occurred, associated with a surge of tropical moisture from the remnants of Tropical Storm Alberto

Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.

Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:

This Week’s Drought Summary

Much of the eastern contiguous U.S. (CONUS), south of the Great Lakes, received little to no rainfall, and this is on top of several weeks of below normal rainfall leading up to last week. In addition, temperatures have remained hot for many locations. This combination of antecedent dryness, much below normal rainfall, and hot temperatures has resulted in rapidly deteriorating conditions, particularly across the Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast, with large increases in abnormally dry (D0) and moderate drought (D1) conditions. Conversely, southern Texas, the Four Corners region, and the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains experienced several rounds of heavy rainfall. Some locations across southern Texas (associated with Tropical Storm Alberto) and the north-central CONUS received well in excess of 5 inches of rainfall that led to flash and river flooding, as well as improvements to drought conditions. Some localized flooding also occurred in portions of the Four Corners region, associated with a surge of tropical moisture from the remnants of Tropical Storm Alberto that came ashore in northern Mexico late last week. Across much of the western CONUS, conditions are starting to dry out a bit, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies. In Alaska, moderate drought was introduced in the eastern interior Mainland, where warm and dry weather continues, elevating fire concerns. In Hawaii, trade winds are lacking moisture resulting in below normal rainfall across the islands and the widespread expansion of abnormal dryness. Puerto Rico continues to remain drought-free…

High Plains

The High Plains region experienced a mixture of both deteriorating and improving drought conditions last week, which has predominantly been the case over at least the last month. High pressure over the eastern U.S. and an active storm track across the northern tier of the lower 48 states have been able to funnel moisture northward over the past few weeks, but precipitation has been hit-and-miss from week to week. However, last week was a little different from prior weeks, as some of the moisture from Tropical Storm Alberto was funneled northward into the Four Corners region and then into the Central and Northern Plains. Southeastern South Dakota received in excess of 5 inch rainfall surpluses for the week leading to flooding along the Missouri River and some of its tributaries. Heavy rain also fell across parts of southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas last week, associated with the surge of moisture from Alberto, leading to some targeted improvements to the drought depiction in those areas as well. Elsewhere in the High Plains region, targeted degradations are warranted due to antecedent dryness, below normal weekly precipitation, and predominantly above normal temperatures (with the exception of northern Montana and the Dakotas)…

Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 25, 2024.

West

A surge of moisture from Tropical Storm Alberto led to widespread, localized heavy rainfall across portions of the Four Corners region, leading to localized flash flooding and targeted drought improvements across Arizona, New Mexico, and southeastern Colorado. Conversely, targeted degradations are warranted across parts of the interior Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies, where warm and dry weather prevailed. Elsewhere in the West, conditions are largely drying out, but the influx of tropical moisture from Alberto has helped to stall the progression of the dryness a bit for many locations…

South

The passage of Tropical Storm Alberto in northern Mexico resulted in a large influx of moisture into southern Texas, with widespread 5 inch rainfall totals (locally upwards of 8 inches for some locations). This heavy rainfall caused localized flash flooding and resulted in large improvements to soil moisture. However, leading up to last week, southern Texas was experiencing abnormally dry and moderate drought conditions, so despite some large improvements (2-category improvements in some cases), some parts of southern Texas remain abnormally dry given the rainfall deficits leading up to Alberto’s landfall. Heavy rainfall also fell across portions of the Oklahoma Panhandle, with several locations receiving in excess of 5 inches of rain, warranting some targeted 2-category improvements to the drought depiction there as well. Elsewhere in the Southern region, conditions are rapidly deteriorating, as rainfall has been lacking entirely over the past few weeks for many locations. Persistent heat has exacerbated the ongoing dryness, leading to degradations across parts of the Tennessee and Lower Mississippi Valleys, western Texas, and northern Oklahoma. Following a very wet May, the last few weeks have been very dry across eastern Texas and this area will need to be monitored in the coming weeks if warmer than normal temperatures persist…

Looking Ahead

During the next five days (June 27 – July 1), a couple of storm systems and trailing frontal boundaries are forecast to bring periods of rainfall to portions of the eastern U.S. These storm systems are likely to usher in some cooler than normal air behind them, particularly across the northern tier of the lower 48 states. Temperatures are expected to remain predominantly warmer than normal across the southern tier of the U.S., with excessive heat also possible across the Gulf Coast states.

The Climate Prediction Center’s 6-10 day outlook (valid July 2 – 6), favors enhanced chances of above average temperatures across the southern two-thirds of the lower 48 states and near to below normal chances across the northern tier states. Near to below normal temperatures are also favored in the Desert Southwest, due to the increased potential for above normal precipitation. Below normal precipitation is favored across parts of California and Nevada, and across the southeastern U.S. Increased above normal precipitation chances are favored elsewhere across the lower 48 states, with the highest chances across portions of the Southwest and Midwest.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 25, 2024.

Hot, dry conditions could push much of #Colorado into #drought by summer’s end — Fresh Water News

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Shannon Mullane):

June 27, 2024

Colorado has seen an average water year so far, but looking ahead, climate experts say much of the state could fall into drought conditions and struggle to find relief.

Colorado’s very average snowpack has officially melted away from all 115 federal snow monitoring stations in the state, as of this week. Reservoir levels are at 94%, just slightly below average, while precipitation was at exactly 100% of the 30-year median, according to a Water Conditions Monitoring Committee meeting Tuesday.

Heat, however, has been on the rise. Even summer showers may not be enough to combat its effects, or to keep the state away from drought.

“Really the entire state is at risk of developing drought this summer,” Assistant State Climatologist Becky Bolinger told listeners during the meeting. “A strong monsoon would be really helpful. It would limit that risk of worsening drought, particularly over the Four Corners. … For now, it’s looking like that is not as likely, and that it’s going to be a pretty rough summer.”

Climate experts track precipitation, temperature, soil moisture and other factors year-round to gauge water supplies and storage for farmers, city utility managers, reservoir operators and residents around the state.

This year’s outlook has some of those water users looking out for impacts to fish populations, recreation opportunities, irrigation supplies and wildfires.

“Without much rain, wildfire will definitely be a pretty serious concern,” said Adrian Bergere, executive director of the San Miguel Watershed Coalition in southwestern Colorado.

The period from October 2023 through May ranked in the top 10 warmest time periods across a significant majority of the state when compared with a 129-year historical record, Bolinger said.

Areas of southeastern Colorado, like Lamar and La Junta, have already reported 20 or more days over 90 degrees. The Front Range has already had 10-15 days over 90 degrees. Most of the country is also likely to be hotter than usual for the rest of the summer, she said.

That’s quite the switch after last year, which started out with cooler-than-average months, Bolinger said.

The hotter temperatures are likely to continue for the rest of the summer. Western Colorado and the Four Corners area have a 70%-80% chance of above-average temperatures — a very high degree of confidence, Bolinger said.

Colorado’s stream and river levels are receding after a normal runoff year, and incoming precipitation will be increasingly helpful for water users in the late summer and early fall. Although the state has seen average precipitation so far, there’s a 40%-50% chance rainfall will tumble below normal levels for July through September.

Some areas, like Fort Collins and Burlington, have seen less-than-average rainfall so far. Even with some rain in the near-term forecast for early July, it will be hard for these areas to end the water year, which closes Sept. 30, at the average level, Bolinger said.

The combination of hot and dry weather could make it harder for areas of the state that are already experiencing drought conditions to recover, and it could mean that more areas fall into drought, she said.

Colorado Drought Monitor map June 25, 2024.

About 16% of the state is experiencing drought conditions. That is vastly better than in late 2020 and early 2021, when the entire state was in drought and over 20% was in the most severe drought category. At that level, agricultural and recreational economic losses are large, reservoirs are low, large fires can develop and mandatory water restrictions are often implemented, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

“There is a slightly increased risk for drier extremes in the southern part of the state, which really means there would be a low likelihood that any drought that worsens or develops in the summer is not going to see relief through the fall,” Bolinger said.

In the Upper Rio Grande River Basin, aquatic biologist Estevan Vigil is keeping an eye on the water temperatures and water levels on the Rio Grande and Conejos rivers for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Brown trout and rainbow trout flourish when water is about 50 degrees but struggle when it rises above 70 degrees. At that level, their immune systems become stressed, and catch-and-release fishing can lead to higher fish mortality.

If stream levels fall below 50% of the norm, and if temperatures rise above 70 degrees, Vigil may implement voluntary or emergency fishing closures.

“In the [San Luis Valley] since 2019, we’ve probably done it twice,” Vigil said. “I’m anticipating having to do it this year.”

A strong monsoon season would help keep rivers flowing and fishing access open, he said.

Several city water managers said their reservoir storage supplies were looking good during the water conditions meeting. Colorado Springs Utilities reservoirs were at 85% of their capacity, and Denver Water’s reservoirs were 97% full.

The lack of monsoons would heighten concerns over wildfire risk or lead to a shorter rafting season for boaters, Bergere said. Less-than-average rainfall could also leave sections of the river dry as water gets pulled for other uses, like irrigation and municipal supplies.

Water users in the San Miguel River Basin know how to endure fluctuating supplies, Bergere said.

“What we’re looking at there is not amazing, but it’s something we’re pretty used to down here,” he said. “Without much rain, wildfire will definitely be a pretty serious concern.”

Romancing the River: Back to Basics? — George Sibley (sibleysrivers.com) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

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

June 26, 2024

Note in passing: this is the 50^th post on this ‘weblog’ (a meaningful number to a ten-digit species). I am grateful to those who continue to open and even read these posts. I am obviously writing as much for my own edification and clarification as for yours, in the spirit of British writer E.M. Forster, who said, ‘I don’t know what I think until I see what I write.’ Working it out on paper, as we used to say, except now it is electrons on a screen only a little more organized than a starry night.

Most of these posts have been about the Colorado River – a river I can say I ‘love’ in all the complexity that concept of engagement encompasses. I love its natural forms and contours, which leave me thinking that we need a ‘sur-’ category for nature – ‘surnature’ like ‘surreal’ is to ‘real’ – for natural phenomena that seem to be ‘beyond nature,’ at least as we usually seem to think about nature, a fragile china shop in which we have sometimes behaved like a bull; here the river often seemed to be the rampant bull.

I am also fascinated, mystified and sometimes horrified by our often surreal engagement with this river and the geography through which it runs, from the mountains where we’ve pushed into the high rock and ice with conveyor lifts for recreation; then through the region of canyons and floodplains where a pre-urban agrarian culture contends unsuccessfully with a post-urban refugee culture trying to figure out what it wants to be; then into the serious canyons where the river in full patiently works at filling in silt behind some temporary (in river terms) structures built to teach the river to stand in and push rather than cut and run during their river-moment; then out onto the hot deserts where we’ve spread the river out in all directions to grow food, feed, and megacities where 20-25 million people live in a luxuriant culture they are just beginning to learn may be as fragile and ephemeral as any china shop in a bullish world.

The world we have made here is our fathers’ world; I am a son of homo faber, man the maker, artisan, artificer, engineer; but my mother was of the homo sapiens clan, men and women who stop, look, listen and think about what they see before rushing into action. With homo faber leading, we have created what looks like miracles in the deserts, but on a ‘buy now pay later’ plan; our miracles now start looking a little short-term, either from the changed environment or from just wearing out, or both, but we will still be paying for them as far into the future as we can see. Our challenge now is for homo faber and homo sapiens to work more in harmony: to stop, look and listen to envision how we can carry forward what we do well with the foresight to avoid what we now know we do badly, accepting that the river and its world are not inert, but have their own standards, not self-evident but discoverable: standards we should learn before we challenge them in this unpredictable ‘surnatural’ mix of utility and beauty because nature can dispassionately punish, withhold, destroy. We’ve no choice but to keep moving what we hope is forward, but remembering the maze that’s the great seal of the Salt River Maricopa and Pima People; don’t expect anything to be easy and fast, like the 20^th century appeared to be. Chronicling and analyzing where we are and what we do is the purpose here – on to the next 50.

That noted – back to the river. Lots is happening and not happening along the Colorado River these days, some of which you’ve been seeing in the national news. One of the notable things happening and not happening is the almost unbelievable fact that the Navajo People, the Hopi People, the San Juan Paiute People, and the People of the State of Arizona as well as We the People (as Indian trustees) have finally negotiated a settlement on water rights for the three-in-one reservations – the huge Navajo Reservation covering a tenth of Arizona and parts of New Mexico and Utah, and the smaller Hopi and Paiute Reservations contained within it. Unfortunately this very complex settlement still needs the approval of Congress, and carries a five billion dollar price tag, so we will wait till that happens, or doesn’t, to look at it more closely.

The most important thing that is not happening along the river today is the impasse in negotiations between the seven Colorado River states, in their efforts to figure out how to manage the river in the post-2026 epoch, when the 2007 Interim Guidelines for managing the river in the early 21^st century expire (along with the 2019 and 2022 Interim Interim Guidelines required to limp through to 2026). Looking over the negotiators’ shoulders very closely are the people of Mexico and the 30 First People tribes, whose rights to water are all shoehorned into the seven state allotments and appropriation systems – and the 30 tribes have informed the Bureau and the states that they will not be ignored or shortchanged this time.

Negotiations with everyone more or less in the same room broke down early in 2024, and the seven states withdrew into their artificial Colorado River Compact division: the four states of the Upper Basin and the four states of the Lower Basin retreated to their redoubts above and below the mainstem’s canyons, to start lobbing proposals over the canyons at each other, each telling the other what they are willing to do in their Basin – and what they expect the other Basin to do in theirs.

Each Basin’s demands on the other Basin are, of course, more than the other Basin is willing to do, and everyone is stubbornly holding their ground. We’ll not go over their separate proposals again; a summary of the two Basin plans can be found here if you want a review. The only real step forward has been the Lower Basin’s willingness to finally take out of their own Compact allotments the ‘structural deficit’ – the Lower Basin system losses through evapotranspiration, bank storage, et cetera, and their half of the Mexican obligation.

There will probably eventually be another set of links in the Law of the River chain going back to the Colorado River Compact: either a complicated set of compromises worked out among the states of the two Basins, with lots of hoops for the Basin states tied to different reservoir elevations – or if that proves impossible, the Bureau of Reclamation will come up with another ‘interim plan’ to stagger a little further into the 21^st century.

But all that is just kind of tedious, mundane – hardly worthy of the surnatural river and its environment we are now just trying keep up with. And – isn’t everyone saying we need to think creatively, ‘think outside the box’? So I want to look at an idea that’s at least up on the edge of the box looking outside it: the fact that we could actually do now – have almost done – what the Colorado River Compact commissioners could not do in 1922.

The Compact’s Signers. Photo via InkStain

They gathered in 1922 to create an interstate compact that would preempt the appropriations doctrine at the interstate level; they wanted an equitable (not the same as ‘equal’) seven-way division of the river’s waters, so they could avoid being trapped in a seven-state appropriations race, with California already at the first turn while Wyoming and New Mexico were still looking for the starting gate. They wanted each state to know that it would have water to develop when it was ready for it.

They were unable to do that seven-way division, however, because they knew too little about the flow of the river, and even less about the future needs of their states. The best compact they were almost able to agree on was the last-minute field-expedient division of the Colorado River Basin into two basins, each with half of the river’s water to develop. At one point in the negotiations, the Commission chair and federal representative Herbert Hoover called the two-basin division ‘a temporary equitable division,’ postponing the more thorough division they had wanted for ‘those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information.’ The ‘temporary equitable division’ would suffice, Hoover believed, to ‘assure the continued development of the river,’ and it did; even though only six of the seven states ratified the Compact, Congress was persuaded that there was enough ‘comity’ among the states for them to authorize the construction of the Boulder Canyon Project.

But – ‘those men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of information’ – that’s us, isn’t it? Women now too, as well as men? We know a lot more about the river than we did in 1922 – a lot of it in the ‘sadder but wiser’ category of knowledge, but … haven’t we also, at this point, incrementally effected a seven-way division of the waters of the Colorado (including a share for Mexico, with the states responsible for fulfilling the Winters promise to the Indians with federal help)? Each state may not have all the river water it wants, and wanted in 1922, but we all know the river is now tapped out: each state has all the water it is ever likely to get; a seven-way division has happened, like it or not. And the quantity each has to use is reasonably close to the quantities codified in various elements of the Law of the River.

So, in other words – could we not finally draft the Colorado River Compact the original compact creators wanted to do, but lacked the necessary ‘fund of information’? Well, yes but…. That seven-way division is not so easy as writing down seven acre-foot numbers and saying ‘That’s all, folks,’ live with it. There are some rough spots that would have to be worked out, probably at the usual glacial speed of Colorado River decision-making.

By my amateur calculations, for example, all three Lower Basin states and Colorado and Utah in the Upper Basin are using somewhere between 5 and 13 percent more water than their ‘Law of the River’ allotments when system losses are figured in – but that’s assuming a proportionate distribution of system losses, rather than distribution based on appropriation seniority, which of course under the two-basin system would allow California to dump its portion on Arizona and Nevada, and Colorado and Utah to legally diss Wyoming and New Mexico. But 5-13 percent is not a huge quantity, and should be negotiable.

Another rough spot would be writing the future into a new compact – a future that does not look so rosy as the future did to the original compact commission. Then, the idea of augmenting the river from other larger rivers was still alive; the commissioners thought that ‘those men who may come after us’ would be allotting more water, not less. Today, our greater fund of information lets us know that we will have less water in the future. So once the states’ current reality-based allotments are settled on, it will be necessary to convert them all to percentages of the current measured flow of the river, maybe as a ten-year rolling average. Then each state’s allotment would be reduced proportionally as the river flow decreased due to climate heating – or. if appropriation’s true believers (aka senior users) continue to rule the roost, with junior users taking the hit.

There would be other rough spots too, I’m sure. But it is obvious at this point that, when it comes to adapting either to reality (the system losses) or to the probable future, the first-come first-served appropriations doctrine as a foundational law is a box with high sides. The 1922 compact commissioners wanted to preempt it at the interstate level, and even California went along with that then because that agreement was the only way to get Congress to build the dam they desperately wanted. But that was then; California got its Boulder Canyon Project, and now doesn’t need to be nice; every time the idea of proportionate sharing of losses among the states comes up, California says first-come first-served or see you in court.

The other box we ought to be thinking outside of is nested within the appropriation doctrine box, the Compact itself, which only partially appeared to succeed in limiting interstate appropriation issues by supposedly giving the four states above the canyons half the river to develop on their own schedule (after working out their own interstate issues). Arizona, stuck in the lower basin with California, refused to even ratify the Compact, and spent three decades in court against California. And as soon as annual flows began to drop after the ‘pluvial Twenties,’ the Upper Basin states got increasingly testy about the ambiguous Compact mandate to ‘not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below’ the Lower Basin’s set share, or else – what? (Expect the worst; it’s California.) The Compact looked increasingly threadbare as the 20^th century wore on. The 2007 Interim Guidelines to help the Compact limp through another two decades was amended by the Drought Contingency plans in 2019, and again by the panicky call for major cuts in use across the board in 2022, centennial year for the Compact – a downward spiral marked, in my mind, by California’s assertion of appropriative seniority over the other states in 2022, a mark of the lack of real progress in sharing the river since 1922. The history of the two-basin division has led inexorably to the current impasse.

Yet no one negotiating is suggesting that maybe it is time to start fresh post-2026, based on our accumulated ‘fund of information,’ and the realization that we could start by formalizing the seven-way division envisioned by the original compact commissioners. We cling to the Compact like shipwrecked sailors clinging to straws.

Maybe if we could at least hoist ourselves up the edge of the Compact box, and look out beyond it and the edge of the appropriations box, we would be able to look back to the surnatural river we had and, with our fund of greater information, see it for what it really is rather than what we imagined it could be – a desert river as well as a water source, with all the coyote trickery and surprises implied therein.

Stay tuned for ‘Outside the Box with the Desert River.’

Data Dump: #ColoradoRiver Consumption Drops — Jonathan P. Thompson (www.landdesk.org) #COriver #aridification

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

June 25, 2024

PLUS: Biden has not issued more drilling permits than Trump

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

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 river’s 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. That’s a huge amount of water that’s staying in — or being returned to — 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 river’s 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 river’s largest water users have cut consumption over the past decade, some more dramatically than others. Source: USBR.

Whether these cuts will be enough isn’t yet clear — they don’t 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 — which wouldn’t have been enough to serve just the Lower Basin.

Estimated natural flow of the Colorado River at Lee’s 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 Lee’s 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 — 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. It’s still a long, long ways from full, however.

It’s 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…

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

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, there’s 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 Biden’s boasts are false and based on misleading data — 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. It’s 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, that’s 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. They’re 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 I’m saying is that the numbers I’m 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 “winner” … or, rather, the administration that issued the most drilling permits per month, on average, is … 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 BLM’s 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. Biden’s BLM has issued 10 fewer permits per month, on average, than Trump’s. I suppose this is notable, given the extreme differences in approach and policy between the two: Trump’s “Energy Dominance” vs. Biden’s 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 you’re 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 you’re 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, Trump’s and his cabinet’s incompetence mitigated the damage, somewhat. This time right-wing think tanks (an oxymoron, perhaps?) are preparing a “playbook” 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.

Helping endangered fish on the #ColoradoRiver: @DenverWater partners with group of reservoir operators to improve river’s ecosystem

Click the link to read the article on the News on Tap website (Jay Adams and Bailee Campbell):

June 14, 2014

Denver Water partners with Front Range, West Slope, state and federal water managers to improve conditions for four species of endangered fish on the Colorado River. Learn about the Coordinated Reservoir Operations program also known as CROS. Learn more here: https://denverwatertap.org/2019/07/16…

Thanks to above-average snowpack this past winter in the northern and central mountains, a section of the Colorado River saw a burst of water in early-June as a group of reservoir operators teamed up with Mother Nature to improve habitat for endangered fish.

As part of the Coordinated Reservoir Operations program, Denver Water, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, Colorado Springs Utilities, Northern Water and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation worked together to either release extra amounts of water from their reservoirs or stopped diverting water from rivers and streams for a period of time.

The coordinated effort is timed to match the existing natural springtime rush of water down the river from melting snow in the mountains. The flows are not higher than the amount of water that would normally occur during runoff.

The combined effort created a pulse of water that came together at a 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River near Palisade in Mesa County.

The pulse helped the river’s ecosystem, which has been affected by water being diverted from the Colorado River and its tributaries over the years.

A burst of water from the Coordinated Reservoir Operations program flows down the Colorado River near Palisade in June 2019. Photo credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

What is CROS?

The Coordinated Reservoir Operations, also known as CROS, program began in 1995 when the water managers looked for ideas to improve conditions for four species of endangered fish; the bonytail, the Colorado pikeminnow, the humpback chub and the razorback sucker.

The 2024 effort marked the 13th time since 1995 that reservoir operators have been able to coordinate their operations on the Colorado River. The voluntary operations are coordinated by staff at the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

Before the program started, each reservoir operator had its own schedule for capturing water from the rivers and releasing extra water downstream.

Water releases from the Coordinated Reservoir Operations program are aimed at improving this stretch of the Colorado River near Palisade. Photo credit: Dale Ryden, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“Reservoir operators realized that if all of us worked together, we could do something to help these endangered fish,” said Travis Bray, an environmental scientist from Denver Water. “Improving this stretch of river was critical to the survival of all four species.”

Reservoirs that can contribute to the coordinated release of water into the Colorado River include Denver Water’s Williams Fork Reservoir along with Green Mountain, Homestake, Ruedi, Willow Creek, Wolford Mountain and Windy Gap reservoirs.

“Typically during above average snow seasons, more water comes through our reservoirs than we can store,” said Cindy Brady, water supply engineer at Denver Water. “When snow conditions allow, we are able to fill our reservoirs for water supply and send the extra water downstream to help the fish habitat.”

The amount of water varies and not all water managers are able to contribute or coordinate flows each year depending on water levels, snowpack and reservoir operating conditions.

Denver Water released water from Williams Fork Dam in Grand County as part of the Coordinated Reservoir Operations program in June 2019. Photo credit: Denver Water.

Benefits to fish habitat

When the reservoir operators coordinate their releases to hit at the same time, the extra water in the river offers improves fish habitat in several ways.

For instance, when there’s more water in the river, it flows faster.

The rushing water flushes tiny pieces of sediment from the rocks on the bottom of the river, which creates space for the fish to lay their eggs. Without these flushing flows, the sediment builds up over time and leaves no room for the eggs.

There are other benefits as well, according to Don Anderson, a hydrologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“The higher water creates calm side channels for young razorback suckers to swim into,” Anderson said. “The fast-moving water also triggers the Colorado pikeminnows to swim upstream and spawn in the 15-mile stretch.”

An additional benefit, according to Anderson, is that the high flow of water scours away young vegetation that encroaches on the river channel. If left unchecked, the vegetation gradually degrades the habitat available for the fish.

Is the program working?

The coordinated release program has played an important role in restoring fish habitat.

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent assessment of the four endangered fish species prompted the agency to propose reclassifying two of them — the razorback sucker and the humpback chub — from “endangered” status to a less-dire “threatened” designation.

The humpback chub is one of four endangered fish species on the Colorado River that will benefit from the higher flow of water this year that came from the Coordinated Reservoir Operations program. Photo credit: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.

“The change in status signals significant progress in the recovery of these fish,” Anderson said. “Since 2014, we’ve measured record numbers of razorback suckers using a fish ladder to bypass a large dam a few miles upstream of Palisade and access additional habitat upstream.”

The higher flow of water is spread out over several days to prevent flooding in communities along the river.

This map shows the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River near Grand Junction, home to four species of endangered fish. Map credit: CWCB

Improving the environment

The coordinated releases are part of the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program established in 1988 to bring the four fish species back from the brink of extinction.

The project marks a change in how reservoirs are managed. In decades past, environmental factors were not given as much consideration as they are now.

“Denver Water participates in many different programs that help the four species of endangered fish,” Bray said. “Our goal is to get as many benefits as possible out of every drop of water and be responsible stewards of the environment.”

The #ColoradoSprings Utilities Board opposes #Aurora’s recent purchase of water rights in Otero County — #Colorado Public Radio #ArkansasRiver

Straight line diagram of the Lower Arkansas Valley ditches via Headwaters Magazine

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Public Radio website (Shanna Lewis). Here’s an excerpt:

June 4, 2024

Colorado Springs Utilities is joining a growing list of water managers and local governments across southeastern Colorado in decrying Aurora Water’s recent purchase of a large farm and water rights in Otero County. The Colorado Springs utility — which is overseen by the city council — is among the counties, cities and other agencies who say that Aurora Water is violating the terms of a 2003 agreement. That contract with the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District allows Aurora to use water rights in the Arkansas River Basin along with infrastructure managed by the district but with limitations and only under certain conditions. That includes only using the water three years out of every ten and only when Aurora’s storage reservoirs are below 60 percent capacity. Colorado Springs Utilities is part of the southeastern Colorado water district, along with nine counties and dozens of municipalities, rural water systems and irrigation companies within the Arkansas River Basin stretching from Leadville to the Kansas border…

“We pay taxes to support that project (SECWCD) in the Arkansas Basin. Having that project utilized for the city of Aurora, which clearly does not sit in that basin, was problematic,” said Abigail Ortega of Colorado Springs Utilities during a recent presentation to the utilities board. She was referring to the reason for the original agreement between Aurora and the southeastern Colorado water district.

Ortega said El Paso County and Colorado Springs residents make up about 70% of the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District’s more than 950,000 users. The southeastern Colorado water district and water managers in the Arkansas River Basin want legal documentation from Aurora to ensure that the water will not permanently leave the basin. Officials from Aurora and the water district met in early May to discuss the district’s concerns.

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