D.C. Circuit Court hits the brakes on Uinta Basin Railway, but oil transport through Colorado is still on the table: Aug. 26 protest turns celebratory for #Colorado citizens fighting #Utah project — @AspenJournalism #ActOnClimate

Close to 30 boats floated the Colorado River through Glenwood Canyon on Aug. 26 as part of a flotilla protesting the Uinta Basin Railway. The event turned celebratory after the Aug. 18 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals that overturned the Federal Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the project. CREDIT: AMY HADDEN MARSH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Amy Hadden Marsh):

Uinta Basin Railway (UBR) opponents floated a portion of the Colorado River on Aug. 26 to celebrate a setback to the UBR. Organized by two citizen groups — Colorado Rising and 350 Roaring Fork — a flotilla of about 30 boats and 100 activists put in at Grizzly Creek in the Glenwood Canyon and landed at Two Rivers Park in Glenwood Springs for a rally and picnic. The flotilla was originally planned as a protest to draw attention to the river and what would happen if a train carrying waxy crude derailed in the Glenwood Canyon.

“We’re not fighting a train. We’re not fighting increased train traffic. We’re a rail town,” said former Glenwood Springs Mayor Jonathan Godes, who is now a City Council member and who emceed the rally. “We’re fighting a train that is full of toxic, waxy crude. To think that five trains, two miles long, every day would not derail in one of the most difficult, sensitive places on the entire line is crazy.”

The Colorado River is the lifeblood for local communities and provides water to 40 million people across the western U.S. and parts of Mexico. The proposed UBR — an 88-mile line that would connect oil fields in the Uinta Basin to the national rail network near Price, Utah, in order to access Gulf Coast refineries — would increase the amount of waxy crude shipped east by rail to between 130,000 to 350,000 barrels per day. The federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) approved the UBR in December 2021, which was followed by two separate lawsuits — one filed by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) on behalf of four other conservation groups, and another by Eagle County. They were consolidated in February 2022. On Aug. 18, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Robert L. Wilkins overturned the STB’s decision, transforming the planned flotilla from a protest to a celebration. Five Colorado counties and five municipalities along the national railway — the proposed route for eastbound Uinta Basin waxy crude — signed on to an amicus brief in support of Eagle County in October, making the Aug. 18 decision a victory across the state.

Ted Zukoski, CBD attorney, told Aspen Journalism that the STB and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), whose flawed biological opinion (BiOp) informed the STB’s decision, must go back to the drawing board. “The existing approvals from the STB and FWS are null and void,” he said. “The UBR has been knocked back a number of steps.”

A CBD news release summarized Wilkins’ ruling by stating that the STB “violated the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] by failing to fully analyze the railway’s potential harm to the climate, wildlife, the Colorado River and people, including environmental justice communities along the Gulf Coast.” Key findings show a mixed bag of what counted as a violation and what did not.

According to the ruling, NEPA violations include ignoring the risk to endangered fish in the Colorado River and failure to take a hard look at upstream and downstream impacts of oil production, accident data and downline wildfire risk. The court’s discussion of the UBR’s impacts from production in the Uinta Basin and the downstream impacts on communities near refineries continues a line of precedent and keeps federal agencies accountable, said Zukoski.

“When federal agencies are the on/off switches for climate impacts, air pollution impacts, surface impacts of wildlife habitat, they can’t say, as the [STB] did here, ‘Oh, no, not our problem. We don’t control who develops oil in the Uinta Basin. We don’t know where the oil is going. We’re just approving the railway,’” he said. “The court saw through that.”

In the December 2021 decision, STB Chair Martin Oberman cast the sole dissenting vote, stating that “the environmental impacts outweigh the transportation merits.” Oberman’s opinion questioned his colleagues’ evaluation of the downstream impacts of the UBR and the overall contribution to climate change. He also cited the financial viability of the project given volatile oil prices and the shifting fossil fuel industry.

Wilkins found that the STB violated its own rail policies by looking at the UBR’s economic benefits while ignoring the full significance of the UBR’s environmental costs. He did not uphold plaintiffs’ claims about failure to address landslide risks, violation of the National Historic Preservation Act, downline impacts on biological resources, land use and recreation, or increased noise and potential impacts to the Tennessee Pass rail line.

A raft of activists protesting the Uinta Basin Railway, captained by Christina Rivera, floats the Colorado River under the Grand Avenue Bridge in Glenwood Springs as part of a flotilla protesting the Uinta Basin Railway on Aug. 26. CREDIT: AMY HADDEN MARSH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Glenwood Springs pleased with outcome

Glenwood Springs City Attorney Karl Hanlon, who worked on the amicus brief in support of Eagle County, told Aspen Journalism that the circuit court opinion was a “huge, huge win,” particularly for the process. “There were things that [the court] did accept and things that they didn’t,” he said. “But at the core of it, NEPA requires a more detailed analysis than [the STB] did. You can’t just sort of gloss over it and rubber-stamp a NEPA process.”

Hanlon said the money and time that Glenwood Springs and other towns spent working on the amicus brief was well spent. “I think [the ruling] lays out three really big areas,” he said. “Quantifying the reasonably foreseeable upstream and downstream impacts from increased drilling in the Uinta Basin on vegetation and special status species, the increased oil train traffic along the UP line, and the issue of environmental justice on the Gulf Coast.”

According to a 2018 feasibility study conducted as part of the EIS, most of the refineries equipped for Uinta Basin waxy crude are in MIssissippi and Louisiana, including Marathon Petroleum in Garyville, Louisiana. On Aug. 25, a massive fire at that refinery, caused by a leaky naphtha tank, produced a plume of black smoke and forced nearby evacuations. “This is the kind of harm the Uinta Basin Railway will worsen by pouring billions of gallons of crude per year into Gulf Coast refineries,” said Zukoski. “And the kind of harm that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals explicitly held that the [STB’s] EIS failed to take a hard look at.”

Hanlon is satisfied with the ruling and how comprehensive it was. He said it’s a win for those who work on conservation and environmental issues. “I think it affirms the rules that we all thought we were operating under, right? That these agencies have to take these analyses seriously,” he said.

Godes added that he’s proud of the stance that many Colorado communities have taken. “We are in a really good space with a recent victory,” he said at the rally. “We have a lot of support. This flotilla is proof of that. All of the neighboring communities and jurisdictions, save for Garfield County, have come out against this.”

Boaters approach the Grand Avenue Bridge in Glenwood Springs as part of a flotilla protesting the Uinta Basin Railway on Aug. 26. The event turned celebratory after an Aug. 18 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit that overturned the Federal Surface Transportation Board’s 2021 approval of the project. CREDIT: AMY HADDEN MARSH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

What’s next?

Aspen Journalism reached out to the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, the quasigovernmental engine behind the UBR, for comment on the ruling. In an official email statement, Melissa Cano, strategic communications coordinator for Jones and DeMille Engineering, said the UBR team is not giving up.

“While we disagree with the D.C. Circuit Court’s recent decision, we respect the authority of the U.S. Court of Appeals,” the statement said. “We firmly believe that the railway’s environmental impact statement (EIS) contains appropriate and thorough analysis of the highlighted concerns, as it stands today. Nonetheless, we are ready, willing and capable of working with the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to ensure additional reviews and the project’s next steps proceed without further delay. We look forward to bringing this railway to the basin in a safe and cost-effective way to enable economic stability, sustainable communities and an enriched quality of life to Utahns and beyond.”

Zukoski said there are strategies the SCIC could use as result of the Wilkins ruling, including an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. “But they are better off just saying, ‘Well, now we have a roadmap from the courts on what we need to fix. Let’s go fix it.” He added that the “fix” would be, more or less, a do-over. “They’re going to need approval from the STB again,” he said.”They’re going to need to go through a supplemental environmental impact statement process and get a new biological opinion from the FWS that looks at the spill risk to endangered fish.”

Hanging in the balance are the September 2022 lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) decision to allow construction of the UBR through an inventoried roadless area (IRA); the expansion of the Wildcat Loadout Facility near Price, which would allow an increase in production, storage and transport of Uinta Basin crude regardless of the success or failure of the UBR; and the use of Private Activity Bonds (PAB) issued through U.S. Department of Transportation to fund the UBR. The City of Glenwood Springs wrote a letter to U.S. Transporation Secretary Pete Buttigeig in early August against the use of PAB bonds and requesting a meeting this month. “It would be incredibly precedent-setting if we ever started allowing our tax dollars to be utilized by a private corporation for their profit and their shareholders,” Godes said at the rally. “It doesn’t benefit Colorado and it doesn’t benefit this country.”

The Wildcat Loadout Facility, near Price, Utah, stores and transports Uinta Basin crude. CREDIT: COURTESY PHOTO BY JOHN WEISHEIT

USFS suit undecided

The USFS approved construction of the UBR in July 2022 through 12 miles of an IRA in Utah’s Ashley National Forest. Prior to the approval, CBD and other conservation groups sent a letter to USFS Chief Randy Moore, urging him to reject the Ashley National Forest’s application. But Moore refused, stating, “By definition, a railway does not constitute a road under the Roadless Rule.”

In September 2022, CBD, Living Rivers, Sierra Club and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment filed suit in D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Zukoski told Aspen Journalism at the time that the argument goes beyond whether a railroad is a road. “We raised many issues, including a failure of the Forest Service to consider the impact on roadless values,” he said. That case has not been briefed.

Legal documents show that the court on April 24 granted an abeyance request by the USFS, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition and the Uinta Basin Railway, temporarily suspending court proceedings until the Eagle County suit was decided. The original request shows that the USFS Record of Decision used portions of the same EIS and FWS BiOp that were used in the STB approval and that a decision in favor of Eagle County could make moot the USFS case.

On Aug. 18, the court requested that all parties involved in the suit file motions to govern future proceedings by Sept. 18. “The order suggests that the parties come up with a plan, or competing plans, for resolving the case in light of the decision in the Eagle County case,” said Zukoski. “So, it’s up to the parties to address that decision and seek further relief on the USFS decision. We’ll have to do that by Sept. 18.”

The outcome could also be compromised by the fact that federal approval no longer exists and that construction of the UBR cannot begin until all approvals are finalized. “One potential path forward is that the USFS voluntarily takes some action, such as withdrawing the ROD, and then one or more of the parties files a motion to dismiss the case,” said Zukoski. “Another potential outcome is the USFS believes that it can continue to litigate the case on the merits and we proceed to briefing.”

the location of the Wildcat Loadout Facility near Price, Utah is shown on this map. CREDIT: FROM GOOGLE MAPS

Wildcat workaround

Meanwhile, Uinta Basin oil producers are upping their game. Utah’s output of crude oil has more than doubled in the past four years. Most of the state’s crude comes from Carbon, Daggett, Duchesne, Rich, Summit and Uintah counties — all within the Uinta Basin. Utah state Division of Natural Resources statistics show that Uinta Basin oil production has increased from a total of 31 million barrels per year in 2020 to 45.3 million in 2022. In the first five months of 2023, nearly 20.1 million barrels have come out of the ground.

Several loadout facilities currently transfer Uinta Basin oil from trucks to rail cars bound for California and the Gulf Coast. More and more tanker trucks are carrying crude over winding, two-lane highways from Myton to loadout facilities near Price, Helper, Ogden and Salt Lake City. Wildcat is one such facility near Price.

The Bureau of Land Management is considering a request from Coal Energy Group 2 to expand the capacity of the existing Wildcat Loadout Facility (WLF) to 100,000 bpd from 30,000 bpd. The project would add tank farm facilities, loading and unloading and other operations on about 13 acres of the existing right of way.

Zukoski said there are two theories about Wildcat. “One is that it’s a workaround. It’s a way to take advantage of high oil prices now,” he said. “The other is that it’s basically a proof-of-concept exercise.” The SCIC needs to show investors that there is a market for Uinta Basin crude. Mark Hemphill, who is with Rio Grande Pacific, in 2019 told the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining that a minimum of 130,000 bpd would need to come out of the basin to support the UBR. But without the UBR, the increase in production has been impossible due to caps on Salt Lake City refineries and no way to transport that much crude to other refineries. Wildcat could be a way out of the financial catch-22 that has been dogging the UBR. “If industry can show a significant boost in Uinta Basin oil production and proof that refineries will take that crude, they can take it to investors,” said Zukosky. “They’re in it to make money. That’s what this whole thing is about, and they’re just trying to figure out how to do it.”

The BLM needs to decide what kind of National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) analysis is best for the WLF expansion. ”Actions are analyzed in an EA [environmental assessment] if they are not categorically excluded, not covered in an existing environmental document, and not normally subject to an EIS,” Angela Hawkins, public affairs officer for Utah BLM, said in an email. “The EA is used to determine if the action would have significant impacts. If that is the case, then BLM would need to prepare an EIS.”

Glenwood Springs, Eagle County and conservation groups, including CBD, would prefer an EIS. Over the summer, they informed the BLM of their concerns in separate letters. CBD public lands senior campaigner Deeda Seed said in the conservation groups’ letter that the ruling in the Eagle County case “demonstrates that BLM has a duty to disclose all of the environmental harms the Wildcat Loadout Project would cause, and makes clear that BLM must weigh those harms in evaluating whether the project is in the public interest.” Zukosky told Aspen Journalism that WLF’s maximum capacity would be less than one-third of the UBR’s top capacity of 350,000 bpd. “So, presumably the upstream and downstream impacts would be reduced,” he said. ”But since they didn’t look at those [in the EIS or FWS BiOp), they have to go look at them for this project.”

Colorado state Sen. Lisa Cutter spoke out against the Uinta Basin Railway at a rally at Two Rivers Park in Glenwood Springs on Aug. 26. Cutter represents SD-20, which is in Jefferson County and includes parts of Arvada and Lakewood. CREDIT: AMY HADDEN MARSH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Meanwhile, Colorado state Sen. Lisa Cutter (D-Senate District 20) told Aspen Journalism at the Aug. 26 rally that the state legislature has begun to take a look at rail-transport issues. She’s on the Interim Transportation Legislative Review Committee that has been meeting over the summer. One of the ideas they talked about was enhanced rail safety. But this, too, is in its initial phase.

“It’s not drafted yet, but we’re looking at several provisions,” she said. “Maybe training people along the route, training first responders, maybe having more people on board, more hazardous material specialists on board.” She figures if toxic materials are going to be transported by rail through the state, safeguards must be in place. “We’re not threatening Colorado, our forests, our water, our recreation, our hearts,” said Cutter, whose district includes Jefferson County and parts of Arvada and Lakewood. “I mean, this is the most important thing to me — the mountains, the forests and the way we live here in Colorado.”

Cutter is not sure why Colorado Gov. Jared Polis remains silent on the issue. Asked what she had to say to him about it, she replied that she knows he cares about the Colorado way of life. “Please lend your voice should the opportunity become available,” she said. Aspen Journalism has not yet received a statement from the governor’s office.

For now, citizens from Grand County to Glenwood Springs are celebrating the recent, hard-won success. But Godes urged Polis, a Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican who represents many of the communities that would be impacted by increased crude oil transport out of the Uinta Basin, to clarify their positions on the issue. Godes wonders if Boebert’s silence on the issue is a tacit objection to the UBR. “Congresswoman Boebert is not against it,” he said. “But she has not come out in support of this and that’s a victory.”

On the SunZia transmission project and carbon tunnel vision — @Land_Desk #ActOnClimate

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

This May the Biden Administration gave the final go-ahead for the SunZia transmission line, which is designed to carry power from wind facilities in New Mexico to a major grid hub in the Phoenix area. The approval — which came after 17 years of review — is being hailed as a major win for clean energy because it will enable the Southwest grid’s dastardly solar “duck curve” to be tamed by wind power, not dirty natural gas generation.

The National Audubon Society also considers SunZia a case study for designing and siting clean energy infrastructure in a way that does the least harm to birds and other wildlife. It seems at first glance like a win-win situation. And in some ways and places it is. But there’s at least one loser here, and that’s the San Pedro River valley in southern Arizona, which will be traversed by the line. Now the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Archaeology Southwest are standing up for the cultural and natural landscape of the valley by disputing the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental review and approval of the project.

SunZia was first proposed nearly two decades ago by the Southwest Power Group to carry electricity generated at its proposed natural gas plant in Bowie, Arizona, to the Phoenix area where it could tie into lines continuing westward. When the gas plant plan languished, developers saw opportunities further to the east, in windy central New Mexico, where a lack of transmission capacity has left potential wind farms “stranded.” They expanded the SunZia proposal to enable the development of New Mexico wind that could be sold to Arizona or California utilities (Salt River Project, which serves most of metro Phoenix, was an investor in the line). This shift garnered the support of clean energy boosters like Western Resource Advocates and helped get the Obama administration’s support and final approval in 2015.

But it still had to get the go-ahead from the states. New Mexico regulators hesitated because of strong opposition from conservationists due to the proposed route’s potential impact on migratory birds. Also, the line would cross a portion of the White Sands Missile Range, making the Pentagon “uncomfortable.” So, in 2020, SunZia said it would reopen the NEPA process in order to reroute the line around wildlife refuges and the missile range, and it tracked migratory bird paths to determine where the line could cross the Rio Grande with the least impact. That alleviated most concerns — and gained the blessings of Southwest Audubon. New Mexico gave its approval clearing the way for the feds to do the same.

Unfortunately, the process didn’t work as well in Arizona. There, sovereign Indigenous nations and conservation groups have attempted to get SunZia to reroute the line away from the fragile, biodiverse San Pedro River, because it would endanger birds and other wildlife and potentially damage culturally significant sites. But that didn’t seem to faze Arizona regulators, who tend to be more amenable to such projects and less responsive to environmental concerns than their New Mexican counterparts, and they unanimously approved the project. That removed any incentive for SunZia to reroute the line in Arizona as it had done in New Mexico. The BLM’s preferred route remained alongside the San Pedro River, despite protests from the tribal nations and conservationists.

The BLM issued its final decision this spring, which included the contested San Pedro River route. That sparked the dispute accusing the BLM of failing to properly address the project’s impacts to historic properties and failing to engage in meaningful government-to-government consultation with the tribes.

Audubon Southwest acknowledged the shortcomings in the process and the routing problem, but maintained their support because they felt the developer’s plan to mitigate impacts by, say, altering the placement and height of towers or using helicopters to avoid building new roads, is sufficient to minimize habitat loss or fragmentation. Besides, they say, climate change is a bigger threat to birds and people and the San Pedro River than a transmission line.

It’s clear that averting more calamitous effects of climate change will require cleaning up the power grid, even as it expands to accommodate more people and more electric cars, appliances, and other gadgets. It won’t be easy. The grid is a huge machine that was built up over the last seven decades to move power from giant coal-fired plants and enormous hydropower dams to faraway cities and states. Since then, the way we use and generate electricity has evolved dramatically, and it will need to continue to change in order to slash greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution. This must include small-scale, distributed generation and energy storage and microgrids. We can and should blanket every warehouse, big-box store, parking lot, irrigation canal and home with solar panels. And, perhaps more importantly, we as a society need to learn to become more energy-efficient, using less power even as we electrify everything.

Even that won’t be enough, however. Utility-scale wind and solar installations will also be necessary, as will the long-distance transmission lines needed to carry the energy they generate, such as TransWest Express (which is under construction and will carry wind power from Wyoming to the California grid) and SunZia. These are massive undertakings, and undoubtedly will affect the natural and cultural landscapes, views, habitats, and wildlife.

As Audubon’s recent Birds and Transmission report points out, there are ways to build these projects while also minimizing the impacts. Doing so requires collaborating with and, more importantly, listening to stakeholders and their concerns. And it requires flexibility on the agencies’ and developers’ part. More than that, it requires avoiding “carbon tunnel vision” and a tendency to forget about on-the-ground impacts when focusing solely on tackling climate change.

The San Pedro River near Palominas, Arizona.. By The Old Pueblo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37612401

It appears that in the SunZia case, both the BLM and the developers were afflicted with this tunnel vision and were unable to see the harm the project would inflict on the San Pedro River and the people who consider it sacred. In his protest letter to the BLM, San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler wrote:

“This Valley … one of the ‘Last Great Places’ in America, is the fragile core for the largest expanse of unfragmented land in the Southwest, an area that includes the southern half of the San Carlos Apache Reservation. At least as importantly, the Valley is the home to more than 60 landforms named and remembered in our Apache language. The Valley also hosts thousands of localities having religious, cultural, historical, and archaeological importance to Apache, O’odham, Hopi, and Zuni peoples.”

Does that sound like the place you’d want massive transmission towers and high-voltage lines slashing through — even with a great mitigation package? Probably not. What’s most aggravating is that there was a reasonable alternative route: along the I-10 and Highway 70 corridor. The biggest impact there would have been to motorists’ views.

Gila River watershed. Graphic credit: Wikimedia

Summer 2023 (June-August) precipitation ranking compared to all summers since 1895. A chaotic mix of record wettest and record driest — Brian Brettschneider @Climatologist49

Book of the Dead: The Species Declared Extinct in 2022 — The Revelator

Dugong photo by Mark Goodchild (CC BY 2.0)

Click the link to read the article on The Revelator website (John R. Platt):

This year we bid farewell to two lost frogs, the Chinese paddlefish, a plant from New Hampshire, and many others.

Last July scientists in Texas announced some surprising news: They had rediscovered an oak tree species previously believed to be extinct. Until then the last known Quercus tardifolia tree was believed to have died more than a decade earlier. But lo and behold, one more tree was discovered in Big Bend National Park, meaning the species wasn’t extinct after all.

The rest of the news wasn’t as good: That lone tree isn’t doing so well. It’s been burned by fire and shows signs of a fungal infection. Scientists say it’s in need of “immediate conservation.”

This situation isn’t that atypical in the world of wildlife conservation, where species that have avoided extinction in the Anthropocene still need dramatic support. A recent study found that more than half of all known endangered species require targeted recovery efforts if they’re to avert “human-induced extinction.”

If that doesn’t happen, we’re going to lose more species — a lot of them. Despite rediscoveries like the oak tree in Texas, the world is still losing biodiversity at dangerously high rates. In 2022, scientists announced that they had given up efforts to find dozens of long-lost species, including two frogs, one of the world’s biggest fish, an orchid from Florida, a grass from New Hampshire and many others.

And those are just the ones we know about. Another 2022 study warned about the threat of “dark extinction,” the loss of species science has never even identified as having existed in the first place. By conservative estimates, millions of species are yet to be discovered, identified and named, and most are at risk of disappearing before that ever happens as humanity continues its relentless expansion. And if we don’t know they exist, we can’t do anything to save them.

So let’s take a moment to talk about the ones we do know that we’ve lost, to remember their names, to add them to the Book of the Dead, and to use their lessons to prevent others from suffering the same fate. We’ve compiled dozens of stories of extinction from the past year, including species that have been declared lost after many decades of looking, other species that have vanished from key ranges of their habitat, and others that are now extinct in the wild and exist only in captivity.

But before we get to those names, let’s take a lesson from the Endangered Species Act here in the United States — a law that turns 50 this year. Virtually every species that has been protected under the Act has had its extinction prevented. Some were added to the list too late, and they died out as a result. Many are still hanging on by a thread, but active conservation efforts are preventing them from disappearing any further. Many have recovered — most recently two plants from the Channel Islands — and more are likely to do so in the future. That is the ultimate lesson of the extinction crisis: It’s preventable if we work hard enough.

Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) — The declared extinction of this iconic fish shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Last seen in 2003, these massive beasts — who reportedly reached up to 23 feet in length — were already on the decline due to overfishing and habitat degradation before the Gezhouba Dam was built in 1981. That dam cut off their migration route in the Yangtze River and doomed the species. People have been looking for them ever since but, given their gigantic stature and the fact that no one has spotted any in that time, the species was declared extinct this past year. As the only member of its genus, the Chinese paddlefish’s extinction represents the loss of an entire evolutionary line.

Yangtze sturgeon (Acipenser dabryanus) — An extinction in the making, or recovery on the cusp? Either of those could be the fate of the Yangtze sturgeon. No mature fish have been seen in the wild in years, and the species was declared extinct in the wild this year by the IUCN. Ongoing captive-propagation efforts have produced tens of thousands of young sturgeon, who are released annually into the Yangtze River, but so far that hasn’t paid off in terms of wild reproduction. The species initially declined due to a long list of threats, including overfishing, shipping, dams, pollution and other habitat degradations, and few of those dangers have faded. Those same threats affect all other sturgeon species: Two-thirds are now critically endangered.

Florida govenia (Govenia floridana) — This large orchid, native to Everglades National Park in Florida, was mistakenly identified as another species when it was first discovered in 1957. That delay in recognition probably doomed it. At the time of discovery, only 25 plants existed. Poaching probably quickly wiped them out before they could be protected. The IUCN declared the species extinct in 2022, decades after its last verified sighting in 1964.

Sharp-snouted day frog (Taudactylus acutirostris) — Gone in the blink of an eye. It took just five years for this once-common Australian amphibian species to decline and ultimately disappear, probably due to the deadly chytrid fungus, which is causing frog extinctions all around the world. Last seen in 1997, the day frog was declared extinct this past year following two decades of extensive searches.

Mountain mist frog (Litoria nyakalensis) — Another Australian frog, another probable victim of the chytrid fungus. This one was last seen in 1990, and extensive searches have failed to prove it still exists.

Rare orchid. Photo: Denise Molmou via Kew Gardens

Saxicolella deniseae — Known from a single waterfall in the Republic of Guinea, this herb appears to have gone extinct after its only habitat was flooded during construction of a hydroelectric dam.

Raiatean ground partula snail (Partula navigatoria) and Garrett’s tree snail (P. garrettii) — These species from French Polynesia were nearly eaten into extinction by the notorious, carnivorous rosy wolf snail, an invasive species around the planet. The last live animals were found and brought into a captive-breeding program in the early 1990s. A reintroduction program began in 2016 at a site that (unfortunately) was later found to contain another predatory invasive species, the New Guinea flatworm. Pending the success of future reintroductions, these species have been assessed as extinct in the wild, joining other snails from French Polynesia in that purgatory-like category.

A jaguarini photographed in Belize in June 2022. Photo: © giana521 via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC)

Jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi) in the United States — One of the major regional extinctions on this year’s list. The jaguarundi, a small feline, was last officially seen in the United States — the northernmost part of its range — in 1986. In 2022 a major 18-year study reported no evidence the species still exists in the country and declared it ripe for reintroduction efforts.

Beilschmiedia ningmingensis — This tree was last seen in China in 1935, in an area that has long since been converted to agriculture and plantations. China already considered it extinct; the IUCN added it to the list of extinct species this year after extensive recent surveys.

Coote’s tree snail (Partula cootei) — Last seen in French Polynesia in 1934, this snail probably disappeared slowly as it hybridized with another introduced species. Researchers assessed it as extinct in 2017, but the information wasn’t published or added to the IUCN Red List until this past year.

White-handed gibbon. Photo: Bernard Dupont (CC BY-SA 2.0)

White-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) and northern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus leucogenys) — China formally declared both these primates extinct in the wild within their borders this past September, at least a decade after they were last seen in the country. Researchers blamed “human activities” (including hunting, deforestation and the pet trade) for their disappearance. Each species still exists in other countries in Southeast Asia, although the white-handed gibbon is endangered, and the northern white-cheeked gibbon is critically endangered.

Dugong (Dugong dugon) in China — These gentle manatee relatives, who are considered “vulnerable to extinction” through most of their range, have all but disappeared from China, another major extirpation for the country this year. A paper published in July declared dugongs “functionally extinct” in Chinese waters, meaning some of them still exist there but not enough to form a healthy population. This, according to researchers, represents “the first reported functional extinction of a large vertebrate in Chinese marine waters” and serves as a “sobering reminder” of the threats faced by other species.

Poecilobothrus majesticus — What little we know about this long-legged fly from the United Kingdom stems from a single male specimen collected on the Essex coast in 1907. Scientists didn’t taxonomically name it until 1976, and a 2018 report on UK flies of the Dolichopodidae family concluded that it was probably extinct, as “one would have expected them to have been encountered by now.” The IUCN added it to the Red List as extinct this past year.

Luciobarbus nasus — This fish was known from just a single river system in western Morocco, where it hasn’t been seen since 1874. Pollution from a nearby city may have done it in, but that remains unclear. Here’s the good news though: After years of scientific debate, this species has now been reclassified into four species, with three of them remaining in existence (and one of those endangered).

Chott el Djerid barbel (Luciobarbus antinorii) — When you use too much water, don’t expect fish to stay alive much longer. That’s what happened in Tunisia, where this rare fish disappeared sometime around the 1990s or 2000s. It was listed under the IUCN Red list as a data deficient for many years but was declared extinct in 2022.

Syzygium humblotii — This tree, a member of the myrtle family, hasn’t been seen in about 130 years. It grew in Mayotte, an overseas department of France located in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique, in an area that has since been degraded by farms, livestock and other nonnative species. Searches over the past three decades have failed to turn up signs of its existence, so this year the IUCN declared it extinct.

Kalanchoe fadeniorum — Relatives of this long-lost Kenyan plant are grown as houseplants around the world. This species isn’t as lucky. Known from just one site, it hasn’t been seen since 1977. The areas surrounding where it grew aren’t very well surveyed, so scientists are hedging their bets and calling it “extinct in the wild.”

Heenan’s cycad (Encephalartos heenanii) — Every member of this plant genus (commonly referred to as bread trees or bread palms) is endangered due to overcollection, sometimes for food, sometimes for traditional medicine, sometimes just to own them. Previously listed as critically endangered, Heenan’s cyad was reassessed as extinct in the wild in 2022 due to “persistent pressure from plant collectors.”

Giant Atlas barbel (Labeobarbus reinii) — Although this Moroccan fish was last seen in 2001, it was listed on the IUCN Red List as “vulnerable to extinction” for several years. Well, that prediction has come true: This year the IUCN declared it extinct. It was known from just one small stretch of river that suffered from pollution and runoff from a nearby city, as well as a dam that separated populations. These factors undoubtedly affected the fish, but the exact reason for its extinction remain unknown.

**Abrolhos** painted button quail. By Grahame Bowland, CC BY 3.0, Link

Abrolhos painted button-quail (Turnix varius scintillans) — This Australian bird subspecies is known from just three islands. Now it’s down to two. The population on North Island in the Houtman Abrolhos Archipelago has been “eaten out of house and home” by introduced invasive species, which degraded the habitat. Researchers spent nearly 13,000 nights camera trapping the island between 2018 and 2021 and concluded in a 2022 paper that the bird no longer exists there. The quail is considered one of the five Australian species most likely to face extinction in the coming years, so this extirpation represents a major blow for its conservation.

Cystophora — Not one extinction, but many? A 2022 paper declares several species of this algae genus “functionally extinct” along the coast of southern Australia. At least seven species are reportedly now absent from the warmest edges of their historical range. The causes of their decline and disappearance are not known, but the paper cites slightly likely impacts from “gradual warming, marine heatwaves and rapid urbanization.”

Smooth slender crabgrass (Digitaria filiformis var. laeviglumis) — Known from a single park in Manchester, New Hampshire, this rare plant was last seen in 1931. The New Hampshire Natural Heritage Bureau declared it extinct this past June. Other varieties of the crabgrass species still exist in neighboring New England states, but this version was unique and is now considered lost.

Mollinedia myriantha — This Brazilian tree has a sad history. It was discovered in [1892], then lost for 123 years. A sole individual tree was rediscovered in 2015, but fieldwork conducted in the following years found that the lonely tree had died. Researchers officially declared it “critically endangered, possibly extinct” this past year. The same paper warns that the genus faces a wide range of threats and many species remain unassessed, meaning they too could soon face extinction.

Irrawaddy dolphin. Dan Koehl, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) in Laos — The last individual of this species in Laos was found dead on Feb. 15. It had been injured by being caught in fishing gear — it escaped, but only after receiving injuries that left it unable to hunt. Irrawaddy dolphins remain in other countries, but the species is endangered, and its loss in Laos represents a major population gone.

And 562 more? — Proving an extinction is never easy — it’s easier to see something than it is to not see something. But many species have gone unseen for decades, and while scientists still look for them every year, hope begins to dwindle after a time.

Is it time to give up hope for 562 lost species? That’s the question raised by a paper published this May, which examines long-unseen species listed on the IUCN Red List. It identifies 137 amphibians, 257 reptiles, 38 birds and 130 mammals that have not been seen for at least 50 years and asks if that half-century of no sightings means they’re extinct. Maybe, maybe not. We need to be prepared for that possibility, but the paper suggests this analysis actually provides something positive: a way to prioritize geographic “hotspots” where scientists can target their searches for long-lost species.

In other words, let’s find these lost species while there’s still time.

Building soil health important for #drought, #wildfire resiliency, experts say: Landowners learn steps to long-temr soil improvements — Steamboat Pilot & Today

This field is irrigated with water from the Roaring Fork River, under a senior water right. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Steamboat Pilot & Today website (Suzie Romig). Here’s an excerpt:

The consultant with UnderstandAG — which uses the tagline restoring soil, profits, farms and futures — conducted a water infiltration test in the field that after 10 minutes showed very little water soaking into the hard soil. That is because, for one reason, the field had no armor, or a soil cover of plant residue on the surface. Soil cover is one of the six key elements for building healthy soil that the landowners and ranchers learned about during the all-day Soil Health Field Day on Aug. 15.

“Hay producers might be better off in the long term if they left a 3 or 4-inch stubble of hay, which would help generate a more healthy soil system and by maintaining a continuous living root or ground cover,” said Lyn Halliday, board president of the Routt County Conservation District, which organized the free workshop.

Halliday explained that healthy soils act like a sponge helping to absorb and contain moisture. Low soil moisture can cause plants to stop growing or dry out and may provide fuels for wildfires. On the other hand, when soil moisture content is high, fires have more difficulty in igniting, burning and spreading rapidly.

In the next demonstration area on the property, Fuchs showed with an infrared thermometer the 30-40 degree difference in temperatures of healthy soil versus compacted, poor soil. When Fuchs took a reading of 143 degrees on bare soil, he stopped to take a photo of the startling results because, he said, at 140 degrees, good soil bacteria die. He pointed out a soil temperature study that showed at 130 degrees, 100% of moisture is lost through evaporation and transpiration. At 100 degrees, 15% of moisture is used for plant growth and 85% is lost…

The conservation district recently released a “Routt County Landowner Toolkit for Building Drought, Wildfire and Soil Health Resiliency,” that is online at RouttCountyCD.com. The toolkit includes links to helpful resources with the goal of inspiring county landowners and ranchers to adapt to changing conditions that affect the land and daily practices of farming and ranching. The toolkit points out the best management practices for agriculture include reducing or eliminating tillage, nurturing the living organic components of soils, promoting diversification of soil flora and fauna below ground and plants above ground, creating pollinator habitat, diversifying rotations including grazing, and reducing wind erosion by establishing wind breaks.

Stakeholder meeting held for proposed #water regulations — The #PagosaSprings Sun #SanJuanRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Ralph Parshall squats next to the flume he designed at the Bellevue Hydrology Lab using water from the Cache la Poudre River. 1946. Photo Credit: Water Resource Archive, Colorado State University, via Legacy Water News.

Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Hailey Sams). Here’s an excerpt:

The Colorado Division of Water Resources (CDWR) met Wednesday, Aug. 9, to go over and develop water measurement rules for Division 7. According to its water administration Web page, the Division of Water Resources (DWR) “has focused on measurement rules in recognition of the importance of measuring both surface water and groundwater diversions. DWR is now beginning a formal effort to develop measurement rules in Division 7 by conducting stakeholder meetings in Southwestern Colorado in late July and early August.”

A draft of 18 possible rules was released and can be found at https://swwcd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2023-07-25-Rules-for-Initial-Stakeholder-Meetings.pdf.

The rules are based off of the rules appointed in Division 6. The CDWR is “in charge by law to make sure the people that divert water off the river according to their water rights, or pump water out of the ground do it according to their water right and … don’t injure other people” said Kevin Ryan, state engineer for the CDWR, at the Aug. 9 stakeholder meeting. Injury is used to describe when someone’s water flow is negatively impacted by an upstream user.

Navajo Dam operations update September 2, 2023: Bumping up to 800 cfs #SanJuanRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Pine River Marina at Navajo Reservoir. Photo credit: Reclamation

From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):

September 1, 2023

The upcoming forecast is warmer and drier than average, and forecast flows in the critical habitat reach are steadily decreasing. For this reason, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam to 800 cubic feet per second (cfs) for tomorrow, September 2nd, at 4:00 AM.

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.

#Colorado Lawmakers seek answers from top #ColoradoRiver officials as critical talks begin — Fresh Water News #COriver #aridification #cwc2023

Colorado River near the headwaters. Photo credit: Dave Showalter

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Larry Morandi):

Colorado won’t be buying up agricultural water rights to reduce water use and help stabilize the Colorado River, according to a briefing top river officials provided state lawmakers last week.

Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission, reassured lawmakers that the state would not buy agricultural water rights from growers as part of any program to reduce Colorado River water use within the state.

Asked by Rep. Barbara McLachlan, D-Durango, whether the state wants to permanently acquire water from agriculture, Mitchell responded with an emphatic “No … We don’t have our eyes set on agricultural [water] rights.”

She also emphasized that whatever policies Colorado considers “should focus on making our own state stronger… We need to do this to protect Colorado.”

Mitchell’s comments came at a meeting of the legislature’s Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee Aug. 23 in Steamboat Springs, held during the Colorado Water Congress Summer Conference.

The Colorado River, despite a bountiful water year thus far, has been mired in a 23-plus year drought, believed to be the worst in at least 1,200 years, and it is witnessing alarming reductions in flows due to climate change and overuse.

Last year lakes Powell and Mead, the river’s largest reservoirs, dropped to historic lows and federal officials ordered all seven Colorado River Basin states to permanently reduce water use by 2 million acre-feet to 4 million acre-feet annually.

This summer critical negotiations on how to continue to operate the river beyond 2026, when current operating guidelines expire, have begun. Mitchell said it was critical the new federal operating guidelines change the way water is released from lakes Powell and Mead. “Operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead must respond to actual hydrology [how much the river produces] and available water supply.” She noted that currently, in eight out of 10 years, more water leaves Lake Powell than comes in.

As the crisis on the river continues, Colorado water users, growers and lawmakers have been asking for more clarity and more assurances on how the state intends to protect their water interests and help stabilize the giant river system.

Because agriculture uses roughly 80% of the Colorado River’s supplies, a major focus across the seven-state basin is on how to reduce agricultural water use while maintaining farm economies and food production.

Earlier this year a new federal program, known as the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP), launched, but it received little interest from Colorado growers.

It used federal funds to provide incentives to Upper Basin irrigators to temporarily reduce their use of Colorado River water.

Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, the agency that represents Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming on Colorado River issues, said the idea was “to demonstrate that the Upper Basin has the tools to manage water uses and to take actions necessary to live within the means of the river.”

But the results so far have been disappointing, with low farmer participation and only 2,700 acre-feet of water conserved. Cullom said there is no commitment yet to run the SCPP again in 2024.

Rep. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose, asked how it might be improved. Cullom said the program would need to operate differently, including starting earlier, developing different pricing policies, and providing more clarity on the program’s purpose and scope, among other things.

Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Avon, asked what additional tools could help agriculture engage in more conservation? Based on feedback he has received from water users, Cullom suggested expanding investments in irrigation efficiency infrastructure—such as canal lining, sprinkler drip systems, center pivot irrigation—and growing alternative crops.

Key to maintaining ownership of water, under Colorado law, is to demonstrate it is being used. Some growers fear that if they reduce use through conservation techniques, their water rights could be taken from them.

Roberts asked Mitchell if Colorado should consider a recently enacted Arizona law that protects agricultural water users who invest in greater efficiencies from losing their water rights. She thought the state already offered those protections “at some level” and would get back to the committee to see if they could be expanded.

Roberts said it would be a good idea “if we could give them assurances in law that they won’t lose their water rights just because they tried to be more efficient.”

Larry Morandi was formerly director of State Policy Research with the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver, and is a frequent contributor to Fresh Water News. He can be reached at larrymorandi@comcast.net.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

#Drought news August 31, 2023: For the week, some light precipitation accumulations (generally < 1 inch) were observed in isolated areas of the Four Corners states and Intermountain West

Click the link 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

This U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week saw continued intensification of drought across areas of the Midwest, South, Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest. In the Midwest, extreme heat impacted areas of the region including Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois with temperatures soaring 6 to 10+ degrees F above normal. Daily high temperature records were broken across the region during the past week including in Chicago (98), Milwaukee (101), Minneapolis (101), and Des Moines (100). Similarly, areas of the South including the northern Gulf Coast of Texas, Louisiana, and southern Mississippi saw continued drought-related deterioration on this week’s map as the heatwave continued to push high temperatures over 100 degrees F with numerous records broken during the past week. Record daily highs were set or tied in various southern cities including Houston (109), San Antonio (104), Austin (107), Dallas (109), Baton Rouge (106), New Orleans (103), Jackson (106), and Mobile (101). In Louisiana and southern Mississippi, the continued hot and dry conditions have led to numerous wildfire outbreaks as well as widespread poor hydrologic conditions and severe impacts within the agricultural sector. In the Southwest, monsoon precipitation has been well below normal across much of the region with areas of southern Arizona and New Mexico reporting rainfall deficits ranging from 3 to 6 inches since the beginning of July. In the Pacific Northwest, areas of drought expanded on the map in Oregon, Washington, and Montana in response to a combination of above-normal temperatures over the past 90-day period, precipitation shortfalls, and poor surface water conditions. Conversely, some areas saw improved drought-related conditions on the map, including southern Texas where heavy rains, in association with Tropical Storm Harold last week, provided much-needed moisture to the region. Rainfall accumulations along the southern Gulf Coast and South Texas Plains regions ranged from 2 to 6 inches. In the Southeast, areas of Florida braced themselves for the impacts of Hurricane Idalia as it intensified rapidly early this week. The hurricane made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida early Wednesday morning (8/30) as a dangerous Category3 hurricane bringing a life-threatening storm surge, catastrophic winds, and severe flooding…

High Plains

On this week’s map, degradations were made in northern portions of North Dakota and in eastern Kansas. Conversely, recent precipitation during the past 30-60-day period led to some minor improvements on the map in drought-affected areas of southeastern Nebraska. Across most of the Plains, hot and dry conditions prevailed this week except for some isolated shower activity along the Kansas-Nebraska border region where 1 to 3 inches were observed. Average temperatures for the week were well above normal (2 to 8 degrees F) with the greatest departures observed in northwestern North Dakota and eastern portions of Nebraska and Kansas…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 29, 2023.

West

On the map, degradations were made across areas of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest including New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. In the Pacific Northwest, an area of Extreme Drought (D3) was added in the North Cascades where precipitation has been below normal both in the short and long term. Moreover, 7-day average streamflows on numerous creeks and rivers were below the 10th percentile and numerous other drought indices were supporting deterioration in the Cascades as well as other areas in the state. Likewise, poor soil moisture and low streamflow levels led to expansion of Extreme Drought (D3) in northwestern Montana. In New Mexico, the combination of short- and long-term precipitation deficits, poor soil moisture, and impacts in the agricultural sector (eastern New Mexico) led to continued deterioration on the map across parts of the state. For the week, some light precipitation accumulations (generally < 1 inch) were observed in isolated areas of the Four Corners states and Intermountain West…

South

In the South, the heatwave continued across the region during the past week with record-breaking temperatures observed across the eastern half of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. On the map, areas of Extreme Drought (D3) and Exceptional Drought (D4) expanded along the northern Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana as well as areas of Severe Drought (D2) and Extreme Drought (D3) in southern Mississippi. According to the latest U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) Weekly Weather and Crop Progress Bulletin (8/29), the percentage of topsoil in Texas rated short to very short was 92%, while neighboring Louisiana was rated 88% short to very short. In addition, Water Data for Texas was reporting (8/30) reservoirs in the Edwards Plateau Climate Division were 35.9% full, while the South-Central Climate Division reservoirs were 44.2% full. In terms of drought-related impacts, the National Drought Mitigation Center’s Condition Monitoring Observer Reports (CMOR) were reporting hundreds of impact reports from across Louisiana and Mississippi during the past 30 days. For the week, average temperatures across the region were well above normal across most of the region with temperature departures ranging from 2 to 10+ degrees F above normal. In terms of precipitation, the region was generally very dry except for some isolated areas of light to moderate accumulations observed in areas of Texas (East Texas, Trans-Pecos), Louisiana, and southern Mississippi. In South Texas, some locally heavy rainfall was observed in association with Tropical Storm Harold making landfall and providing beneficial rainfall to drought-affected areas…

Looking Ahead

The NWS WPC 7-Day Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) calls for heavy precipitation accumulations ranging from 4 to 10+ inches in association with impacts of Hurricane Idalia, which is forecast to bring very heavy rains across the Big Bend region of Florida as well as across areas of the Coastal Plain of Georgia and the Carolinas. In the Northeast, dry conditions are expected, while most of the South, Midwest, and the Plains states are forecasted to experience generally dry conditions. In the West, some light to moderate accumulations ranging from 1 to 3 inches are expected across portions of Arizona, Utah, and in isolated areas of the central and northern Rockies. The CPC 6-10 Day Outlooks call for a moderate-to-high probability of above-normal temperatures across much of the conterminous U.S. in an area extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Eastern Seaboard, while near-normal temperatures are expected over the remainder of the West except in Washington state where temperatures are forecasted to be below normal. In terms of precipitation, below-normal precipitation is expected across much of the southern tier of the conterminous U.S. as well as portions of the Mid-Atlantic, Great Basin, and Intermountain West. Meanwhile, above-normal precipitation is forecasted for areas of the Upper Midwest, Northern Plains, and the Pacific Northwest.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 29, 2023.

Sackett v. EPA: How the Supreme Court Decimated the Clean Water Act — Getches-Wilkinson Center #WOTUS

Click the link to read the article on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Andrew Teegarden):

August 22, 2023

After reading, rereading, and rereading again, I can’t help but conclude that the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA makes no sense. The case presented the decades-old question of which waters, and by extension, the wetlands adjacent to those waters, are considered “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) and therefore subject to federal regulation under the Clean Water Act (CWA). Section 404 of the CWA requires operators to obtain a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) before beginning dredge and fill operations on WOTUS. But the confusion surrounding the meaning of WOTUS, most of it caused by the Supreme Court itself, puts anyone potentially subject to regulation under the CWA in a difficult spot. If they fail to get a permit when one is needed, they could be subject to fines and ordered to restore any land or water they disturbed. The Corps has also been placed in the untenable position of not being able to ascertain what lands and waters are deemed WOTUS.

The Supreme Court has now issued four decisions addressing WOTUS. With each decision they seem to show greater hostility towards the law, even as they fail to offer clear guidance to the public and the agency about what activities, lands, and waters are subject to regulation.

Riverside Bayview Homes was the first of these, issued in 1985. It was a unanimous decision upholding the Corps’ authority to regulate the proposed filling of wetlands adjacent to a navigable stream. Although Riverside was arguably an easy case, the Court signaled its intention to support a broad reading of the WOTUS, consistent with Congress’ declaration in the conference report to the CWA that they intended “the broadest possible constitutional interpretation” of federal jurisdiction.

But in its subsequent 5-4 decision in SWANCC, which came down in 2001, Justice Rehnquist, speaking for the Court, narrowly construed the CWA because it believed that a broad reading might violate the commerce clause of the constitution. Specifically, the Corps struck down the “migratory bird rule,” whereby waters used by migratory birds were deemed WOTUS. Oddly, the Court failed to even assess the scope of the CWA against the commerce clause or other constitutional authorities like the treaty clause. Had it done so, it surely would have found grounds to uphold the statute under the constitution.

The SWANCC decision forced the Corps to develop a process whereby a party could seek a “jurisdictional determination” from the Corps. This added another bureaucratic layer to the policy of protecting our nation’s waters and forced the Corps to back-off from claiming jurisdiction where the administrative cost of doing so was simply too high.

Five years later, in 2006, a divided Court once again narrowly construed the CWA in Rapanos. Justice Scalia’s plurality opinion for four members of the Court held that only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to a traditional navigable water would be deemed WOTUS. In a concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy held that wetlands should be deemed WOTUS if they have a “significant nexus” with traditionally navigable waters. Kennedy based his opinion in part on the CWA’s main purpose of restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters. But like Scalia, and Rehnquist before him in SWANCC, he ignored Congress’ admonition that it intended WOTUS to have the “broadest possible constitutional interpretation.”

SWANCC resulted in confusion across the country for the interested public, regulated parties, administrative agencies, and the courts. EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers took the position that Justice Kennedy’s “significant nexus” test would control the issue moving forward, but the application of that new rule, forced upon federal and state agencies by the Supreme Court, would prove to be a costly and uncertain process.

That tortured history set the stage for the Supreme Court’s most recent opinion in Sackett, in which the Court compounds these mistakes by ignoring the science and prior precedent by further narrowing the CWA’s reach by defining “adjacent” to mean “adjoining.” Even using a plain meaning of the word, adjacent realistically includes wetlands that are ‘next to’ or ‘beside’ a navigable water. However, relying on Justice Scalia’s decision in Rapanos, the Court held that WOTUS covers only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water with a continuous surface connection to a traditional navigable water body. According to the Court, the surface connection must be so extensive that it is difficult to determine where the water ends, and the wetland begins.An even larger problem with the majority approach is their use of section 404(g)’s parenthetical reference to ‘adjacent wetlands’ as the justification for limiting the jurisdictional reach of the CWA. According to the Court, “because section 404(g) includes adjacent wetlands within WOTUS, these wetlands must qualify as WOTUS in their own right, i.e., be indistinguishably part of a body of water that itself constitutes waters under the CWA.”

Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org

Limiting the Corps jurisdiction to only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection will result in catastrophic damage to our nation’s waters because many ecologically important areas will not be protected by the CWA. The ruling goes even farther than the Trump-era Navigable Water Protection Rule which removed protections from 51% of wetlands nationwide.

In a few weeks, the EPA and the Corps will release a proposed rule to clarify the meaning of WOTUS and issue guidance to States and Tribes looking to assume their own 404(g) permitting and compliance program. Given that EPA plans on issuing a new operational definition of WOTUS without public comment, we encourage all partners to read the pre-publication version of the § 404(g) rule which solicits comments on each area of the program, particularly funding, operations, and judicial review of final determinations. The Getches-Wilkinson Center plans to submit a comment to the EPA on this proposal. If you have any comments or concerns that you believe we should address in our comment, please feel free to reach out to me via email to andrew.teegarden@colorado.edu.

Download the document here.

Justice Scalia’s opinion in the Rapanos case, and now Alito’s in the Sackett decision, would remove most or all intermittent or ephemeral streams from Clean Water Act protections. That would leave 94% of Arizona’s streams more vulnerable to development. Source: U.S. EPA.

Forests to Faucets (and Headgates!) — John Fleck (InkStain) #SanJuanRiver #RioGrande

Informal collaborative governance in action. Photo credit: John Fleck/InkStain

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

I spent a couple of days last week out of Pagosa Springs in southern Colorado, touring forest restoration work in the headwaters of the San Juan-Chama Project, which produces critical water supplies for central New Mexico. In others words, water for my neighhbors and me.

We’ve learned over and over in the last couple of decades the risk to city water from wildfire in our headwaters, and the benefits of forest restoration. But the institutional path to restoration is challenging – because of cost, because of the complicated mix of land ownership, and because of the distance (both physically and also conceptually) between the mountain watersheds and the people who depend on the water they supply.

I came away optimistic about the creative problem solving I saw. This stuff’s hard, especially to do at the scale needed, but the efforts are impressive.

FOREST TO FAUCETS (AND HEADGATES)

A few years back, my University of New Mexico collaborator Bob Berrens helped guide a research project intended to flesh out the relationship between Albuquerque and the distant headwaters (a ~200 mile drive away) that provide a critical piece of our water supply.

That’s from the resulting paper, Adhikari, Dadhi, et al. “Linking forest to faucets in a distant municipal area: Public support for forest restoration and water security in Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Water Economics and Policy 3.01 (2017): 1650019. Using a contingent valuation survey (a technique Bob’s used for many years to help us get our heads around non-market values of stuff related to water resources, see for example here on the endangered Rio Grande Silvery minnow), the research group found:

a mean willingness to pay of $64 per household, which equates to $7 million a year flowing out of Albuquerque to help support forest restoration in the watershed on which we depend, and

even households far away from watersheds support shelling out cash to pay for the work – not just communities like Santa Fe that can look up from their back porch to see their watershed (more on this later – in addition to its back porch watershed, Santa Fe also gets water from the San Juan-Chama headwaters)

COLLABORATIONS AT THE WATERSHED SCALE

While in Pagosa Springs and the surrounding watersheds, we got to see and learn about an amazing set of collaborations involving the Forest Stewards Guild, the Chama Peak Land Alliance, and The Nature Conservancy’s Rio Grande Water Fund, which provides a crucial conduit for the “payment for ecosystems” model Bob’s work talks about.

Bobcat® Compact Track Loader with Masticating Attachment. Photo credit: Wilderness Forestry, Inc.

One of the keys to making this work is a business model – the money supports folks in communities like Pagosa Springs who actually drive the masticators (big machines that grind up overgrown forest stuff). It’s part of the rural-urban social contract Bob and I talk about in the UNM Water Resources Program class we’re teaching this fall.

COLLABORATIONS AT THE REGIONAL WATER MANAGEMENT SCALE

Bob’s called this stuff “forests to faucets”, but what we’re seeing this year on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico is a reminder that the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, and the river channel itself, also depend on the importation of San Juan-Chama Project water across the continental divide. Absent the SJC water over the last couple of months, the MRGCD’s ditches would have gone dry sooner, as would the river channel. (Both ditches and river channel are starting to go dry as we speak, after MRGCD’s San Juan-Chama water ran out, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)

The organizer of last week’s tours was the San Juan-Chama Contractor’s Association, a group formed several years ago to try to create a framework for collective action among the New Mexico water agencies that use this imported water. Other states have umbrella agencies to organize big parts of their Colorado River water management – the Central Arizona Water Conservation District (“CAP”) in Arizona, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and the Southern Nevada Water Agency (Las Vegas NV). In New Mexico, we have a bunch of separate San Juan-Chama Project water users, each with their own contract with the Bureau of Reclamation. The SJC Contractors Association has created a framework for thinking about collective action on things like physical infrastructure costs and maintenance – and forest restoration!

Key Rio Grande Valley players in attendance were leadership from Albuquerque, Santa Fe (which in addition to San Juan-Chama water, gets supplies from its own local Sangre de Cristo watersheds, which have forest health challenges too) and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

SOCIAL CAPITAL

In addition to spending time in drop-dead gorgeous mountain watersheds, last week’s tours and meetings also created a great framework for sitting out on the back patio at Motel SOCO in Pagosa Springs eating delicious bar food and drinking our choice of beverages and building social capital. Bonus points for the tours organizers for getting the forest nerds and the water nerds talking.

Great fun was had by me.

Near Pagosa Springs. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs

2023 #COleg: New #drought task force supports river’s revival: The 17-member task force will provide recommendations to #Colorado’s state legislature in mid-December 2023 — The #Telluride Daily Planet #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

State Capitol May 12, 2018 via Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on The Telluride Daily Planet website (Sophie Stuber): Here’s an excerpt:

Colorado’s legislature recently approved a new Colorado River Drought Task Force that will help provide guidelines and recommendations to manage the state’s water supply from the river as dry conditions continue. The aim of the task force is to give recommendations for state legislation and to develop additional tools to help address drought in the Colorado River basin.

“Since the early 2000s the Colorado River basin has been experiencing an unprecedented drought,” Colorado Representative Julie McCluskie, one of the bill’s sponsors, told the Daily Planet…

The 17-member task force is composed of representatives from local governments, agricultural water users, environmental groups, water management boards and the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes. There will also be a sub-task force to focus on tribal water rights and to provide additional recommendations for state legislation…Members met for the first time at the start of August. The task force will issue recommendations in mid-December…

Seven states are part of the Colorado River compact. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming represent the Upper Basin, and Arizona, Nevada and California comprised the Lower Basin. The majority of the Colorado River’s water originates in the Upper Basin, but the Lower Basin is currently using more than the river can supply. Along the river, agriculture takes up 80% of the Colorado River’s water. The Colorado River Drought Task Force will focus on the Upper Basin, as it only will be providing recommendations for the state of Colorado…

All of the task force’s meetings are open to the public. People can attend either in person or online. McCluskie encouraged people to be involved.

“There are ample opportunities for public participation. All of us should have interest in the Colorado River,” [Kathy] Chandler-Henry said.

52% of the US is experiencing very short to short topsoil moisture conditions, a 5% rise since last week — @DroughtGov (August 27, 2023)

Click the link to read the Tweet from @Drought.gov:

At 52%, this August is higher than all end-of-August percent short to very short values since the USDA began tracking this data in 2015. Map, graph and stat from @usda_oce.

Historically, how has #ElNiño influenced summer temperature and precipitation around the world? — NOAA #ENSO

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Rebecca Lindsey and Brian Brettschneider):

Ever since NOAA declared El Niño to be officially underway in June 2023, people have been asking us what it would mean for summer heat. For most of the United States, the short answer has been “probably very little.” Or as the experts put it, El Niño doesn’t have a strong summer climate signal for most of the country. That’s true whether we look at departures from average temperature (anomalies) in summers leading up to El Niño, or whether we look at the frequency of warmer-than-average summers, which is what we are showing here.

For parts of the tropics, it’s a different story. Northern Hemisphere summers that lead up to El Niño winters do tend to be hotter than average across parts of northern Africa, India, and Central and South America. They also tend to be drier than average.

Exactly how often do these patterns occur? These maps show the scorecard for all 29 El Niño summers on record, 1950–present. For this analysis, which was done by Brian Brettschneider, a climate expert with the National Weather Service-Alaska, what we are calling an “El Niño summer” is any summer (June-August) leading into a winter (December-February) with El Niño conditions, regardless of whether El Niño was officially in place in the summer. (See “additional details” for an explanation of why Brettschneider chose to look at things this way.)

On the top map, red areas mean that out of the 29 El Niño summers on record, more were hot than cold. Blues mean cold El Niño summers outnumbered hot ones. (“Hot” and “cold” are shorthand for hotter and colder than average; “wet” and “dry” are shorthand for wetter and drier than average.) On the bottom map, brown areas mean El Niño summers were more often dry than they were wet; green areas mean wet El Niño summers outnumbered dry ones. In both maps, the darker the color, the more lopsided the count. In other words, the darker colors indicate how reliable or frequent the specific climate anomaly was at a given place, not how intense it was. The point of looking at the patterns this way is to emphasize that El Niño and La Niña may increase the chances for above- or below-average temperature or precipitation in different parts of the world, but they don’t guarantee it. Credit: NOAA

Not surprisingly, the only place where an El Niño summer was nearly always hotter than average (26 or more out of 29 years) was in the heart of the tropical Pacific, where above-average temperatures are literally part of the definition of El Niño. (If the coming winter wound up having El Niño conditions, the warmth would have been building there in summer, even if the temperature hadn’t reached official El Niño status at that time.) Across the tropics in places as scattered as the African Sahel and Hawaii, 20 or more out of 29 El Niño summers on record (close to 70 percent) were warmer than average. For many of those same areas, dry El Niño summers far outnumbered wet ones. Together those conditions significantly would have raised the risk of drought and fires in

Annual Colorado Water Congress Summer Conference wraps up — Ark Valley Voice

Sunset on the Colorado River at Silt September 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Ark Valley Voice website (Jan Wondra). Here’s an excerpt:

At the conference, [U.S. Senator] Bennet addressed his priorities for the return of Congress after the August break. At the top of the agenda will be writing the 2023 Farm Bill; which is normally approved and funded for a five-year period of time. This is expected to include protecting the $20 billion for agricultural conservation in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and $10 billion for forestry in the IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law…Both [U.S. Senator] Hickenlooper and Bennet have advanced the role that must be played by the 30 tribes of the Colorado River Basin; recommending a permanent seat at the table on water renegotiations. The tribes did get attention from the infrastructure bill with about $5 billion set aside for their projects, said Bennet. But in Colorado River Basin negotiations, they have had no voice…

How much money? Bennet has estimated about $4 billion from the inflation bill for permanent and long-term reductions in the lower basin states, as well as $8 billion from the infrastructure legislation. The next step is to try to forge a consensus among the seven basin states of the Colorado River about how to reapportion the water, that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation can ratify. That could be easier said than done, given the friction between the Upper Basin states and the Lower Basin states. The Biden Administration has directed the Bureau of Reclamation to get the seven states to agree on a plan to handle the water crisis on the Colorado River. It’s not that they don’t agree on the science and the diminished flow of the Colorado. Regardless of being red or blue states they do — they are just not yet at the point of agreeing on what to do about it…

By the end of 2023, the Bureau is expected to have some rulemaking in place that will cobble the agreement among the states to the year 2026. But that is the limit of the extension because the current operating guidelines for the Colorado River expire then and there is no choice: they have got to be renegotiated.

Bennet is on record saying, “I do not want the Bureau telling the American West what this will look like.”

Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR

#Colorado Water Congress Summer Conference emphasizes collaboration, cooperation, urgent need to address Colorado #water issues — Steamboat Pilot & Today

Click the link to read the article on the Steamboat Pilot & Today website (Suzie Romig). Here’s an excerpt:

Rep. Joe Neguse, who represents the second congressional district including Routt County, Rep. Lauren Boebert as well as Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet discussed the importance of Colorado River water as a national-level concern…

Neguse, who once served on then Gov. Hickenlooper’s cabinet, said, “The governor would remind us that there was no margin in making enemies and that collaboration was ultimately the key ingredient to solving any problem or challenge facing our state.”

[…]

Neguse, Hickenlooper and Bennet used the word “we” repeatedly in their short remarks focusing on the importance of cooperation in complicated water issues. The four elected officials listed Colorado water projects that garnered millions of dollars in federal funds. Hickenlooper said the bipartisan Infrastructure Law in November 2021 included $300 million for Colorado River Basin drought contingency plans, and the Inflation Reduction Act from August 2022 included $8 billion for water infrastructure funding…

After the senators and representatives spoke and answered several questions from panel moderator Christine Arbogast, vice president of the Colorado Water Congress, Gov. Jared Polis addressed the ballroom full of hundreds of attendees for about seven minutes…Polis listed various active water-saving measures ranging from leak detection programs to “Colorado-scaping” education to swap turf for water efficient and climate-appropriate landscaping including tax credits for turf replacement. The governor encouraged people in the water community to speak up about the need to integrate water usage and planning, noting integration “had been done on a haphazard basis before but is at the level that we have to do this thoughtfully as a state.” The governor called housing a very important example of how to “achieve solutions that make sense” such as constructing more water efficient housing options such as duplexes, quad-plexes and multi-family housing…

The governor said the Colorado Department of Agriculture is hiring for the first time an agriculture water advisor.

Management of John Martin Reservoir State Wildlife Area to revert to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Aug. 31 — #Colorado Parks & Wildlife #ArkansasRiver

Click the link to read the release on the Colorado Parks & Wildlife website (Bill Vogrin):

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is ending its management of the John Martin Reservoir State Wildlife Area on Aug. 31 after 55 years after being unable to reach a new agreement with the property’s owner, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

CPW will continue to manage John Martin Reservoir State Park, which is operated under a separate agreement with the Corps.

The 19,471-acre wildlife area surrounds the reservoir west of the state park and is a destination for hunting, fishing, boating, camping and wildlife viewing.

Beginning Sept. 1, any questions about the wildlife area should be directed to the Army Corps.

This view is from the top of John Martin Dam facing west over the body of the reservoir. The content of the reservoir in this picture was approximately 45,000 acre-feet (March 2014). By Jaywm – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37682336

Increased attention on issues evident at #Colorado Water Congress 2023 Annual Summer Convention — The #Aspen Daily News #cwc2023

Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Daily News website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:

The Colorado Water Congress annual summer conference in Steamboat Springs this week saw its largest-ever attendance. Speakers said the event’s size reflects a growing public attention to water as climate change and population growth put pressure on the state’s water resources…Speakers said they are seeing more public attention to water than they ever have in the past. Historian of the American West Patty Limerick, who delivered the first speaking event of the conference, said that when she first moved to Colorado in 1984, she saw a great deal of “complacency and taken-for-grantedness” in Coloradans regarding water. Now, she said, there is much more awareness of the issue…

[U.S. Senator] Hickenlooper noted that he convened a new Colorado River Caucus in the Senate this year, which includes senators from all seven states in the basin. [U.S. Representative] Neguse, whose district covers Boulder and much of north-central Colorado, has followed suit by convening a similar caucus in the House of Representatives…

Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Becky Bolinger/Colorado Climate Center

Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher affirmed that Colorado’s water supplies face a troubling future as he shared findings that Colorado State University is expecting to include in their 2023 Colorado Climate Change Report, which they plan to release in October. While precipitation doesn’t show a clear upward or downward trend, Schumacher said temperatures are trending upward. That means that soils will dry out, hotter air will cause more evaporation and rivers will run lower earlier in the summer.

One Eagle County stream is getting healthier quickly, but #GoreCreek still needs work — #Vail Daily

Gore Creek is healthy as it emerges from the Eagles Nest Wilderness Area, but has problems soon after, via The Mountain Town News. All photos by Jack Affleck.

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

Since 2012, the Colorado Department of Health and the Environment has listed Gore Creek as an impaired waterway due to low aquatic life. In the ensuing years, the town of Vail and the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District have been working to get the waterway off the list. Restore the Gore activities have included education efforts around pesticides and landscaping as well as the recent installations of gutter bins to reduce pollution flowing through its its stormwater drains. One of the main metrics the two entities use to track the progress of such efforts is the health of macroinvertebrate species in Gore Creek, Black Gore Creek, Red Sandstone Creek and Booth Creek. To track the abundance and diversity of these species, the water district conducts sampling at several sampling locations each September. This data has been collected since 2009 and includes eight sites on Gore Creek…

Pete Wadden, the town’s watershed health specialist, recently presented the full data from Eagle River Water and Sanitation District’s 2021 sampling as well as gave some insight into the 2022 results to the Town Council. Overall, samples from the last two years showed that the creek is “moving in the right direction, albeit at a modest pace,” Wadden said, later adding that the data shows an “upward trend over time, but it’s very gradual and still in most cases, in most years, pretty far from reaching what CDPHE defines as attainment.”

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

Guardians of the River — @AmericanRivers #KlamathRiver

In this film by American Rivers and Swiftwater Films, Indigenous leaders share why removing four dams to restore a healthy Klamath River is critical for clean water, food sovereignty and justice. “Guardians of the River” features Frankie Joe Myers, Vice Chair of the Yurok Tribe, Sammy Gensaw, director of Ancestral Guard, Barry McCovey, fisheries biologist with the Yurok Tribe, and members of the Ancestral Guard and Klamath Justice Coalition.

Klamath river California Image from Public domain images website, http://www.public-domain-image.com/full-image/nature-landscapes-public-domain-images-pictures/river-public-domain-images-pictures/klamath-river-california.jpg.html. By Blake, Tupper Ansel, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-photos/nature-landscapes-public-domain-images-pictures/river-public-domain-images-pictures/klamath-river-california.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24916463

Prepared remarks from Upper #ColoradoRiver Commissioner Becky Mitchell at the 2023 #Colorado #Water Congress Summer Convention #COriver #aridification #CWC2023

Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

From the Colorado Water Conservation Board (Katie Weeman):

Introduction

Good morning. My name is Becky Mitchell and I am proud to be joining you as Colorado’s first, full-time Colorado River Commissioner. This change took effect on July 1st. With thanks to the General Assembly and Governor Polis, I stepped out of the CWCB Director role – which is now in Lauren’s very capable hands – and have dedicated myself full-time to protecting our state’s significant interests in the Colorado River. The Commissioner role is a unique one. I am charged by the Governor to represent the state in interstate Colorado River matters, which includes all of our diverse water users, sectors, and geographies. It is not a role that I take lightly. And I truly appreciate the support that so many of you have lent as we shape the future of the Colorado River. I’d like to take “the last word,” as the agenda says, to update you on interstate Colorado River matters; plus, what I’m doing to push everyone in the basin to live within its means –- something we in Colorado have always done.

The past year has been tumultuous for the Colorado River. Last summer, when we gathered here in Steamboat, the Upper Division States had just completed the Five Point Plan in response to Commissioner Touton’s call for the basin states to conserve 2 to 3 million acre-feet. To put that in perspective: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – combined – used three and a half million acre-feet in 2022.

The current water level of Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam July 2023. Photo credit: Reclamation

You’ll remember how bad the situation was. The reservoirs were declining quickly, with daily headlines in the papers. The federal government took emergency action to reduce releases from Lake Powell. The Upper Division States provided DROA water from Upper Basin reservoirs to prop up elevations at Lake Powell. You might also remember how the Lower Basin was unable and unwilling to reach agreement to do their part to conserve water.

Water users are urgently trying to keep Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border from dropping to a point where Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate electricity. (Source: Bureau of Reclamation)

The Five Point Plan showed the federal government that the Upper Division States are united, committed to being part of the solution, and limited in the scale of what we can do.

One of the five points was a commitment to pursue water conservation on a voluntary, temporary, and compensated basis through the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP). After an incredibly fast reauthorization by Congress, the UCRC launched SCPP earlier this year. Contracts were temporary – for just one year; completely voluntary; and fairly compensated – on average, $422 an acre-foot. All conserved water became system water, used to mitigate the impacts of drought in the Upper Basin. In total, the Upper Basin conserved less than 38,000 acre-feet of water in 64 projects; 2,700 acre-feet of which was conserved by 22 projects in Colorado.

A second point in the Five Point Plan was to continue the Demand Management Feasibility Investigation. Like SCPP, Demand Management would be a temporary, voluntary, and compensated program. The difference is that water conserved in a Demand Management program would be stored in a pool to ensure ongoing Compact compliance for the Upper Division States. Each Upper Division State must find that a Demand Management program is feasible for their state, before any such program could be established. We’ve been discussing Demand Management for a few years now. I want to take a quick second to thank you all for your continued engagement on the topic. Regardless of whether Colorado moves forward with any such program, your input – and debates – have shaped our state’s understanding of conservation programs overall.

Then – and now – the Upper Division States recognized that we did not cause and cannot solve the problem. Overuse in the Lower Basin has driven the Colorado River System into crisis. But inaction is not the answer.

COMPACT COMPLIANCE EMPHASIS

I want to pause here to emphasize something that is so, so important to say: even in the driest of years, the Upper Division States have never been out of compliance with the Compact. We are not even close. If flows at Lees Ferry fall below 75 million acre feet over a 10-year period, it would prompt an inquiry into the cause. If the cause is something other than our depletions, we have not violated the Compact. Remember, we are currently using less than half the flows of the River and less than half of what the Compact apportioned to us.

My team takes the importance of protecting Colorado’s legal interests very seriously. The Compact assures us the ability to develop our half of the river into perpetuity – at our own pace, without risk of a Lower Basin giant guzzling up our share.

I can’t say this clearly enough: Colorado is not at risk of Compact curtailment. We do ourselves a disservice by suggesting otherwise and play right into the Lower Basin’s strategies.

COLORADO RIVER UPDATES – SEIS & Post 2026

Now, back to our recap of the last year. Even to those who actively read about the Colorado River, the issues have been complicated by two distinct federal processes

The first process – the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to revise the ‘07 Guidelines – started in late 2022 to provide the Bureau of Reclamation with additional tools to protect Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams between now and 2026. Specifically, the SEIS could change operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead in the near-term to allow for lower releases out of those reservoirs. Last January, I was driving back-and-forth between Water Congress and a Basin States meeting, trying to reach an agreement with our neighbors about what input to provide to the federal government on this process. Ultimately, six states signed a letter urging the Bureau of Reclamation to consider several options for reductions in uses in the Lower Basin, including assessment of evaporation and transit losses. Fast forward to spring, and Reclamation released a draft SEIS with two action alternatives and one no-action alternative. No alternative reached upstream to the Upper Basin – each was focused on reducing uses downstream of the reservoirs. In response, the Lower Basin States negotiated a different proposal, which they say will conserve 3 million acre-feet. The Upper Division States agreed to transmit that plan to Reclamation for analysis. We are expecting their findings in the coming weeks, and a revised Draft EIS should provide this analysis. To be clear: while we applaud our downstream neighbors’ efforts to conserve water, the Upper Division States did not, and cannot, endorse the Lower Basin’s proposal. We have not yet seen enough detail about the conservation efforts.

But please keep in mind: this SEIS would develop a short-term fix for the ‘07 Guidelines, which have proved inefficient to protect the System.

This year’s hydrology has given us a much-needed reprieve, but it has not changed the fundamental challenges we still face. We must re-focus our efforts on developing longer-term solutions for management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. This is the only way to stop living crisis to crisis on the Colorado River.

That brings me to the second federal process – in June, the federal government announced the Post-2026 Environmental Impact Statement Process, which will develop new operating guidelines for Powell and Mead. To be blunt: this is the process that matters the most for Colorado. The current guidelines, the ‘07 Guidelines, have been gamed by the Lower Basin. They have knowingly maximized releases from Powell for decades, simultaneously draining Mead and ignoring basic physics like evaporation and transit losses. The silver lining is that the ‘07 Guidelines were interim, by design, so that we could learn from their implementation – and we did learn a lot.

IRREFUTABLE TRUTHS

The ‘07 Guidelines have illustrated why Colorado and the Upper Division States must care about sustainable operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. We cannot have our fate tied to continued Lower Basin overuse.

I met with many of you, with the Tribal Nations, with entities like the Basin Roundtables, IBCC, and conservancy districts, to develop my guiding principles for the post-2026 negotiation.

First, we must acknowledge that climate change is real. We can’t count on decades like the 80s and 90s; we need to be prepared for years like the early 2000s. Our future is going to be drier and more variable.

Second, water users in the Lower Basin are not more important than water users in the Upper Basin. The Upper and Lower Basins have equal apportionments to the river in perpetuity, established by the 1922 Colorado River Compact. We are not re-negotiating the Compact, and any guidelines for post-2026 operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead must be rooted in the Compacts and the Treaty with Mexico.

.

Updated Colorado River 4-Panel plot thru Water Year 2022 showing reservoirs, flows, temperatures and precipitation. All trends are in the wrong direction. Since original 2017 plot, conditions have deteriorated significantly. Brad Udall via Twitter: https://twitter.com/bradudall/status/1593316262041436160

Third, the Colorado River is not providing enough to sustain overuse in the Lower Basin. We’ve seen the reservoirs crash to critically low levels. Water use in the Lower Basin cannot continue to exceed available supplies and operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead must better respond to actual hydrology. The Lower Basin must account for all depletions, including evaporation and transit losses.

Fourth, Compact curtailment is not an option. The Upper Basin is apportioned half of the river’s flows in perpetuity, and we are using a lot less that.

Fifth, operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead must respond to actual hydrology and available water supplies. This will be hard for water users in the Lower Basin because it will demand change. Lake Powell releases must be determined by actual hydrology and protecting storage rather than by Lake Mead conditions.

Sixth, the Tribal Nations have federal reserved water rights that must be preserved. The Tribal Nations have water rights that they are entitled to use. Solutions for overuse in the Lower Basin cannot continue to depend on Tribes’ undeveloped federal reserved water righ.

And finally, we need solutions that comply with federal environmental law and advance coordination between the United States and Mexico.

I am honored to be Colorado’s interstate negotiator, and will stand firm by these principles. Future operations must live within the means of the river.

UNITY

We are in difficult negotiations with the Basin States, and I suspect things will get harder before they get easier. From experience, I know we are better when we stand together as seven basin states. But I also know we must be ready to stand alone when necessary to defend our significant interests in the river. The only way that I can stand alone in the basin is if Colorado can stand together as a state.

I have worked hard to facilitate unity across our state – and a huge thank you to you who’ve organized meetings, rearranged agendas, and teed up discussions with me. Unity is a two-way street. While I work to understand the needs and concerns of Colorado’s diverse water users, diverse water users work to understand the needs and concerns of other people in the state. Unity does not necessarily mean agreement. It’s not an echo chamber – Coloradans have never seen eye-to-eye on all of our water issues, and the post-2026 negotiations will be no different. But unity does mean that we’re good-faith actors with one another; that we agree to protect Coloradans’ rights on our namesake river; and that we commit to finding shared values where we can.

As Commissioner, I represent the entire state – all of our diverse interests and needs. It is so important that we put our best foot forward on the matters where we are unified, while leaving room for difficult discussions to continue within our state.

CONCLUSION

The post-2026 negotiations matter to Colorado: we must seek operations that are responsive to climate change and actual hydrology. I hope you’ll stay interested, involved, and committed to a future where all in the basin live within the means of the river. You have heard me say it before, but I am going to say it again: we are at a critical juncture on the Colorado River. We have an opportunity to negotiate a better deal on how Lake Powell and Lake Mead are operated – a better deal for our State and also for the 40 million people who depend on this critical resource. I am bringing all of myself and the State’s resources to this effort, and I will need each of you, too.

Thank you all for your continued support.

Summer flooding challenges the United States’ #ClimateChange readiness — @AmericanRivers #ActOnClimate

Photo courtesy of the National Weather Service

Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Eileen Shader):

The flash flooding currently happening in Southern California and Nevada is the latest example of why we must transform the management and health of rivers and streams to strengthen communities in the face of climate change.  Tropical Storm Hilary was the first tropical storm to hit California since 1939 and it has dropped historic amounts of rainfall on parts of communities from southern California to Las Vegas and across the Southwest. This event follows just weeks after major floods caused widespread damage across Vermont and the Northeast.

Climate change is fueling more frequent and intense storms, putting pressure on federal and state agencies to help communities manage the runoff and stormwater from these extreme events. This means adapting our existing infrastructure–elevating roads, expanding bridges, setting back levees- and it means making smart decisions about how we are developing along rivers and throughout watersheds.

American Rivers is calling on federal, state, and local governments to protect communities from increasingly severe flooding. Decision-makers must: 

Give rivers room to flood safely: Naturally functioning floodplains (the low-lying lands along a river) are a community’s natural defense against flooding. These areas soak up and store floodwaters and reduce downstream flooding. Keeping floodplains natural and undeveloped is the best way to avoid flood damage to begin with. Governments must prioritize protecting undeveloped floodplains and putting in place policies like the FEDERAL FLOOD RISK MANAGEMENT STANDARD that require development to be resilient to Increasingly severe floods.

The fact is, many communities have already developed in their floodplains and have channelized and leveed their rivers, disconnecting them from their floodplains. All of this puts people and property at risk. Wherever possible, communities must work with residents and landowners to find solutions that improve their resilience and leverage state and federal funding to restore damaged floodplains to give rivers room to flood safely.  

Protect wetlands and small streams: The Supreme Court’s recent Sackett v. EPA ruling stripped federal Clean Water Act protections for small streams and 50% of the nation’s wetlands. These wetlands, along with perennial and ephemeral streams, are critical to public safety because they absorb and store floodwaters. By leaving streams and wetlands vulnerable to destruction and pollution, more communities are now at risk. State and federal decision-makers must shore up protections for wetlands to safeguard public health and safety. 

This record Southwest flooding highlights the important connection between rivers and the ephemeral and intermittent headwater streams that lost protection under the Sackett case and are now at risk of unregulated development. Ephemeral and intermittent streams are dry for much of the year but fill with water during heavy rains. These headwater streams make up 81% of the arid and semi-arid Southwest and are the source of drinking water for people in the Southwest. Unchecked development on headwater streams could further increase future flood damage.

Remove unsafe, outdated dams and levees: More frequent extreme rain storms mean more risk of dams, levees, and other infrastructure being overtopped or failing resulting in catastrophic loss of life and property. We cannot wait until dams fail to take action. Poorly maintained and improperly designed dams and levees need to be removed to protect downstream communities and infrastructure before they fail. States need programs that work with dam and levee owners to provide technical and financial support to remove dams and levees that they no longer want or need.  

In addition, many dams are outdated and unsafe. Hundreds of dams have breached or failed in recent years because of heavy rainfall and flooding, putting communities at risk. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates that aging dams across the nation need more than $70 billion in repairs.   

Communities are not prepared for the increasingly frequent and severe flooding fueled by climate change. Our infrastructure was not built for this. We must help communities prepare, and that means protecting and restoring rivers. A healthy river is a community’s best and first line of defense against flooding and other climate impacts. When we pave over streams, disconnect floodplains, and destroy wetlands, we strip communities of these vital defenses. We must protect and restore rivers to make our communities stronger, safer, and more resilient.

These wetlands, located on a 150-acre parcel in the Homestake Creek valley that Homestake Partners bought in 2018, would be inundated if Whitney Reservoir is constructed. The Forest Service received more than 500 comments, the majority in opposition to, test drilling associated with the project and the reservoir project itself. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Water Corner: Grand County’s Stream Management Plan undergoing an important update, includes stakeholder outreach — Sky-Hi News

Denver Water is one of 18 partners who signed the Colorado River Cooperative Agreement in 2013, ushering in a new era of cooperation between the utility and West Slope stakeholders, all with the vested interest in protecting watersheds in the Colorado River Basin. As part of that agreement, a process called “Learning by Doing” was created, which has helped the utility stay better connected on river conditions in Grand County. The partnership is a collection of East and West Slope water stakeholders who help identify and find solutions to water issues in Grand County. “Denver Water has been part of Grand County for over 100 years, and we understand the impact our diversions have on the rivers and streams,” said Rachel Badger, environmental planning manager at Denver Water. “Our goal is to manage our water resources as efficiently as possible and be good stewards of the water — and Learning By Doing helps us do that.”

Click the link to read the article from the Colorado Basin Roundtable (Anna Drexler-Dreis) via the Sky-Hi News website:

The Grand County Stream Management Plan was created in 2010 and was the first of its kind in Colorado. Since the inception of the plan, changes have occurred throughout that warrant a necessary reexamination of the technical aspects of the stream management plan to better reflect current river conditions.

In addition, a significant amount of new data (macroinvertebrates, fish, sediment, stream temperature, stream flow and water quality) has been collected that supports a robust watershed assessment to improve characterization and prioritization of areas of concern. The plan update is focused on river health and needs, and the goal is to make general improvements to support stream health for aquatic habitat.

The Grand County Learning By Doing Cooperative Effort is a nonprofit made up of partner organizations from both sides of the Continental Divide in Colorado, and its overarching goal is to maintain, and when reasonable, possibly restore or enhance the aquatic environment in Grand County. For more information, check out the website at GrandCountyLearningByDoing.org

Learning By Doing’s focus is the Cooperative Effort Area, which includes over 100 river miles in Fraser and Williams Fork River basins upstream of the Colorado River’s confluence with the Blue River in Grand County. Since it was formed in 2013, it has made significant progress in establishing a long term scientific-based program to collaboratively monitor and address changes in the area.

Each year, it designs, funds and implements a plan for field data collection that achieves the goals of monitoring key aquatic metrics in Grand County streams and rivers consistent with the stream management plan. The intergovernmental agreements that founded Learning By Doing state that it is the task and responsibility of the cooperative to update the Grand County Stream Management Plan.

Updating the plan includes a robust stakeholder outreach program that allows Learning By Doing to engage with a broad diversity of interest groups to inform and support the plan’s update. Peak Facilitation Group, a professional public outreach facilitator, is organizing the stakeholder outreach program. The stakeholder outreach process consists of three groups: a stakeholder group, which has open membership; an advisory board of representatives, a smaller subset of the stakeholder group selected by stakeholders to represent the diverse field of interests involved in the update; and Learning By Doing working with all the groups as the project manager.

The first open house meeting was held in early May. At this open house, Grand County’s Manager Ed Moyer and Grand County Water Quality Specialist Kayli Foulk presented the history and background of the stream management plan, an overview of Learning By Doing and its role in managing the update to the plan. Then, Peak Facilitation Group presented the overall purpose and scope of the update. The meeting concluded with Northern Water’s Jen Stephenson and Trout Unlimited’s Katie Schneider presenting a high-level summary of the objectives and methods for completing a comprehensive watershed assessment of data collected within the Cooperative Effort Area.

The second open house meeting was held on July 18 at the Granby Library and was well attended by stakeholders. This meeting included a presentation by Seth Mason from Lotic Hydrological on the background chapter of the comprehensive watershed assessment. Samuel Wallace from Peak Facilitation presented an overview of the stakeholder survey results. The meeting ended with an exercise where the stakeholders were encouraged to share their vision on stream and aquatic health within the Cooperative Effort Area.

The next chance for public engagement will be at an open house in September. Please email grandcountysmpupdate@gmail.com for general information or to be added to the email distribution list to be involved in this stakeholder process.

For additional ways to support waterways in the Colorado River Basin, consider getting involved with the programs of the Public Education, Participation and Outreach (PEPO) Committee of the Colorado Basin Roundtable (CBRT). The roundtable is a group of water managers, users and stakeholders who work to solve water-related issues within the Colorado River Basin in the state of Colorado from its headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park to the Utah state line. Their goals are to protect, conserve and develop water supplies within the Colorado Basin and the Western Slope of Colorado for future needs. For more information visit ColoradoBasinRoundTable.org.

The confluence of the Fraser River and the Colorado River near Granby, Colorado. By Jeffrey Beall – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50012193

#Drought news August 24, 2023: In the Four Corners states, the poor #monsoon2023 season and related precipitation shortfalls led to introduction of areas of Moderate Drought (D1) in southern and central #AZ as well as in south-central #Colorado in the #SanLuisValley.

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

This U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week saw drought-related improvements on the map across southern portions of California and Nevada in association with the impacts of Tropical Storm Hilary, which made landfall in Southern California over the weekend and into Monday. The tropical storm, the first to make landfall in Southern California since 1939, brought record-breaking rainfall accumulations leading to widespread life-threatening flash flooding, mud and rockslides, and debris flows to parts of the region. Rainfall totals for the event ranged from 2 to 12 inches with the heaviest accumulations observed in higher elevations including the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Ranges, southern Sierra Nevada, Panamint Range in Death Valley National Park, and in the Spring Mountains near Las Vegas. In terms of the urban areas, the Los Angeles Basin received totals ranging from 2 to 5 inches, while the greater San Diego area received 1 to 3 inches and Palm Springs 2 to 4 inches. The rainfall led to removal of lingering areas of drought across the Mojave Desert and southern Nevada. In the Southwest, conditions in New Mexico saw statewide degradation on the map in response to a combination of both short- and long-term dryness across the state, including a weak monsoon season with 60-day rainfall deficits ranging from 2 to 6-inches. In the South, drought-related conditions have deteriorated rapidly during the past month across areas of Texas and Louisiana where persistent heat and rainfall shortfalls have led to drought expansion and intensification on the map this week. During the past two weeks, average maximum temperatures were 6 to 10+ degrees F above normal across Texas, southern Oklahoma, Louisiana, and southern Mississippi with reports of impacts related to human health as well as severe impacts to agriculture, vegetation health, and surface water conditions. Looking at the latest climatological data released by NOAA NCEI (through July 2023), Louisiana Climate Division 7 (Southwest Louisiana) observed its warmest May-July period on record, while Texas Climate Division 8 (Upper Coast) experienced its warmest June-July period on record. In the Midwest, continued areas of dryness led to degradations in portions of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. In the Eastern Tier, some minor deterioration in drought-related conditions occurred in areas of the Carolinas as well as in the Panhandle of Florida…

High Plains

On this week’s map, no changes were made across the Plains states while some minor improvements were made in northwestern Wyoming and some degradations in south-central Colorado. Across the Plains, hot and dry conditions prevailed across much of the region this week with well-above normal temperatures (2 to 8 degrees F) observed, except for areas of the Dakotas where temperatures were a few degrees below normal. In terms of the overall drought situation, the past 60-day period has been marked with some improvements in response to above-normal precipitation across areas of Kansas and Nebraska. However, the longer-term dry signal has remained intact across areas of the region and continues to be reflected in various drought indicators including soil moisture and streamflow levels…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 22, 2023.

West

On the map, widespread improvements were made in drought-affected areas of southern California and Nevada in response to heavy rainfall accumulations associated with Tropical Storm Hilary and its remnant moisture that pushed northward across the Mojave Desert, Great Basin, and into the Pacific Northwest. The severe weather event helped to eliminate areas of lingering drought on the map across the Mojave Desert and in areas of southern Nevada. Likewise, conditions improved on the map in west-central Idaho and northeastern Oregon in response to this week’s rainfall. Conversely, continued dryness and below-normal streamflow activity led to an introduction of Extreme Drought (D3) in the Northern Rockies around Glacier National Park where streamflows on the North Fork of the Flathead River at Columbia Falls, Montana were in the 4th percentile. In north-central Montana, areas of Severe Drought (D2) expanded on the map due to a combination of factors including dry soils and below-normal precipitation during the past 60-day period. In the Four Corners states, the poor monsoon season and related precipitation shortfalls led to introduction of areas of Moderate Drought (D1) in southern and central Arizona as well as in south-central Colorado in the San Luis Valley. In New Mexico, the combination of short- and long-term precipitation deficits, poor soil moisture, and rangeland conditions led to widespread deterioration on the map across much of the state.

South

In the South, drought-related conditions continued to deteriorate as the hot and dry pattern continued across most of the region. Many impact reports came in this week emphasizing the rate at which the impact of the persistent heat is taking its toll. In both Louisiana and areas of Texas, numerous impacts are being observed including declining soil moisture, poor vegetation health, impacts within the agricultural sector, and poor surface and groundwater conditions. The combination of these factors led to expansive deterioration on the map in areas of Texas, Louisiana, and southern Oklahoma including expansion of areas of Extreme Drought (D3) and the introduction of Exceptional Drought (D4). For the week, average temperatures across the region were above normal with Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas observing temperatures ranging from 4 to 10+ degrees F above normal. Conversely, temperatures were near to slightly below normal across northern portions of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. In terms of precipitation, the region was very dry except for some isolated areas of South Texas and southeastern Louisiana which received light accumulations…

Looking Ahead

The NWS WPC 7-Day Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) calls for light-to-moderate precipitation accumulations ranging from 1 to 3+ inches across portions of the Four Corners states as well as areas of Far West Texas. Likewise, similar accumulations are expected across areas of the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. In the eastern and northern portions of the Midwest, lighter accumulations (< 1 inch) are forecasted. The CPC 6-10Day Outlooks call for a moderate-to-high probability of above-normal temperatures across much of the conterminous U.S. including the West, South, Southeast, Plains states, and western portions of the Midwest. Conversely, below-normal temperatures are expected across the Lower Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast. In terms of precipitation, below-normal precipitation is expected across the Plains states, Midwest, and far western extent of the Northeast, while above-normal precipitation is forecasted for much of the western U.S. and across much of the Eastern Seaboard.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 22, 2023.

Federal court vacates approval of #Utah oil-train project opposed by #Colorado local governments: Court of Appeals finds ‘numerous NEPA violations’ in analysis of Uinta Basin Railway risks — Colorado Newsline #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround #ColoradoRiver #COriver

A Union Pacific train travels along the Colorado River near Cameo on May 16, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Chase Woodruff):

A federal court on Friday [August 18, 2023] sent regulators back to the drawing board on their approval of a new short-line railroad in the oil fields of eastern Utah, finding major flaws in how the federal Surface Transportation Board analyzed the risks of increased oil-train traffic through western and central Colorado.

The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is a victory for Colorado local governments and environmental groups who oppose the construction of the Uinta Basin Railway, an 88-mile rail extension that would allow drillers in Utah to ship large volumes of crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries. An estimated 90% of the resulting traffic — as many as five fully loaded, two-mile-long trains of oil tankers per day — would be routed through Colorado.

The ruling, issued by Judge Robert Wilkins, grants in part a petition filed by Eagle County against the STB’s approval of the railway’s construction, and the environmental impact statement supporting the approval. Eagle County was joined by five environmental groups in suing to block the project, which is backed by a public-private partnership between Utah county governments and industry.

“The deficiencies here are significant,” the Court of Appeals ruling states. “We have found numerous (National Environmental Policy Act) violations arising from the EIS, including the failures to: (1) quantify reasonably foreseeable upstream and downstream impacts on vegetation and special-status species of increased drilling in the Uinta Basin and increased oil-train traffic along the Union Pacific Line, as well as the effects of oil refining on environmental justice communities the Gulf Coast; (2) take a hard look at wildfire risk as well as impacts on water resources downline; and (3) explain the lack of available information on local accident risk.”

In a joint statement, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Joe Neguse, who have urged multiple federal agencies to put a stop to the railway project, called Friday’s ruling “excellent news.”

“The approval process for the Uinta Basin Railway Project has been gravely insufficient, and did not properly account for the project’s full risks to Colorado’s communities, water, and environment,” said Bennet and Neguse. “We’re grateful for the leadership of Eagle County and the many organizations and local officials around Colorado who made their voices heard.”

The court’s ruling vacates key sections in the EIS conducted by the STB prior to its 4-1 vote in December 2021 to approve the railway, as well as a so-called biological opinion prepared with the help of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to evaluate “downline” risks to endangered species and critical habitats along the Colorado River. It also faults the STB for failing to scrutinize what critics have alleged is the Uinta Basin Railway project’s shaky financing.

“The Board failed to weigh the Project’s uncertain financial viability and the full potential for environmental harm against the transportation benefits it identified,” the ruling concludes.

The ruling remands the project’s application for approval back to the STB “for further proceedings in accordance with this opinion.”

The Price River near Kyune, Utah, where the proposed Uinta Basin Railway would meet the existing Union Pacific line, is pictured from an Amtrak passenger train on June 5, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

New #Colorado #climate report says state will continue to heat up, but whether it will dry out is unclear — Fresh Water News #ActOnClimate

A rancher digs a boot heel into the dry ground of the Little Bear Ranch near Steamboat Springs, Colo., during the Northwest Colorado Drought Tour on August 11, 2021. Credit: Dean Krakel, special to Fresh Water News.

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):

Colorado will certainly grow warmer between now and 2050, but whether it will become wetter due to this warming isn’t clear yet, according to a new state climate report due out next month.

The draft report, 2023 Climate Change in Colorado, shows that scientific models predict with high confidence that the state will see temperatures rise 2.5 degrees to 6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, but models looking at how this warming trend will impact water are much less clear. Some projections indicate the state could see more precipitation, and others show it will get less, according to Becky Bolinger, assistant state climatologist and an author of the new report.

“Some models are showing wetter, some drier, and we have a lot of uncertainty about which direction it is going to go,” Bolinger said.

“Since 2008 we have consistently experienced drier conditions. If you were to do a simple trend, it would appear we have gone drier, but there is a lot of variability. It is possible we will end this dry period and go into a wetter period. It is also possible that we could go into a drier period,” she said.

The Climate Change in Colorado report was produced by the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, with support from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and Denver Water.

Bolinger said that this new third edition of the climate report, two previous editions were published in 2008 and 2014 respectively, is designed to serve as a guide for any community, or farm, or industry in Colorado working to prepare for a warmer future.

Despite the uncertainty about water, new modeling shows that snow, soil moisture and streamflows will likely decline, heat waves, fires and droughts will increase in frequency, and extreme rain storms and flooding are also likely to worsen.

Among the hardest-hit sectors will be agriculture, Bolinger said, in part because evaporation rates will rise as temperatures rise. As larger amounts of water are lost to the atmosphere, plants will need more.

In addition, because spring snows will melt and peak runoff will occur sooner, farmers will likely have to change planting schedules and figure out how to make their irrigation water last longer.

“It’s going to get harder to farm,” Bolinger said.

Out on Colorado’s Eastern Plains, at the Greeley-based Central Colorado Water Conservancy District, that’s not necessarily a surprise.

Crop residue November 4, 2021. Photo credit: Joel Schneekloth

Randy Ray, executive director of the district, said farmers have already begun using comparatively new methods to stretch their water supplies and to help the soil retain moisture. These techniques, which include dramatically reducing the tilling of soils and using compost to help them retain water, are becoming more and more common, Ray said.

Irrigators also continue to call for more storage, whether it is in a reservoir or an aquifer, to give them more flexibility in how they manage irrigation water.

“I’m confident that the American farmer is going to be able to adapt,” Ray said. “It probably isn’t going to be easier and they are going to adapt with different crops and different methods of irrigation.”

Water utilities across the state have already begun analyzing what the dramatic warming trends mean for urban water supplies.

The City of Grand Junction has done forecasts that show worst-case drought scenarios could slash annual water supplies by more than half, to 6,400 acre-feet, down from the 15,000 acre-feet its system generates and stores each year. It also figures that long-term warming will drop the number by an additional 10%, according to Mark Ritterbush, Grand Junction’s manager of water services.

“By 2039, we may need to develop a different water supply in the event the worst-case scenario happens. We have the water rights, we would just need to upgrade our treatment technology to utilize those new sources,” he said.

Having more refined climate data and experts, such as those available at the Colorado Climate Center, is going to be helpful, he said.

“I feel good about [our forecast], but you never really know,” he said. “I’d like to know if that 10% we came up with is accurate.”

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Topsoil Moisture % Short/Very Short (S/VS) by @usda_oce

For the week ending 8/20, 47% of CONUS is rated short/very short, a 5% increase compared to last week. More short soil moisture emerged in mid-Atlantic states & worsened across the S & SE U.S. with TX, NM & LA hit hard.

Lauren Ris Named New Director of the #Colorado Water Conservation Board @L_Ris @CWCB_DNR

From email from the Colorado Water Conservation Board:

August 22, 2023 (Denver, CO) – The Colorado Department of Natural Resources and the Colorado Water Conservation Board announced that Lauren Ris has been selected as the next Director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

Lauren Ris, who has held the position of Deputy Director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) since 2017. She is a water policy expert who is passionate about solution-focused water resilience in the state.

”We are excited to welcome Lauren Ris at this important time as we continue to take bold and innovative action to preserve and protect Colorado’s precious water resources. We know that here in Colorado, water is the lifeblood of our state and we will all benefit from Ris’s leadership and expertise on this issue,” said Gov. Polis.

“What’s most inspiring to me about working in the water sphere, is the high degree of collaboration that’s required. It’s not a political issue, it’s a geographical issue—and water is a resource that every sector in Colorado can’t do without. It requires us to work together and find win-win solutions for hard problems,” said Lauren Ris, Director, Colorado Water Conservation Board. “Having grown up in Colorado, it’s important for me to see that we have a continued pathway for economic growth, agricultural viability and environmental resiliency in our state.”

Ris holds a Bachelors in English and Environmental Science from Willamette University and a Masters in Natural Resource Policy and Conservation Biology from the University of Michigan. She previously worked as a Committee and Policy Staff Fiscal Analyst for the Colorado Legislative Council, a Legislative Liaison for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Assistant Director for Water in the DNR, and most recently, the Deputy Director of the CWCB.

A major priority, Ris says, is continuing the momentum of the Colorado Water Plan. “We are positioned well with the recent release of the updated 2023 Water Plan, and it’s absolutely critical that now we check off the boxes and make real tangible progress.”

“I would like to see us find creative solutions that allow us to maximize every drop of water in Colorado,” said Ris. “That includes doubling down on municipal conservation efforts like urban landscape transformation. I’d also like us to take a hard look at some of the barriers that are impeding water sharing agreements–the creative, collaborative agreements that allow municipalities to lease water from agricultural operations during times when they aren’t irrigating while continuing to have viable agriculture.”

Ris also plans to ensure CWCB continues to support former CWCB Director Rebecca Mitchell in her new role of the State of Colorado’s Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission—by providing the best policy and technical expertise to the state on the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin.

“I am extremely excited about Lauren Ris’ elevation to Director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Her leadership, insight, strong relationships, collaborative nature, and deep knowledge of Colorado water issues will enable her to seamlessly step into the Director role,” said Dan Gibbs, Executive Director, Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “Colorado faces many future water challenges, but Lauren has the experience and skills to help our state build on the great work of CWCB while ensuring the future sustainability of our critical water resources.”

“Ris has played a pivotal role in the agency for years and has provided seamless support as Interim Director,” said Greg Felt, Board Chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “The agency, and Colorado’s water future, will be in good hands under Lauren’s leadership.”

Lauren Ris, Director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board

Deadpool Diaries: rekindling optimism? — John Fleck (InkStain) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Lake Mead used to be here (October 2022). Photo by John Fleck

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

Something remarkable is happening this year in the Lower Colorado River Basin that provides both a glimmer of hope about what durable basin solutions might look like, and also a clear demonstration of the obstacles still standing in their way.

NEVADA’S COLORADO RIVER WATER USE IS ON TRACK TO BE THE LOWEST IT’S BEEN SINCE 1992

Southern Nevada’s projected 2023 use right now (the following is based on Reclamation’s Aug. 14 water forecast run) has dropped below 200,000 acre feet, sitting today at 199,943 af. That would be Nevada’s lowest take on the Colorado river since 1992. Southern Nevada’s population (Clark County, basically “greater Las Vegas”) has nearly tripled in that time.

Nevada has demonstrated its ability to take deep cuts without jeopardizing the structure and function of the communities that depend on Colorado River water.

ARIZONA’S COLORADO RIVER WATER USE IS ON TRACK TO BE THE LOWEST IT’S BEEN SINCE 1992

Arizona’s projected 2023 use, 1,974,819 acre feet, has dropped below 2 million acre feet, also the lowest since 1992. The Central Arizona Project, which supplies the Phoenix-Tucson area, is projected to take just 605,171 acre feet this year. That is 40 percent of CAP’s 21st-century average.

Arizona has demonstrated its ability to take deep cuts without jeopardizing the structure and function of the communities that depend on Colorado River water.

CALIFORNIA’S COLORADO RIVER WATER USE IS ON TRACK TO BE THE LOWEST IT’S BEEN SINCE 2019

California’s use has dropped below 4 million acre feet, which would be the first time that’s happened since 2019, currently 10 percent below the state’s 21st century average.

Ok, the comparison is striking, right? Some states are doing a lot, other states are doing less. But I’m trying to be optimistic here, California’s water use reductions aren’t nothing! Everyone’s using less water!

But the relative depth of California’s cuts has not yet demonstrated its ability to take deep cuts without jeopardizing the structure and function of the communities that depend on Colorado River water.

THE NUMBERS

THE OBSTACLES

The premise of a piece I wrote earlier this year in the New York Times is that there’s no way we can fix the Colorado River supply/use imbalance if California insists that the burden of overallocation and climate change fall on everyone else.

The new Schmidt/Yackulic/Kuhn paper puts the needed cuts at 20 percent just to stabilize the system – more if we’re going to rebuild a buffer against a repeat of last year’s shit show. Arizona and Nevada have figured out how to cut a lot more than that.

California, not so much.

A CLARIFYING NOTE ON THE PICTURE

The above picture, which I took in October, no longer represents reality. Based on the latest Sentinel satellite imagery, a bit of water has returned to Boulder Harbor on Lake Mead’s western shore.

2020 #COleg: #Gunnison ranch to loan #water for the environment — @AspenJournalism #Tomichi #GunnisonRiver

Kathleen Curry, owner of Peterson Ranch in Gunnison County, stands by a fence on her ranch on a breezy summer day. Peterson Ranch has an agreement to temporarily loan its agricultural water to the state’s instream flow program for the benefit of Tomichi Creek. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

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

A Gunnison County family ranch plans to use a relatively new tool to help keep water flowing in a chronically dry section of creek while still irrigating their hay crop.

In dry years, the Peterson Ranch will temporarily loan some of the water it diverts from Tomichi Creek to the state’s instream flow program, which is aimed at keeping water in rivers for the benefit of the environment. The agreement was approved by the Colorado Water Conservation Board this year under legislation passed in 2020 designed to make the water loans more attractive to water-rights owners and effective as a conservation tool.

“We don’t like to see the fish suffer, so we thought this was one way to allow us to continue with our operation and do something for the creek,” said ranch owner, former legislator and Colorado River Water Conservation District board member Kathleen Curry. “For us, it was a way to make a contribution.”

Historically, Curry and her husband, Greg Peterson, have flood irrigated their 220 acres of river bottom ranchland, about 15 miles east of Gunnison, beginning in the spring until the end of July. The end of spring runoff, combined with irrigation season, can cause river flows to plummet during the hottest time of year, which is bad news for fish.

“Historically, Tomichi Creek dries up in several locations,” said Tony LaGreca, a project manager for the Colorado Water Trust. “A dry-up is the complete worst thing to happen for an aquatic ecosystem because everything that needs water to live does not live.”

In late July, Curry and Peterson normally stop irrigating to allow their fields to dry out for a few weeks so that they can get their one annual hay cutting in August, during which time — with the help of monsoon rains — creek flows tend to rebound. They resume irrigating in the fall to regrow some pasture grass and to replenish the groundwater for the next season, which leads to another dip in river flows.

But with the lease agreement enacted, Curry and Peterson would turn off their four ditch headgates at the end of June and keep them off for 37 days — usually the hottest, driest time of year and when Tomichi Creek could most use a boost. By turning water off a month early, they expect to lose about 20% to 25% of their yield, for which they will be compensated nearly $25,000 by the nonprofit Colorado Water Trust.

A second part of the agreement would let them irrigate in August and leave the water in the creek in September, when streamflows are lower. Peterson Ranch could get $2,500 if it enacts the lease in the second operational window. If they do both windows, they could get $30,000.

Over seven miles of Tomichi Creek would benefit from the loan of water. Depending on the location in the stream and time of year, the project could add between 2 and 18 cubic feet per second back to the stream for a total of 116 acre-feet of water conserved.

“It’s a win-win,” Curry said. “We can go with a little bit less yield and they are compensating us very fairly.”

Tomichi Creek, a tributary of the Gunnison River, runs through the Peterson Ranch property. The Colorado Water Conservation Board holds an instream flow water right for 18 cfs on the creek in this stretch. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Legal pathway

The statute that allows irrigators to temporarily loan their water to the state’s instream flow program was originally crafted in 2005 with the help of Curry when she was a state representative. (Curry this week told Colorado Politics that she intends to run in 2024 to represent House District 58.)

The instream flow program allows the Colorado Water Conservation Board to appropriate water rights to “preserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree.” Since it was created in 1973, the CWCB has appropriated water rights on nearly 1,700 stream segments, covering more than 9,700 miles of streams, according to its website. But because these rights are so junior compared with most other water users, their effectiveness as a tool for keeping water in rivers is limited.

Under the prior appropriation system — the cornerstone of Colorado water law — the holders of the oldest water rights, which usually belong to agriculture, get first use of the river. That means in many locations across the state, the much younger instream flow water rights — 18 cfs in the case of Tomichi Creek, with an adjudication date of 1980 — are not met. Temporary leasing of agricultural water to the instream flow is one way to remedy the problem.

Still, the tool is not widely used, despite tweaks to the legislation in 2020 with House Bill 1157 that allowed projects to expand to being used five of every 10 years from three of every 10 years. The Peterson Ranch lease is one of just three projects using the five-in-10 lease program, according to CWCB staff. There are six other similar projects across the state that came about under the previous three-in-10 legislation.

“It doesn’t appear at the rate it’s being utilized, it’s going to solve environmental problems all across the state just like that,” said Kate Ryan, executive director of the Colorado Water Trust. “But on the streams and rivers where it’s used, it’s transformative. It makes a huge difference.”

The graph shows how, even in a wet year, a “July hole” sends Tomichi Creek flows below the targeted instream flow of 18 cfs. Credit: Colorado Water Trust

State Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Avon, who represents District 8, was one of the sponsors of HB 1157. The bill also made it possible to renew loans for two additional 10-year periods, meaning that holders of agricultural water rights can theoretically loan their water for the benefit of the environment for 15 of every 30 years. Roberts said he has heard positive feedback about the expanded loan program.

“We’ve cut down some of the barriers and made it easier to participate but the whole time we’ve kept it voluntary,” Roberts said. “I think the tool is only going to become more important as we head further into drought and dry summers.”

Curry said she got involved with the original bill that created a legal pathway to loan water to ensure that it was workable for livestock producers.

“The state is changing, and we have to face that there are other values for water,” she said. “We just need to make sure if we go down this path, these types of projects need conditions: They wouldn’t hurt ag, they wouldn’t hurt your neighbor, it’s voluntary — things like that.”

State engineers at the Division of Water Resources still need to give their final sign-off for the Peterson Ranch project to move forward. In the spring, Peterson Ranch will decide whether to enact the lease for 2024’s irrigation season. Ideal conditions for the agreement would be a below-average runoff year but not in the bottom 10%.

Despite the lease program’s limited use so far, Ryan said she has seen more interest lately in partnerships among water-user groups.

“We don’t have to choose between ag and the environment,” she said. “I think water users are seeing there is a natural partnership between ag and the environment. But it’s still complicated and takes a lot of work.”

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

The latest seasonal outlooks through November 30, 2023 are hot off the presses from the #Climate Prediction Center

Farm bill timeline in flux as a messy September for Congress nears: Omnibus spending package last passed in 2018 expires on September 30, 2023 — #Colorado Newsline

Bill Fales cutting hay near Carbondale August 2020. The summer’s drought led to a 40% smaller crop than what he would normally harvest at the first cutting of the season. “I’m going to have to sell cows because I just don’t have enough hay and it’s too expensive to buy to feed to cattle,” he says. Photo credit: Laurine Lassalle / Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado News line website (Ashley Murray):

The roundtables, listening sessions and appearances at farm shows have largely wrapped up and lawmakers tasked with reauthorizing the nation’s agriculture and nutrition programs are comparing notes and beginning to draft the massive, multi-year farm bill.

The 2018 version expires Sept. 30, just as many urgent priorities compete for floor time in Congress — namely the government funding bills that, if not passed by Oct. 1, could mean a partial government shutdown.

The expansive agricultural and food policy bill covers farmer safety net programs, conservation and sustainability incentives, international trade, rural area development, and food and nutrition programs for low-income earners — the last of which by far accounts for the largest portion of the bill. The legislation is one of Congress’ omnibus packages, meaning it’s made up of numerous provisions from many lawmakers.

Staff working on the respective House and Senate agriculture committees expect a roughly $1.5 trillion price tag over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office baseline scores for SNAP and mandatory farm programs.

Both parties have rallied around ways to make the government safety net more reliable for farmers facing rising production costs. Differences surface when discussing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as SNAP, or food stamps, and how to spend conservation and climate dollars earmarked in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

While the outlook for when the farm bill reaches the floor is “murky,” committee leadership “has committed to bipartisanship,” said a Republican House aide knowledgeable about Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson’s negotiations. The aide did not want to be identified because of ongoing discussions.

Thompson, of Pennsylvania, chairs the House Committee on Agriculture.

Some worry that despite Thompson’s goal for bipartisanship, the omnibus to continue America’s farm and food programs will become another battleground for far-right lawmakers.

If Congress does not pass a final farm bill by the end of September, lawmakers will likely will enact program extensions as they have in the past. Aides say the situation becomes more worrisome if lawmakers cannot finish the omnibus by the end of the calendar year.

“Once it leaves his committee it’s at the mercy of the Rules Committee and right now the Freedom Caucus is — not just with the farm bill, and not just with the agriculture appropriations — but pretty much every bill going through, (they have) some of their unrealistic demands on required amendments,” said Chandler Goule, CEO of the National Association of Wheat Growers.

“I’m worried it’s going to not only stall the farm bill, but it’s also going to make the farm bill a partisan bill, which is not good for anyone in agriculture,” he said.

Food assistance

Nutrition initiatives were added to the farm bill in the early 1970s, expanding the scope of the legislation that previously focused on support for certain commodities, including corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, dairy and others.

Nutrition programs are projected to comprise 84% of the 2023 farm bill, compared to the 76% in the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, the official name of the most recent omnibus. The increase reflects pandemic-related spending and an adjustment to benefits meant to better reflect grocery store prices.

While the farm bill authorizes policy, a separate agriculture appropriations process greenlights the dollars for farmers and SNAP, as well as the Food and Drug Administration. Talks to advance the funding bill collapsed before lawmakers left for August recess as far-right conservatives pushed to ban the availability of mifepristone, the abortion pill.

Cutting SNAP funding in the agriculture appropriations bill is also a target for the GOP-led House.

Among the Republican proposals are “right-sizing” funding to reflect pre-pandemic levels and adjusting the administration’s Thrifty Food Plan, which increased benefits to match healthy food prices.

Another proposal Democrats are criticizing is limiting state waivers that allow certain adults to be exempt from work requirements because of labor market conditions. Currently 13 states, the District of Columbia and two territories have statewide waivers.

They include: Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Another 16 states have partial waivers in certain areas.

The GOP already moved the needle this year on SNAP work requirements when House Leader Kevin McCarthy of California won a provision in the debt ceiling deal to increase the work rules age ceiling from 49 to 55 for adults without dependents.

As for the farm bill debate, “Mr. Thompson has been clear: he is not interested in further debate of the age of someone participating in a work requirement,” the GOP aide said.

Democrats are warning McCarthy and GOP leadership that inserting the SNAP debate into the farm bill process could hamper progress.

“The continued threat of making additional changes to SNAP eligibility and benefits is not helpful and even undermines Chairman Thompson as he works with his Democratic and Republican membership to bring a bipartisan farm bill out of the Agriculture Committee,” wrote the committee’s ranking member, David Scott of Georgia, in an Aug. 7 letter co-signed by two dozen Democratic colleagues.

Aside from work rules, the GOP would like to see some policy changes in the farm bill’s SNAP title, including more resources directed toward fraud prevention and “health and wellbeing,” or restricting what people can buy with SNAP benefits, according to the Agriculture Committee.

The United Council on Welfare Fraud, a group representing state and county investigators, met with GOP lawmakers multiple times this year ahead of farm bill negotiations to push for more robust prevention of underground SNAP benefits trading and complex retail skimming schemes that strip benefits from recipients’ EBT cards.

“You have legitimate people who go to buy milk and groceries for their children and they have a zero balance on their card,” said Dawn Royal, the group’s director and past president.

“In recognizing that there are legitimate victims, the government decided to reissue benefits on those cards to the victims up to twice and that’s great, right. So now mom can buy milk for her children and that’s great, but they (the government) did nothing to prevent it,” she said.

The USDA spends less than 1% on fraud prevention and prosecution, according to the group.

Farmer safety net

Another major area of concern for the farm bill among GOP leaders is updating guidelines that trigger risk protection programs for several commodities, including wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, peanuts, sugar and dairy.

Farmers and lawmakers maintain the prices — referred to as reference prices — are outdated. Despite market fluctuations, severe drought or natural disasters, the protections aren’t set in motion until crop prices drop to a certain level.

Irrigation in the San Luis Valley in August 2022. Photo/Allen Best

“Everything we’re doing on the farm now costs a whole lot more money when it comes to planting the crop. But the reference prices for when some type of disaster program would kick in haven’t changed. So it’s much more costly to put a crop in and to protect that crop,” said Josh Gackle, a North Dakota soybean farmer and vice president of the American Soybean Association.

Prices have to dip to $8.50 per bushel before government coverage begins. Gackle says in North Dakota it costs him $12 per bushel to produce the crop.

“The data that was used (for reference prices) goes back to 2012. The world is very different now than it was in 2012,” Sen. John Boozman told Agri-Pulse in an April interview.

“So I can tell you, there is not going to be a farm bill that I vote for that doesn’t take care of the safety nets,” continued the Arkansas Republican who is the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

Boozman is also eyeing “producer focused” policies in the trade title of the bill, said Patrick Creamer, the committee’s communications director for the minority.

The senator wants to focus on “things that really impact farmers, whether it’s market access overseas or research to help increase their crop yields,” Creamer said.

One of the Colorado Orange apples collected from an ancient tree in Fremont County, Colorado. (Provided by Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project)

Democrats agree that farmer safety net programs are falling short. However, they want expanded protection for crops — like apples, for example — that are outside of the major commodities.

“Both program crops and specialty crops have to have some kind of safety net and access to whether it’s (for) conservation research, anything that will make those farmers profitable and able to stay in business,” said a Democratic House aide who did not want to be identified because of ongoing negotiations.

The Senate returns Sept. 5. The House returns Sept. 12.

Feds ease up on #ColoradoRiver restrictions — for now: This year’s wet winter helped save the river from collapse. But a reckoning is on the horizon — Grist #COriver #aridification

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

The water shortage crisis on the Colorado River is improving, but it’s far from over.

That was the message from the Biden administration on Tuesday, as officials announced they would loosen water restrictions on the river in 2024. Thanks to robust winter snowpack that provided about 33 percent more moisture than the average year, the water levels in the riverʻs two main reservoirs have begun to stabilize after plummeting over three years. This has lessened the need for states in the Southwest to cut their water usage.

The total cuts will be about 20 percent lighter than they were last year, requiring three Southwest states and Mexico to save around 600,000 acre-feet of water — enough to supply roughly 1.2 million homes.

Even so, the administration left some mandatory restrictions in place to account for the fact that the reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are still emptier than they have been at almost any point in history. That’s due in large part to a millennium-scale drought that researchers believe was made much more likely by climate change. And even as federal officials eased up on mandatory restrictions, they were also preparing to dole out billions of dollars to the region’s farmers and cities in an effort to further reduce water usage on the river.

“The above-average precipitation this year was a welcome relief,” said Camille Camimlim Touton, the commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees the river, in a press release. “We have the time to focus on the long-term sustainability solutions needed in the Colorado River Basin.”

During the past three years, as the Colorado River has dried up, the federal government has used the elevation of Lake Mead as a benchmark to determine what restrictions it needs to impose on Arizona, Nevada, and California, the three states in what’s known as the riverʻs “Lower Basin,” as well as Mexico. In practice, the state that has suffered the most under this system is Arizona, which has junior rights to the river as a result of a compromise it made in the 1960s to secure funding for canal infrastructure; it has borne almost all the early cuts.

The Biden administrationʻs announcement this week, which will move the river from a “Tier 2a” shortage back down to a “Tier 1” shortage, should give Arizona cotton farmers and Phoenix-area cities a little more breathing room next year. But the river’s long-term prognosis means that it may not be wise for farmers to start planting more fields, or for cities to keep adding new golf courses and lawns.

“I’d say it’s probably not going to help that situation much,” said Paco Ollerton, a farmer who grows cotton and other crops outside the city of Casa Grande, south of Phoenix. “The acreage has dropped quite a bit. We’re probably about 25 percent fallow in the district this year.” The easing of drought restrictions might help some farmers increase their acreage, Ollerton added, but many will hold off on replanting because they’re wary of future cuts.

Even as the Biden administration sets a more relaxed standard for 2024, officials are preparing to roll out a larger series of water cuts that will last for the next three years. These bigger cuts, which the administration hopes will lift the river out of the drought-induced crisis of the past few years, were the result of a hard-fought compromise between the seven states that use the river — and in particular between the two largest users, Arizona and California.

The announcement of the compromise plan in May brought an end to a year of tense negotiations between the states and the Biden administration, triggered by unprecedented fears that Lake Powell and Lake Mead would bottom out altogether. In that doomsday scenario, hydroelectric plants that provide power to millions of people would have shut down, and water might not have been able to move past the reservoirs at all. The compromise plan uses about $1.5 billion in drought funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to compensate farmers and cities for using less water over the next three years.

This was a welcome outcome for farmers in places like Imperial County, California, who had expected to take uncompensated water cuts for the first time in history, as well as for city leaders in Arizona, who had stood to lose a huge share of their Colorado River water during the negotiations. The compromise was only possible because of this year’s wet winter, which deposited enough snow to prop up water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. With reservoirs recovering, the states could get away with more modest cuts — and pay for them with money that Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona secured within the Inflation Reduction Act last year.

Even so, the compromise leaves several questions unanswered. The biggest question is how the states can reduce usage over the long term to account for the gradual aridification of the river. Farmers and cities can save water through techniques like drip irrigation or wastewater recycling, but these technologies are expensive to implement. In all likelihood, some places will have to farm less or build fewer houses. Furthermore, many tribal nations along the river still can’t access the water to which they have legal rights, and satisfying those rights could mean taking water away from other non-tribal users.

The federal government needs to hash out answers to these questions with states and tribes by the end of 2026, when the current operating guidelines for the river will expire. The Biden administration already kicked off that process last month when it asked stakeholders to weigh in on the river’s future. The negotiations won’t kick off in earnest for months or even years, but the administration’s goal is clear: avoid a repeat of the past yearʻs crisis at all costs.

It’s time for an update to the #ColoradoRiver/Lees Ferry flows chart, showing the April High Flow Experiment and elevated releases from #LakePowell this summer — Lauren Steeley #COriver #aridification

It’s time for an update to the Colorado River/Lees Ferry flows chart, showing the April High Flow Experiment and elevated releases from Powell this summer. pic.twitter.com/cHdT3fPkEC
— Lauren Steely (@MadreDeZanjas) August 18, 2023

September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.

Navajo Dam operations update August 18, 2023: Bumping down to 600 cfs #SanJuanRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

The San Juan River near Navajo Dam, New Mexico, Aug. 23, 2015. Photo credit: Phil Slattery Wikimedia Commons

From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):

August 17, 2023

In response to the precipitation forecast and increased observed flows in the San Juan River Basin and its tributaries, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled a decrease in the release from Navajo Dam from 700 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 600 cfs for tomorrow, August 18th, at 4:00 AM.

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.

#ColoradoRiver restrictions eased thanks to “lucky” rain and snow but negotiators race toward long-term fix: Colorado River’s biggest reservoirs at 36% capacity despite wet year — The #Denver Post #COriver #LakePowell #LakeMead #aridification

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

Federal officials on Tuesday temporarily eased Colorado River water use restrictions due to a “lucky” year of increased precipitation, but drought and overuse remain a crisis as officials begin negotiations for the future of the river on which 40 million people in the West rely for drinking, agriculture and water. Colorado’s top water officials on Tuesday submitted the state’s first formal comments on negotiations that will govern the use of the river after current guidelines expire in 2026. They urged change in how Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the two major water storage reservoirs on the river — are operated as the West becomes hotter and drier…

Negotiations for a new plan to replace a 2007 agreement began in June between federal officials, tribal leaders and the seven basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and California. The groups must come to an agreement by 2027, when the current guidelines established in 2007 end. New operating guidelines must account for climate change as well as “recognize that Lower Basin overuse is unsustainable and puts the entire system at risk,” according to the letter to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from Mitchell and Lauren Ris, acting director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board…

Water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell rose this spring due to increased snow and rain in the region. The wet winter and spring mean for the next year Lake Mead will operate in a Level 1 Storage Condition, a “significant improvement” from the Level 2 Shortage Condition implemented in 2022, the Bureau of Reclamation announced Tuesday…That means two Lower Basin states that rely on releases from the reservoirs for water — Nevada and Arizona — will have a little more water to work with this year. Cuts don’t affect allocations to the Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico or Wyoming — because they are upstream of the reservoirs…

Heavy snowfall and increased rains helped boost flows in the Colorado River Basin this winter and spring, raising the water levels of reservoirs across the system. Lake Mead rose more than 10 feet and Lake Powell rose more than 50 feet.

“We were on the verge of a crash,” said Matt Rice, director of the Colorado Basin Program at American Rivers. “There’s no doubt we got lucky.”

#Drought news August 17, 2023: The #Monsoon2023 remains suppressed with increasing short-term drought across #Arizona, #NewMexico and southwest #Colorado

Click the link to see a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.

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

This Week’s Drought Summary

Conditions continued from last week with the southern part of the country, where above-normal temperatures and mostly dry weather across the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, and the lower Mississippi Valley saw drought conditions continue to deteriorate. Drought intensified across Texas and the lower Mississippi Valley, particularly in eastern Texas, Louisiana and south-central Mississippi. The Monsoon remains suppressed with increasing short-term drought across Arizona, New Mexico and southwest Colorado. Frequent rounds of heavy rainfall occurred from the Northeast into the central Mississippi valley, into southern Missouri and the upper Midwest. The continuing west conditions are improving drought across parts of the Corn Belt and much of the southern and central Midwest. Farther to the north, drought continues to intensify across northern Wisconsin, North Dakota, Montana and Washington. Hawai’i continued to experience dry conditions, particularly on the leeward side of the islands. Conditions that came to a peak on August 8th with deadly Lahaina Fire on Maui…

High Plains

Eastern parts of the High Plains saw the benefits of this week’s precipitation along with below-normal temperatures. Kansas saw heavy precipitation continue from last week, bringing further improvements to the east and central regions. Areas near Kansas City saw upwards of 3 inches of precipitation, while the southeast areas received 4 to 7 inches of rain, carrying over improvements seen in Oklahoma. Some improvements occurred along parts of the Nebraska-South Dakota border. Both southeast and northeast South Dakota saw improvement from heavy rainfall and improving soil moisture. This improvement bled over in southeast North Dakota, where areas of D0 were removed due to heavy precipitation. Little precipitation was received further north. Continual soil moisture and streamflow impacts led to D1 and D2 expansions. Southeastern Colorado received spotty precipitation, adding to the already-degrading conditions and resulting in expansion of D1 and D0…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 15, 2023.

West

Much of the continental West remained status quo, with small improvements in central Utah and near Yellowstone National Park into Butte, Montana. Areas in The Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest and in the east near Fort Peck Indian Reservation also saw improvements with the removal of D0 conditions. Northwestern Washington state saw continued above-normal temperatures, as high as 8 degrees above normal, and little measurable precipitation, resulting in slight expansion of D0-D2 from the Okanoga-Wenatchee National Forest to Puget Sound. The dry conditions experienced in Texas continued into New Mexico. Above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation in the eastern part of the state has led to further degradations, with the expansion of D1 near De Baca, Chaves and Lincoln counties. New Mexico has been on water restrictions for several months, with lake levels falling further below average…

South

Much of the South, from Texas to Mississippi, saw temperatures of 4 to 6 degrees above normal for the past two weeks. While northeastern Mississippi, Tennessee, northern Arkansas, and northeast Oklahoma, much of the rest of the south missed out. Northern Oklahoma and Arkansas benefited from this above-normal precipitation, allowing for the removal of D0 conditions. Meanwhile, D0 expanded in eastern Arkansas into northwest Mississippi due to continued dryness over the last 30 days, combined with extreme temperatures. A widespread expansion of dry conditions occurred from southern Mississippi into east-central Texas due to a continued lack of rainfall (about 8 – 14 inches over the last 90 days) combined with above normal temperatures. For example, rainfall in Southern Mississippi is well below normal for the year, with Crystal Springs only seeing 2.99 inches of rain for July and August. At the same time high temperatures of over 95 degrees have been recorded over 26 days — with 14 of those days over 100 degrees. Nearly all counties in southeastern and south-central Mississippi are in a burn ban, a commonality seen across the rest of the South. Many livestock producers are having to feed hay and have begun selling their livestock, leading to record cattle sales in various communities. Conditions from western Louisiana into eastern Texas continued to deteriorate, with D3 (extreme drought) expanding from the Louisiana boot heel into Houston, down to Corpus Christi. In Shelby County, Texas, little to no rain has fallen in the last 30 days, which has been accompanied by weeks of triple-digit heat. Agriculture across the southern Gulf Coast has seen enormous impacts due to this lack of precipitation and extreme heat. Eastern and central Texas also had extensive degradations with expansions of D2 (severe drought) through D4 (exceptional drought). Presently, Austin’s precipitation from June 1 to August 15 ranks as the fourth driest on record. Belton and Stillhouse Hollow reservoirs are also the driest on record for this time of year. Near Midland, Texas, conditions have been compared to the record-breaking drought of 2011. To the far West, parts of the Big Bend region have received 600% of normal weekly rainfall in the last week, resulting in improvement from D1 to D0. The Edwards Plateau saw some rainfall, but it was not enough to improve the long-term regional dryness. Soil moisture and streamflows through the region continue to decline. Southern Oklahoma also felt the effects of low precipitation and high temperatures, resulting in widespread expansion of D0 and degradation of areas of D0 into D1…

Looking Ahead

According to the Weather Prediction Center (WPC), during the next five days (Aug. 17-22, 2023), significant rainfall is expected across parts of the Southwest and California as Tropical Storm Hillary approaches the California-Mexico border. While the storm is expected to reach hurricane status, forecasts call for it to weaken before making landfall due to cooler ocean temperatures and land interactions. Rainfall totals of 2–4 inches with isolated areas over 6 inches are expected — a considerable amount of rain for the dry Southwest. Rain is also expected across the Northwest and northern Rockies. Much of the rest of the country looks to remain mostly dry, with the exception of Florida and the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, a heat wave will build over the southern and central U.S. into the Midwest. Daytime highs are expected to be 10-20 degrees above normal in some places, equating to highs near 100 degrees in places such as the upper Midwest.

Moving into next week, the Climate Prediction Center’s 6-10 day outlook (valid Aug. 22-26, 2023) calls for an increased probability of above-normal temperatures throughout most of the Lower 48 states and much of Alaska. The only areas where below- or near-normal temperatures are favored include the Northeast, western Alaska and parts of the Southwest. Above-normal precipitation is favored across much of the western half of the U.S., parts of the Northeast, south Texas, South Florida and much of Alaska.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 15, 2023.

#ColoradoRiver Basin ranks among the world’s most #water-stressed regions, analysis finds — The Los Angeles Times #COriver #aridification

Screenshot of the Aqueduct World Water Risk Analysis website August 16, 2023.

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

The analysis by researchers with the World Resources Institute found that all seven states that rely on the Colorado River face high or extremely high water stress. Arizona ranked first for the most severe water stress in the country, followed by New Mexico and Colorado, while California ranked fifth.

“When I put the results on a map, the first thing I saw was the Colorado River Basin,” said Samantha Kuzma, the nonprofit group’s data lead for the assessment, called the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas.

The analysis found that 25 countries, with about one-fourth of the world’s population, are exposed to extremely high water stress. Those countries include Bahrain, Cyprus, Lebanon, Israel, Chile, Jordan, Greece and Tunisia, among others. The United States as a whole doesn’t meet the threshold to be considered a country with high water stress.

“But if you were only to count the Colorado River Basin, it would be one of the most water-stressed countries in the world,” Kuzma said. “It ranks at the top of the list with the other extremely high countries.”

But the analysis highlights warnings from experts who say that even though the Colorado River has benefited from one of the wettest winters in years, the long-term gap between heavy demands and limited supply will require significant reductions in water use. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the country, remain at historically low levels. Even with the rise in water levels this year, the reservoirs are at 36% of capacity.

“The problem on the Colorado River does not get erased with one wet year. And in fact, climate change pretty well ensures that this problem continues,” said Jennifer Pitt, director of the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River program. “While there is a temporary reprieve, and while there will always be wet years and dry years, the overall trend is warmer, drier, and less water availability.”

The First People, Part 2: The Reservations — Sibley’s Rivers #ColoradoRiver #COriver

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

The last post here began an exploration of tribal issues in the Colorado River region, where 30 ‘First People’ nations have been put on reservations throughout the region. We looked at some of the precolumbian history in the Southwest, to emphasize the human diversity that existed in the region when European peoples invaded the continent beginning 500 years ago. ‘The Second People,’ I guess we could call the invaders – a single people instead of many like the more than 700 distinctive First Peoples; most of our ancestors seemed willing to let go of their Old World identities and assimilate to a common ‘American dream’ in the New World, e pluribus unum. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that we consistently act as ‘one people.’ But our differences today are ‘New World conflicts,’ not those stemming from ‘Old World’ distinctions between English, French, Italian, Spanish, Slavic, and the other hereditary European national stocks.

From the beginning till now, the relationships between the First and Second Peoples have been mostly ambiguous at best. Until the 20^th century CE, their interactions almost always devolved into conflict and warfare, conflicts the native people always eventually lost, despite occasional battle victories, to the sheer mass of the invaders and their superior firepower, not to mention their virulent diseases unknown in the New World.

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

The conflicts were eventually settled with treaties in which the First Peoples, one by one, yielded most or all of their old hunter-forager territories to the invaders in exchange for much smaller ‘reservations’ managed through a ‘trust’ relationship with the United States government. In the best resolutions, the First People got the least desirable part of their former homeland as their reservation; in the worst resolutions, they were forcibly moved to strange and generally undesirable places beyond the settled area. Out of sight, out of mind.

In its broadest terms, a ‘trust’ is a legal arrangement between a benefactor and a beneficiary that is administered by a trustee. Given that the reservation trust arrangement had the First People giving up most of the land they had inhabited for many generations, in exchange for a small piece of that land and freedom from further invasive pressure, one wonders who should be called the benefactor and who the beneficiary.

But the trust arrangement between the First and Second Peoples was defined in 1831 by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, in deciding a suit filed by the southeastern Creek Nation against the State of Georgia. The Creek People were one of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ in the southern states who had tried hard to fully assimilate to European ways: taking up farming, speaking English, even dressing European – and being civilized enough to know they needed to lawyer-up in civil situations like loss of their land. But they were still ‘Indians,’ and therefore subject to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, to free up more land for white settlers.

When that suit went to the Supreme Court in 1831, Chief Justice Marshall – probably the first real ‘activist justice’ – declared that all situations involving the First Peoples should be negotiated and resolved as between nations, not within state jurisdictions. But it would not be nation-to-nation negotiations between equals. The First Peoples he declared to be ‘domestic dependent nations’ whose ‘relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the President as their Great Father.’

There is a sad irony to the fact that this articulation of a guardian-ward relationship concluded with the ‘Five Civilized Tribes,’ who had tried to follow the ways of their ‘guardian’ nation, removed from their homes and force-marched on the ‘Trail of Tears’ to strange lands across the Mississippi. More power than kindness.

An Office of Indian Affairs was created to administer the reservation trust model; the nature of the trust relationship is indicated by the fact that OIA was in the War Department. In 1849 the Interior Department was created, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was moved into that.

Devastated as the First Peoples were at that time by European diseases, continual conflict and retreat before the waves of ‘unsettlers’ swarming over the continent, the ‘guardian-ward’ foster-parent relationship was probably an accurate enough description of the reservation life imposed on the First Peoples: a relationship historically marked at best by what could only be described generously as tough love, too often by blatant exploitation, and most often by indifference and negligence. That they survived at all with so much of their spiritual life and heritage still burning within is a measure of the cohesive strength possible in small tight societies that mass societies can never really achieve.

Through time, the undercurrent of vengeance leached out of the trust relationship, but a full legal definition of the trust remained somewhat ambiguous, and the treaties on which the trusts were based had varying degrees of legal explication. And until well into the 20^th century, the reservation trust relationship was rooted in a belief – a benefactor belief, of course – that the best resolution for all concerned was total cultural assimilation of the First Peoples – essentially, elimination of them as distinct peoples: it was no longer ‘kill the Indians,’ but ‘kill what’s Indian to save the people.’ This included measures like the 1887 Dawes Act that ‘subdivided’ the reservations into individual plots to make the Peoples understand the blessings of private property, and laws that moved children from their families to boarding schools where they were given haircuts, immersed in industrial culture, and punished for speaking their own language. This was all done with a virtuous sense of Christian duty to the heathen.

The 20^th century also saw some of the worthless land the First People had been relocated to turn out to have valuable deposits of oil and gas, uranium, and other basic industrial resources. The Peoples were of course judged to be unable to develop and manage these resources themselves, so that was done under the trust by the BIA and other Interior agencies, with all the revenues supposed to go to the Peoples of the reservation exploited: some into tribal funds, and some into individual funds where the reservation had been successfully subdivided – funds to be kept separate from other expenditures and revenues associated with regular reservation activity.

This was a daunting accounting challenge, but the BIA seemed to go above and beyond the challenge in messing it up. By the 1990s, it was obvious that this was a complete mess, and a $100 billion class action suit was filed in the mid-1990s on behalf of all the tribes and half a million individuals who should have been getting resource revenue, but weren’t. Investigation showed an array of misdirection of funds, malfeasance on the part of some of the private contractors holding back funds, some money just going into the general treasury funds, but mostly it was just terrible non-management of the trusts.

The judge who evaluated the $100 billion suit came up with a figure of only $455 million. Faced with the probability of a court appeal, keepng a truly embarrassing situation in the public mind longer, Interior offered a settlement of $1.4 billion in direct payments, plus $2 billion to try to unsnarl some of the Dawes Act reservation fragmentation, and a $60 million scholarship fund to educate reservation youth.

But – meanwhile, what about the most important western resource for the reservations: water? (You knew I’d eventually get around to it.) In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a seminal decision on water for reservations, to resolve a Montana water situation, that was really the first government action showing empathy for a First People trying to make a life in circumstances made difficult both by antipathy from the larger society around them and by the always ambiguous trust relationship with the government.

Early in the 20^th century, Montana settlers had began using water from the Milk River above the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation (north of the Missouri River, primarily Gros Ventre People). The settlers were told to stop because it was taking water needed by the First People in their own efforts to become ‘civilized’ farmers. The settlers – faced with the possible loss of their own land, worthless [without] the water – sued, Winters v. the United States; and the case went to the Supreme Court.

The Court affirmed that the water the settlers was using belonged with the reservation, even though the Indians were not using all of the water yet, and had filed no appropriation claim on it. When the federal government reserved land for some purpose, the Court declared, such as the settling and ‘civilizing’ of a People, the reservation of a sufficient quantity of water to carry out that purpose was implicit in the reservation of land. The water thus reserved, with creation of the reservation, was to be exempt from appropriation under the laws of the state in which the reservation was located; and the appropriation date for thatreservedwater would be the date of creation of the reservation, whether the water was yet being used or not. Given that most reservations were created before their former land was opened to settlers, these became very senior water rights – and the right didn’t even require the water to immediately be put to beneficial economic use; it was to be there whenever the reservation People were ready to learn to use it.

One can imagine the shockwave this sent through the arid West where appropriation law was foundational to practically all development – first come, first served for the use of water, so long as the claim was properly filed and adjudicated. Now the federal government, which still owned most of the Interior West and Southwest, was being given, by the highest court in the land, the prerogative of elbowing its way to the front of the line by reserving land for specific purposes thar required a quantity of water.

The Supreme Court that issued the Winters decision may have engaged in a little judicial activism – taking upon itself something that would have been more properly addressed by Congress. But the Court essentially argued that its decision was obviously implicit in the Congresssional ratification of each reservation: Congress would surely not ‘take from [a First People] the means of continuing their old habits, yet not leave them the power to change to new ones’; therefore the reservation of the water along with the land was surely presumed by Congress. This may be a more idealized view of the rationality and integrity of Congress than many people then or now have, especially where the First People were concerned, but so the Court decreed. It was basically a majority of justices making a judgment call on behalf of equity, fairness and decency: how could the nation take away the free-ranging hunter-forager way of life from the people of another nation, and not give them the wherewithal to forge a new, more ‘civilized’ way of life?

The Winters decree did leave the First Peoples with a couple of difficult challenges, however, and no instruction on how to address them. They had to get their water rights quantified, in order to begin planning their development – and how much water did it take in the desert to convert a whole people to agricultural and industrial civilization? Then they had to figure out how to finance the development of their rights. And they had to do both of these things in a larger water-culture environment less than happy with the whole Winters decision.

This is where the ‘trust’ relationship with the federal government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, should have worked better than it in fact has. Next post, we will look at some of the trials and tribulations the First Peoples in the Colorado River region have experienced in working through those two challenges – a struggle most recently manifested in June this year, with a new Supreme Court decision declaring that, the Winters decision notwithstanding, nothing else about the trust relationship can be considered implicit in the fumbling-forward effort to work out the whole relationship of the First Peoples and the Second People. If something like assisting in determining a People’s basic rights isn’t explicit in the century-old establishing treaties, then no trust responsibility for that exists.

Reclamation announces 2024 operating conditions for #LakePowell and #LakeMead #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the release on the Reclamation website:

Significant improvement for Lake Mead due to improved hydrology, ongoing conservation efforts. Operating guidelines in effect until Reclamation finalizes SEIS, including analysis of consensus-based state conservation agreement.

August 15, 2023

BOULDER CITY, Nev. – The Bureau of Reclamation today released the Colorado River Basin August 2023 24-Month Study, which determines the tiers for the coordinated operation of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for 2024. These operating conditions, which are based on existing agreements under the 2007 guidelines and lower basin Drought Contingency Plans, will be in effect until the near-term guidelines from the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) are finalized. Reclamation is currently analyzing the consensus-based Lower Division States proposed alternative for the SEIS.

Based on projections in the 24-Month Study, Lake Powell will operate in a Mid-Elevation Release Tier with a 7.48 million acre-feet release in water year 2024. Consistent with existing agreements, Lake Mead will operate in a Level 1 Shortage Condition – an improvement from the Level 2 Shortage Condition announced last year – with required shortages by Arizona and Nevada, coupled with Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan water savings contributions. Mexico’s water delivery will be reduced consistent with Minute 323.

Lake Mead’s release in 2023 is projected to be the lowest in 30 years, approximately one and half million acre-feet lower than an average normal year, reflecting extensive, ongoing conservation efforts in the Lower Basin states funded in part by President Biden’s historic Investing in America agenda, above-normal inflows in the lower basin below Hoover Dam, and conservation in Mexico.

Investments in system conservation and improved hydrology this year have provided an opportunity to recover some reservoir storage. At the same time, the Colorado River system continues to face low elevations, with Lake Powell and Lake Mead at a combined storage of 36%.

“The above-average precipitation this year was a welcome relief, and coupled with our hard work for system conservation, we have the time to focus on the long-term sustainability solutions needed in the Colorado River Basin. However, Lake Powell and Lake Mead – the two largest reservoirs in the United States and the two largest storage units in the Colorado River system – remain at historically low levels,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “As we experience a warmer, drier west due to a prolonged drought, accelerated by climate change, Reclamation is committed to leading inclusive and transparent efforts to develop the next-generation framework for managing the river system.”

The Development of Near- and Long-Term Guidelines

Reclamation is simultaneously developing both near- and long-term guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead operations. The supplemental SEIS in progress focuses on near-term actions, which would be applicable from 2024 through 2026 based on potential changes to limited sections of the 2007 Interim Guidelines. Reclamation temporarily withdrew the SEIS so it could fully analyze the consensus-based Lower Division States proposed alternative and will publish an updated draft SEIS for public review and comment with the consensus-based proposal as an action alternative later this year.

In addition to several agreements that have already been finalized, a consensus-based proposal – agreed upon by the three Lower Basin states earlier this year – commits to measures to conserve at least 3 million-acre-feet (maf) of system water through the end of 2026, when the current operating guidelines are set to expire.

The long-term guidelines, informally referred to as Post 2026 Operations, will revisit the 2007 Interim Guidelines in full, as well as other operating agreements that expire in 2026, including Drought Contingency Plans and Minute 323. In June, Reclamation initiated the formal process to develop the long-term operating guidelines.

Reclamation is committed to an inclusive and transparent process that enhances meaningful Tribal engagement as well as collaboration with all stakeholders in the basin. In response to Tribal feedback, the Department of the Interior established the first-ever Federal-Tribal-State partnership to promote equitable information-sharing and discussion among the sovereign governments in the Colorado River Basin. All 30 Colorado River Basin Tribal Nations and the seven U.S. basin states were invited to participate in this new group. The group met for the first time last week with Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau, Commissioner Touton, and other Department leaders. The formation of this new group does not replace any independent consultation with either Tribes or states.

2024 Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead

Until the updated near-term guidelines are finalized once the supplemental SEIS is complete, Reclamation will continue to implement the plans developed over the past two decades that lay out detailed operational rules for these critical Colorado River reservoirs through 2026:

Lake Powell Mid-Elevation Release Tier: The 24-Month Study, with an 8.23 maf release pattern in October – December 2023, projects Lake Powell’s January 1, 2024, elevation to be 3,568.57 feet – about 130 feet below full and about 80 feet above minimum power pool. Based on this projection, Lake Powell will operate in the Mid-Elevation Release Tier in water year 2024 (October 1, 2023, through September 30, 2024). Under this tier, Lake Powell will release 7.48 million acre-feet in water year 2024 without the potential for a mid-year adjustment in April 2024. Under the most probable scenario, and with a 7.48 maf release pattern in October – December 2023, Lake Powell’s projected elevation on January 1, 2024, is 3,573.68 feet.

Lake Mead Level 1 Shortage Condition: The 24-Month Study projects Lake Mead’s January 1, 2024, elevation to be 1,065.27 feet – about 10 feet below the Lower Basin shortage determination trigger of 1,075 feet and about 25 feet below the drought contingency plan trigger of 1,090 feet. This elevation is based on a 7.48 maf release from Lake Powell in water year 2024. Based on this projection, Lake Mead will operate in a Level 1 Shortage Condition for calendar year 2024 (January 1, 2024, through December 31, 2024). This is a significant improvement from the Level 2 Shortage Condition announced last year. The required shortage reductions and water savings contributions under the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, 2019 Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan and Minute 323 to the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico are:

Arizona: 512,000 acre-feet, which is approximately 18% of the state’s annual apportionment.

Nevada: 21,000 acre-feet, which is 7% of the state’s annual apportionment.

Mexico: 80,000 acre-feet, which is approximately 5% of the country’s annual allotment.

Lower Basin projections for Lake Mead include updated water orders to reflect additional conservation efforts and new completed system conservation agreements under the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program.

President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda

System conservation and efficiency programs in the Colorado River Basin are being strengthened by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda and will invest in long-term durable system efficiency improvements that result in quantifiable, verifiable water savings in the Basin.

The Investing in America agenda represents the largest investment in climate resilience in the nation’s history and is providing much-needed resources to enhance Western communities’ resilience to drought and climate change, including protecting the short- and long-term sustainability of the Colorado River System. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Reclamation is investing a total of $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including water purification and reuse, water storage and conveyance, desalination and dam safety. The Inflation Reduction Act is investing an additional $4.6 billion to address the historic drought.

To date, the Interior Department has announced the following investments for Colorado River Basin states, which will yield hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water savings each year once these projects are complete:

$281 million for 21 water recycling projects that are expected to increase annual water capacity by 127,000 acre-feet annuall

Up to $233 million in water conservation funding for the Gila River Indian Community, including $83 million for a water pipeline project and an additional $50 million from the Inflation Reduction Act through the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program, which will also provide similar investments in 2024 and 2025

Over $73 million for infrastructure repairs on water delivery systems, $19.3 million in fiscal year 2022 and another $54 million in April

$71 million for 32 drought resiliency projects to expand access to water through groundwater storage, rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge and water treatment

$20 million in new small surface and groundwater storage investments

Eight new System Conservation Implementation Agreements in Arizona that will commit water entities in the Tucson and Phoenix metro areas to conserve up to 140,000-acre feet of water in Lake Mead in 2023, and up to 393,000-acre feet through 2025.

The #Runoff: Non-depletion vs. delivery obligation — @AspenJournalism #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

The Colorado River from Navajo Bridge below Lee’s Ferry and Glen Canyon Dam. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

Colorado River politics is heating up with the looming negotiation of the post-2026 operational guidelines and state representatives are laying the groundwork to get Colorado’s water world on the same page regarding the state’s position and talking points.

Colorado’s now full-time commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission Becky Mitchell has embarked on what she called a road show, meeting with water managers and organizations around the state to open the lines of communication and share news related to the negotiations. Among what she called her “irrefutable truths” is that according to the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided the waters equally (7.5 million acre-feet per year to each) between the upper and lower basins, the upper basin states (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming) do not have an obligation to deliver 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year to the lower basin. What they have is a “non-depletion” obligation. So long as the upper basin uses less than 75 million acre-feet over 10 years, there’s no compact violation. I doubt the lower basin sees it that way.

What the compact actually says is this: “The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years…”

Its actual meaning has long been a point of contention for Colorado River scholars. Many people believe the language represents a de facto delivery obligation, with the upper basin required to send 75 million acre-feet over 10 years to the lower basin.

This delivery obligation interpretation favors the lower basin and the non-depletion obligation interpretation favors the upper basin. It’s important because whether the upper basin violates the compact, which would trigger mandatory cutbacks, may hinge on this interpretation.

Also, presumably in an effort to communicate the state’s positions going into the post-2026 negotiations — while presenting it as the Law of the River 101 — representatives from the Colorado Attorney General’s office made an appearance at the Colorado Basin Roundtable meeting in July and pushed the non-depletion point of view as the law of the land. While seeing it as a non-depletion obligation is a very good political messaging strategy for the upper basin, it is in fact an unsettled legal argument.

Another wrinkle in the non-depletion vs. delivery obligation debate is climate change. Scientists have found that Colorado River flows have declined nearly 20% from the 20th century average and that higher temperatures are responsible for about one-third of that. The compact clearly says that the states of the upper division will not cause flows to be depleted, but what if it’s not the states’ water use (which remains well below their 7.5 million acre-feet per year allocation), but climate change that causes flows to be depleted? Would that still be considered a compact violation? Colorado River expert and author Eric Kuhn has been asking this question for years, but he isn’t ready to test it.

“Will it survive legal scrutiny? I’m not sure I would want to be the attorney that leads with that argument,” he said.

The #Runoff | Big #water year begins to fade away — @AspenJournalism #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Colorado Drought Monitor map August 8, 2023.

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

As water year 2023 wraps up, water managers are coming off a high, with the Colorado River crisis temporarily warded off thanks to a record-breaking snow year. But the basin may already be slipping back into conditions reminiscent of 2019, another big snow year that was followed by dry conditions, which set the basin up for a disastrous 2020 and 2021. Despite a few afternoon rain (and hail) storms, the monsoon in western Colorado has not set up with any consistency; aside from a few north-facing gullies, the snow has all melted in the high country; and abnormally dry and moderate drought conditions have crept back into southwestern Colorado, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Not to mention that in terms of global average temperature, it was the hottest July ever recorded. Next year’s conditions depend not solely on snowpack, but on what the rest of this summer and fall bring, and water managers are eagerly watching the forecasts.

Biden-Harris Administration Announces $50 Million to Enhance Key #Water Infrastructure in the Upper #ColoradoRiver Basin Through President’s Investing in America Agenda: Historic investments are helping to protect and sustain the #COriver System #aridification

The downstream face of Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, America’s second-largest water reservoir. Water is released from the reservoir through a hydropower generation system at the base of the dam. Photo by Brian Richter

Click the link to read the release on the Department of Interior website:

8/14/2023

WASHINGTON — The Department of the Interior today announced $50 million over the next five years to improve key water infrastructure and enhance drought-related data collection across the Upper Colorado River Basin. The Bureau of Reclamation is making an initial $8.7 million investment in fiscal year 2023 to support drought mitigation efforts in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming that will help ensure compliance with interstate water compact obligations, maintain the ability to generate hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam, and minimize adverse effects to resources and infrastructure in the Upper Basin.

President Biden’s Investing in America agenda represent the largest investment in climate resilience in the nation’s history and is providing much-needed resources to enhance Western communities’ resilience to drought and climate change, including protecting the short- and long-term sustainability of the Colorado River System. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Reclamation is investing a total of $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including water purification and reuse, water storage and conveyance, desalination and dam safety. The Inflation Reduction Act is investing an additional $4.6 billion to address the historic drought. Today’s announcement is one of the many historic investments the Biden-Harris administration is implementing as part of an all-of-government effort to make the Colorado River Basin and all the communities that rely on it more resilient to climate change, including the ongoing drought in the West.

“The Biden-Harris administration is committed to bringing every tool and every resource to bear to as we work with states, Tribes, and communities throughout the West to find long-term solutions in the face of climate change and the sustained drought it is creating,” said Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau. “As we look toward the next decade of Colorado River guidelines and strategies, we are simultaneously making smart investments now that will make our path forward stronger and more sustainable.”

“Resources from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda are allowing us to meet a number of program needs across the Colorado River System, including expanding the Basin’s existing network of instrumentation to improve water accounting, weather predicting and monitoring,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “Today’s funding will enhance critical data and empower us with the best-available science and technology to more accurately measure the Upper Basin’s consumptive water use.”

The initial $8.7 million announced today will purchase and place 12 new eddy covariance stations. Reclamation will locate the stations throughout the basin to measure evapotranspiration, a key measurement for determining consumptive water use. There are currently four of these stations in the Upper Basin, one placed in each of the Upper Basin states. Reclamation and the Upper Basin states, along with other partners, studied evapotranspiration in the Upper Basin from 2018 through 2020. The data that was collected and analyzed provided critical insight and demonstrated the need and value of expanding the data gathering ability.

This funding helps further Drought Contingency Planning activities in the Upper Colorado River Basin and is consistent with the obligations of the Secretary under the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan Authorization Act (P.L. 116-14) and related agreements.

To date, the Interior Department has announced the following investments for Colorado River Basin states, which will yield hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water savings each year once these projects are complete:

$281 million for 21 water recycling projects that are expected to increase annual water capacity by 127,000 acre-feet annually

Up to $233 million in water conservation funding for the Gila River Indian Community, including $83 million for a water pipeline project and an additional $50 million from the Inflation Reduction Act through the Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program, which will also provide similar investments in 2024 and 2025

Over $73 million for infrastructure repairs on water delivery systems, $19.3 million in fiscal year 2022 and another $54 million in April

$71 million for 32 drought resiliency projects to expand access to water through groundwater storage, rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge and water treatment

$20 million in new small surface and groundwater storage investments

Eight new System Conservation Implementation Agreements in Arizona that will commit water entities in the Tucson and Phoenix metro areas to conserve up to 140,000-acre feet of water in Lake Mead in 2023, and up to 393,000-acre feet through 2025.

Upper Colorado River basins. (The border of Wyoming and Colorado is mislabeled.) (U.S. BOR)

A dogged reporter covers our roiling world — Writers on the Range

Dave Marston has written a profile of friend of Coyote Gulch Allen Best. Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (David Marston):

Usually seen with a camera slung around his neck, Allen Best edits a one-man online journalism shop he calls Big Pivots. Its beat is the changes made necessary by our rapidly warming climate, and he calls it the most important story he’s ever covered.

Best is based in the Denver area, and his twice-a-month e-journal looks for the radical transitions in Colorado’s energy, water, and other urgent aspects of the state’s economy. These changes, he thinks, overwhelm the arrival of the telephone, rural electrification and even the internal combustion engine in terms of their impact.

Global warming, he declares, is “the biggest pivot of all.”

Whether you “believe” in climate change — and Best points out that at least one Colorado state legislator does not — there’s no denying that our entire planet is undergoing dramatic changes, including melting polar ice, ever-intensifying storms, and massive wildlife extinctions.

A major story that Best, 71, has relentlessly chronicled concerns Tri-State, a wholesale power supplier serving Colorado and three other states. Late to welcome renewable energy, it’s been weighed down with aging coal-fired power plants. Best closely followed how many of its 42 customers — rural electric cooperatives — have fought to withdraw from, or at least renegotiate, contracts that hampered their ability to buy cheaper power and use local renewable sources.

Best’s first newspaper job was at the Middle Park Times in Kremmling, a mountain town along the Colorado River. He wrote about logging, molybdenum mining and the many miners who came from eastern Europe. His prose wasn’t pretty, he says, but he got to hone his skills.

Because of his rural roots, Best is most comfortable hanging out in farm towns and backwaters, places where he can listen to stories and try to get a feel for what Best calls the “rest of Colorado.” Pueblo, population 110,000 in southern Colorado, is a gritty town he likes a lot.

Pueblo has been forced to pivot away from a creaky, coal-fired power plant that created well-paying jobs. Now, the local steel mill relies on solar power instead, and the town also hosts a factory that makes wind turbine towers. He’s written stories about these radical changes as well as the possibility that Russian oligarchs are involved in the city’s steel mill.

In 2015, signs supporting coal were abundant in Craig, Colo. Photo/Allen Best

Best also vacuums up stories from towns like Craig in northwestern Colorado, home to soon-to-be-closed coal plants. He says he finds Farmington, New Mexico, fascinating because it has electric transmission lines idling from shuttered coal power plants.

His Big Pivots may only have 1,091 subscribers, but story tips and encouragement come from some of his readers who hold jobs with clout. His feature “There Will Be Fire: Colorado arrives at the dawn of megafires” brought comments from climate scientist Michael Mann and Amory Lovins, legendary co-founder of The Rocky Mountain Institute.

“After a lifetime in journalism, his writing has become more lyrical as he’s become more passionate,” says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company. “Yet he’s also completely unknown despite the quality of his work.”

Among utility insiders, and outsiders like myself, however, Best is a must-read.

His biggest donor has been Sam R. Walton’s Catena Foundation — a $29,000 grant. Typically, supporters of his nonprofit give Big Pivots $25 or $50.

Republican River in Colorado January 2023 near the Nebraska border. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Living in Denver allows him to be close to the state’s shot callers, but often, his most compelling stories come from the rural fringe. One such place is the little-known Republican River, whose headwaters emerge somewhere on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. That’s also where Best’s grandfather was born in an earthen “soddie.”

Best grew up in eastern Colorado and knows the treeless area well. He’s written half a dozen stories about the wrung-out Republican River that delivers water to neighboring Kansas. He also sees the Eastern Plains as a great story about the energy transition. With huge transmission lines under construction by the utility giant Xcel Energy, the project will feed renewable power from wind and solar to the cities of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.

Best admits he’s sometimes discouraged by his small readership — it can feel like he’s speaking to an empty auditorium, he says. He adds, though, that while “I may be a tiny player in Colorado journalism, I’m still a player.”

He’s also modest. With every trip down Colorado’s back roads to dig up stories, Best says he’s humbled by what he doesn’t know. “Just when I think I understand something, I get slapped up the side of the head.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

Subscribe to Big Pivots here.

Just for grins here’s a gallery of Allen’s photos from the Coyote Gulch archives.

Top photo, Vestas located a factory to produce wind turbines in Pueblo in 2010 and has added other renewable energy elements even as the coal-burning units have begun to retire. Photo credit: Allen Best

Gunnison County falls back into #drought: Dry conditions ideal for new wildfire starts — Gunnison Country Times #GunnisonRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the article on the Gunnison Country Times website (Abby Harrison). Here’s an excerpt:

Despite a season of abundant spring rainfall and runoff in the Gunnison Valley, the late arrival of monsoon season has set the stage for fire, robbing the basin of the moisture it relies on each year to reduce the chance of starts. After nearly a month of little-to-no precipitation, the valley started registering drought conditions in mid-July. Lack of monsoon rains and high temperatures have exacerbated and prolonged the drying pattern, bringing drought back to the county and setting the stage for multiple fire starts around the Western Slope. Although a few storms have graced the valley recently, more significant precipitation is not expected for at least a week…

These lingering high pressure systems have ushered in record-breaking temperatures for both Gunnison and Crested Butte. Cities all over the Western Slope set temperature records this year, Sanders said. Thunderstorms that follow prolonged periods of drying tend not to bring “deep moisture,” he said. Dry air at ground level prevents moisture in the atmosphere from reaching the ground, causing dry thunderstorms. Fire officials have stated that the Lowline Fire burning north of Gunnison was likely started by a lightning strike, and most fires burning around the state have also been started this way. The high pressure system finally moved out in late July, bringing some moisture. Even then, rain fell in a few isolated incidents while darker storm clouds hung along the edges of the valley and didn’t quite make it into town.

Gunnison River Basin. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

Interview: Lorelei Cloud makes history in a critical time as first tribal council member on the #Colorado #Water Conservation Board — Colorado Public Radio

Lorelei Cloud. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Public Radio website (Tom Hesse). Here’s an excerpt:

Lorelei Cloud joined the Colorado Water Conservation Board in March as the first tribal council member to serve in the position. Cloud, the vice chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, was appointed to the position by Gov. Jared Polis. She joins the board at a critical time for water not just in Colorado, but across the American West. As the representative for the San Miguel-Dolores-San Juan drainage basin, she represents land that covers not just the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations, but also 10 counties in southwestern Colorado. She spoke to Colorado Matters about including Indigenous voices in water discussions and the challenges ahead for the Colorado River…

Historically, tribes have been left out of the process of negotiating these Colorado River issues. Do you feel that’s going to be different this time around?

I’m hopeful that we are going to be included in those conversations. There has been a lot of effort going forward historically in making sure that tribes are included in those broader conversations. There currently is still no formal written document or no formal process for tribes to be included in those conversations. The Colorado River Compact was created in 1922. It wasn’t until 1924 that Native Americans became citizens of this country. And so with that and our tribal history, I think that plays a big part in why we were not part of those conversations at the very beginning. And so now, being included in those conversations is going to be critical. And, because we know that we are sovereigns — and for the federal government and the Bureau of Reclamation and the Upper Colorado River Commission to recognize tribes as sovereigns — and having those government-to-government discussions when it comes to water, I think is critical.

Last fall, we learned that Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming for the first time began formal negotiations with tribal governments over water. How is this going to affect the broader water conversation now that tribes are formally being brought into discussions that they’ve so long been left out of?

I think it’s going to have a positive impact. You know, when we talk about these state officials finally having conversations with tribes, again, it’s been historical. We’ve been meeting with the Upper Colorado River Commission. They’re the commissioners from each one of those states and the six tribes in the upper basin. We’ve had some really good conversations, but we’ve had to get through a lot of tough conversations to get to that point. And I think that since these state officials were still willing to take that on, we’re going to make a really big impact for the Colorado River Basin, not just for the upper basin because it shows that there are four states that are willing and able to work with tribes in their respective areas.

And I’m hoping that creates leeway for other tribes, other states, particularly in the lower basin, to find ways to work together and have positive outcomes. Again, I think it’s going to be a positive outcome when you stand together as a group, as a collective, even though you may not see eye to eye or agree with decisions or the understanding of where somebody is coming from. If you can put that aside and create the trust that’s very much needed, we can do just about anything. And I think we all have the same mind frame of protecting the river and making sure that all of the water users have the water that they need.

After decades of gravel mining, stretch of #AnimasRiver eyed for restoration — The #Durango Telegraph

Animas River just north of downtown Durango. By Ahodges7 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26602754

Click the link to read the article on The Durango Telegraph website (Jonathan Romeo). Here’s an excerpt:

…among the most significant issues, is the impact of historic gravel mining on the 6-mile stretch from Bakers Bridge to Trimble Lane, north of Durango. Over the years, gravel mining has completely altered the function of the river and turned it into what looks like the surface of the moon…the damage left by gravel mining between Bakers Bridge and Trimble has gone largely unnoticed and unaddressed – in part, because that stretch, hemmed in by private property, is relatively unused for recreational purposes such as river running or fishing.

But that all might soon change. Recently, a number of stakeholders invested in the Animas River began the process of forming a stream management plan (SMP) for the waterway, which will likely address lasting impacts caused by historic gravel mining.

“It’ll be in there,” Warren Rider, coordinator of the Animas Watershed Partnership, which is leading the SMP process, said. “Too many people are justifiably concerned about how the river is behaving in that area and the consequences of it. It was eye-opening when I first saw what the impacts have been.”

San Juan River Basin. Graphic credit Wikipedia.

R.I.P. John Fielder

Here’s the release from Governor Polis’ office:

“I am saddened by the loss of John Fielder, who captured Colorado’s iconic beauty during his 50 years as a nature photographer. His unique talent and work allowed him to showcase our state to millions across the world and he will be dearly missed,” said Governor Polis. “My condolences to his family and friends. I hope that we can all follow his example to appreciate and preserve our outdoor lands.”

“I last saw John two weeks ago at the opening of the ‘REVEALED: John Fielder’s Favorite Place’ exhibition at History Colorado. On behalf of the state, I thanked him for donating his life works to History Colorado.”

More of Fielder’s photos that have made into the Coyote Gulch archives from one direction or another.

Browns Canyon — John Fielder photo via BrownsCanyon.org

The West — and the Alfalfa Wars — heat up: #Drought returns after a little vacation — @Land_Desk #ColoradoRiver #COriver #Aridification

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

This week two reports on agriculture in the Colorado River Basin popped into my inbox. It was quite interesting to read them back to back, given the similar topic and the wildly diverging slants:

The Family Farm Alliance The Importance of Irrigated Agriculture in the Colorado River Basin & The Western United States.

And Food and Water Watch released Big Ag is Draining the Colorado River Dry.

That these two papers dropped at almost the same time is mere coincidence, I’m sure, but it still gave the effect of a brutal water-policy cage fight in which the alfalfaphiles go up against the alfalfaphobes and innocent folks like yours truly get caught in the crossfire. Which is not to say the reports are brutish in the way that, say Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk — those other wannabe cage fighters — are. Anything but. Both papers are informative, make good points, and are well worth a read.

I’m not going to rehash all of their arguments here. I’ve covered both sides of the alfalfa debate pretty thoroughly in the past (links below). What’s interesting to me is how much attention the alfalfa/water use issue is getting these days after long wallowing in relative obscurity. One of the Land Desk’s first Data Dumps was on alfalfa and water use and a lot of the responses to it were along the lines of: Finally, someone’s talking about alfalfa! That was just two and a half years ago. Now, everyone’s talking about alfalfa.

And a lot of that talk irks the Family Farm Alliance’s Dan Keppen, a noted alfalfaphile. His report claims that urban interests and junior water rights holders — with support from journalists — “have mounted a sustained campaign against agricultural water use in the basin, often pointing to alfalfa as one crop that uses too much water … .” He even calls me out by name!

I’m flattered. Really. But to be fair, I wasn’t being sensational. I was simply doing the math. Fact is, alfalfa and other forage crops use a lot of the Colorado River’s water, and the only way to cut 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of consumption is to stop irrigating a lot of that alfalfa.

Keppen goes on to suggest that the purpose of this “demonization” of Western agriculture is to take water from farmers and use it to fuel urban growth. That has certainly happened in the past, usually in the form of buy and dry. But the Colorado River situation is a bit more dire: There simply isn’t enough water to irrigate all of the existing crops and serve all of the existing people. It’s just not there — the water, I mean.

As the title implies, the Food and Water Watch report targets factory farms and industrial-scale agriculture, not small farms, even ones that grow only alfalfa. Long-time Land Desk readers will be familiar with most of the numbers and information in the report: alfalfa is thirsty; agriculture — specifically forage crops that feed dairy and beef cows — is the biggest user of Colorado River water; some of that alfalfa — along with Colorado River water — is being shipped overseas; the Colorado River Compact is riddled with flaws, the most egregious being its exclusion of the tribal nations that should rightfully control all of the river’s water; and so on.

But the report isn’t merely an indictment of the current system. It also suggests reforms, including:

ban new factory farms and limit expansions of existing facilities;

stop using federal funds to prop up factory alfalfa farms;

restrict alfalfa exports;

help small- and medium-scale farmers shift to more geographically appropriate crops;

define water as a public trust resource, not a commodity.

For a bit more reading:

Alfalfaphobia? In which I play the role of Colorado River Tsar–and defend the vilified crop — @Land_Desk

The Growth Machine Churns On: At the expense of us ‘all

Aridification Watch

“Another record-breaking drought,” wrote Dan Keppen in the report referenced above, “is now in the rearview mirror for many parts of the Western U.S.” Perhaps. But to carry the metaphor into the present: That drought has rushed right back up the highway and is once again riding our bumper like a jerk-ass motorist from (fill in the state/region of your choice).

How can that be, you might ask, given our wet and wild winter and spring? The answer: July. It was hot. It was dry. Oh, July. Basically, the entire West — save for Wyoming and a little portion of the Colorado plains — was warmer than average (with record-breaking heat in the Southwest) and drier than average.

The dastardly climatic duo sapped the streams and the soil of a lot of the winter and spring moisture. And now the drought is creeping back into the region.

August 2023 #ElNiño update: back to school — NOAA #ENSO

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Emily Becker):

PUBLISHED AUGUST 10, 2023

It’s that time again! And by “that time,” I mean the El Niño forecast update, of course. The chance that El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (aka “ENSO”) climate pattern—will continue through the winter is greater than 95%, so let’s sharpen our pencils and get into the details of what that means for upcoming seasons.

Mathematics

Greater than 95% is a very strong chance! Forecasters’ confidence that El Niño will continue is based on a few factors. First, the east-central tropical Pacific is quite warm. Specifically, our primary El Niño-monitoring metric, the Niño-3.4 Index—the average sea surface temperature in the Niño-3.4 region in the east-central tropical Pacific—was 1.0 °Celsius (about 2 °Fahrenheit) warmer than the long-term average in July, according to our most reliable dataset, ERSSTv5. (Long-term = 1991–2020.)

2-year history of sea surface temperatures in the Niño-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific for all events evolving into El Niño since 1950 (gray lines) and the current event (purple line). NOAA Climate.gov image based on a graph by Emily Becker and monthly Niño-3.4 index data from CPC using ERSSTv5.

The three-month-average Niño-3.4 Index, the Oceanic Niño Index, was 0.8 °C above the long-term mean for the May–July average, the second three-month-period in a row above the El Niño threshold of 0.5 °C. We need to see five consecutive three-month averages above this threshold before these periods will be considered a historical “El Niño episode” and colored red in our ENSO record). Two is a good start, especially with the 0.8 °C recording from May–July. If this El Niño were to collapse after hitting this high, dropping back below the threshold of this magnitude before next winter, it would be the first time in our historical record, dating back to 1950.

Social studies

El Niño is a coupled phenomenon, meaning the changes we see in the ocean surface temperature must be matched by changes in the atmospheric patterns above the tropical Pacific. The average atmospheric circulation over the tropical Pacific, the Walker circulation, is like a conveyor belt: rising air over the very warm far western Pacific, west-to-east winds high up in the atmosphere, descending air and dry conditions over the east-central Pacific, and returning east-to-west winds near the surface—the trade winds.

Generalized Walker Circulation (December-February) during ENSO-neutral conditions. Convection associated with rising branches of the Walker Circulation is found over the Maritime continent, northern South America, and eastern Africa. NOAA Climate.gov drawing by Fiona Martin.

During El Niño, the warmer east-central tropical Pacific Ocean surface leads to lower surface air pressure and more rising air, clouds, and rain over that region, weakening the overall circulation. The trade winds slow, and drier conditions and higher-than-average air pressure are observed over the western Pacific and Indonesia. The ocean-atmosphere coupling is both how El Niño perpetuates itself, as the atmospheric changes feed back into the oceanic changes, and how El Niño affects global weather and climate.

Generalized Walker Circulation (December-February) anomaly during El Niño events, overlaid on map of average sea surface temperature anomalies. Anomalous ocean warming in the central and eastern Pacific (orange) help to shift a rising branch of the Walker Circulation to east of 180°, while sinking branches shift to over the Maritime continent and northern South America. NOAA Climate.gov drawing by Fiona Martin.

In July, we observed more rain and clouds over the central Pacific, with somewhat drier conditions in Indonesia, and some reduced trade wind activity in the western Pacific. The Equatorial Southern Oscillation Index, which measures the relationship between surface air pressure across the Pacific, was -0.9 in July, indicating weaker pressure in the eastern Pacific and higher in the western. Taken together, these are all signs of the atmospheric component of El Niño, providing more confidence that the system is engaged and that these conditions will last through the winter.

Computer science

Our global climate models are predicting that the warmer-than-average Pacific ocean conditions will not only last through the winter, but continue to increase. There is a good chance—approximately 2 in 3—that the peak Oceanic Niño Index this winter will match or exceed 1.5 °C, our informal threshold for a “strong” El Niño event. This is more confident than last month, in large part because the peak of this El Niño is one month closer, and, as I mentioned above, the surface is already 1.0 °C warmer than average.

Animation of maps of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean compared to the long-term average over five-day periods from the end of May to early August 2023. The waters in the key monitoring region, which scientists call “the Niño-3.4 region,” progressively become warmer than average (red) as El Niño builds. NOAA Climate.gov, based on Coral Reef Watch maps available from NOAA View.

The sea surface temperature changes associated with El Niño events usually peak in November–January or thereabouts. Why? We still don’t know exactly why ENSO’s seasonal cycle is timed the way it is, with most events peaking in the winter and decaying through the spring. There is still a lot to learn!

Geography

El Niño’s most extensive impacts on global climate also occur during the winter and early spring. (I’m using Northern Hemisphere seasonal terms here.) Typical impacts include more rain and storms across the southern tier of the United States, southeastern South America, around the horn of Africa, and eastern Asia. Drier conditions are often found in December–February during El Niño through the Maritime continent/Indonesia, southeastern Africa, and northeastern South America. El Niño affects summer (June–August) climate, too, including drier conditions through the Caribbean, Indonesia, India, northern South America, parts of Central America, and eastern Australia.

These maps show winter and summer global ENSO impacts.

El Niño is also known to interact with the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons, with El Niño years tending to be less active in the Atlantic. In the hurricane season outlook released in May, NOAA scientists expected the potential suppressing effect of El Niño may be offset by the much warmer than average Atlantic Ocean surface, as warm water provides fuel for hurricanes. NOAA’s update to the outlook will be released later today, so be sure to keep an eye out for that!

Experimental psychology

Speaking of the warm Atlantic, you’ve probably heard about the recent unusually high global average temperatures. Some of the world’s oceans are extremely warm (North Atlantic, Southern Ocean, and so on), and there have been long-lasting heat waves across many land regions. El Niño is linked to higher global averages, although this El Niño is just getting going and can’t be blamed for all the heat events that have occurred already this year. (In fact, over North America, impacts tend to be very weak during the summer). There’s a good chance, though, that it will contribute to (at the very least) a top-3 average temperature for 2023. In a guest post in June, Karin Gleason discussed how NOAA predicts the global average temperature.

But what are the computer climate models predicting? Michael Tippett of Columbia University, noted friend-of-the-blog, took a look at some of the predictions from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble. These graphs are a lot, so bear with me!

Global average temperature forecasts from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble, from an original by Michael Tippett of Columbia University. Each panel shows the forecast from one model, relative to the “pre-industrial” period—that is, the increase in global average temperature since 1850. The black line shows the observed global temperature, from the Hadley Center’s HADCRUT5 temperature record. The gray lines are forecasts starting in April, May, June, July, and August from previous years, starting in 2013. The most recent forecasts, from April, May, June, July, and August of 2023, are on the right-hand end, in colors. For most models, the forecasts extend out 12 months—for example, the forecast made in June 2014 goes out to May 2015. These forecasts have the same structure as our Niño-3.4 forecasts, but instead of predicting the average sea surface temperature in the Niño-3.4 region, they’re predicting the average temperature over the entire globe. For help visualizing the separate forecasts, take a look at this animation showing Niño-3.4 forecasts from 2015–16. Figure by climate.gov based on data from Michael Tippett, obtained from the IRI Data Library.

Each panel shows the global average temperature forecast from one model, relative to the “pre-industrial” period—that is, the increase in global average temperature since 1850. To see how the predictions vary from month-to-month, Mike has included forecasts made in April, May, June, July, and August of each year, starting in 2013. The most recent forecasts, from April, May, June, July, and August of 2023, are on the right-hand end, in colors.

The gray lines are forecasts from previous years. For most models, the forecasts extend out 12 months—for example, the forecast made in June 2014 goes out to May 2015. The black line shows the observed global temperature, from the Hadley Center’s HADCRUT5 temperature record. These forecasts have the same structure as our Niño-3.4 forecasts, but instead of predicting the average sea surface temperature in the Niño-3.4 region, they’re predicting the average temperature over the entire globe. (For help visualizing what I mean, take a look at this animation showing Niño-3.4 forecasts from 2015–16.)

The different models and the different monthly forecasts show that there is some variation in the predictions overall. Most models suggest that the global average temperature will substantially exceed that of early 2016, our last strong El Niño event, but not all of them. Month-to-month, the predicted average can shift around. You can also see that the 2016 record was pretty well predicted by the models. There are a lot of things to note in these graphs, but I’m running out of space here, so I leave you to your studies. What do you observe? Let us know in the comments!

Glenwood Springs pleased with outcome

What’s next?

USFS suit undecided

Wildcat workaround

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This Week’s Drought Summary

Looking Ahead

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FOREST TO FAUCETS (AND HEADGATES)

COLLABORATIONS AT THE WATERSHED SCALE

COLLABORATIONS AT THE REGIONAL WATER MANAGEMENT SCALE

SOCIAL CAPITAL

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This Week’s Drought Summary

Looking Ahead

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NEVADA’S COLORADO RIVER WATER USE IS ON TRACK TO BE THE LOWEST IT’S BEEN SINCE 1992

ARIZONA’S COLORADO RIVER WATER USE IS ON TRACK TO BE THE LOWEST IT’S BEEN SINCE 1992

CALIFORNIA’S COLORADO RIVER WATER USE IS ON TRACK TO BE THE LOWEST IT’S BEEN SINCE 2019

THE OBSTACLES

A CLARIFYING NOTE ON THE PICTURE

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Legal pathway

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