Aerial image of entrenched meanders of the San Juan River within Goosenecks State Park. Located in San Juan County, southeastern Utah (U.S.). Credits Constructed from county topographic map DRG mosaic for San Juan County from USDA/NRCS – National Cartography & Geospatial Center using Global Mapper 12.0 and Adobe Illustrator. Latitude 33ยฐ 31′ 49.52″ N., Longitude 111ยฐ 37′ 48.02″ W. USDA/FSA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):
July 15, 2024
Due to falling flows in the critical habitat reach, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 600 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 700 cfs for Wednesday, July 17th, 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.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Lauren Penington). Here’s an excerpt:
Rocky Mountain Lake โ located at 3301 West 46th Avenue in Denver โ closed Thursday after recent testing found toxic levels of algae around the shoreline, theย Denver Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statementย on social media…Recent routine testing at Lake Arbor in Arvada also revealed blue-green algae was approaching toxic levels, forcing the city to close the lake indefinitely Thursday,ย Arvada officials said in a news release…
Theย number of algae blooms will increase as Coloradoโs climate becomes warmer, according to previous reporting. The blue-green algae found in the lakes are naturally occurring and an important part of the ecosystem, but the blooms can produce toxins if they grow big enough. Harmful algae looks like thick pea soup or spilled paint with a green, red, gold or turquoise color. They also often have foam or scum.
Toxic-algae blooms appeared in Steamboat Lake summer of 2020. The lake shut down for two weeks after harmful levels of a toxin produced by the blue-green algae were found in the water. As climate change continues, toxic blooms and summer shutdowns of lakes are predicted to become more common. Photo credit: Julie Arington/Aspen Journalism
Precipitation conditions ranged from much-below to much-above normal for the region in June. The Four Corners region experienced 400-800% of normal June precipitation while other areas of the region experienced record-dry conditions. Temperatures were above to much-above normal throughout the region in June. Snowpack completely melted out in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming by June 23. Most regional streamflow gauges recorded normal to above normal flows. Drought conditions improved in Colorado but worsened in Wyoming. The NOAA seasonal outlook for July-September suggests an increased probability of below normal precipitation and above normal temperatures for the entire region.
The region experienced mixed conditions in June. 200-400% of average precipitation fell throughout southwestern Colorado and much of southeastern Utah, with 400-800% of normal precipitation in the Four Corners region and south-central Colorado. Large portions of the region experienced much-below average precipitation, with less than 2% of average precipitation west of the Great Salt Lake, in southwestern Utah, and in a small pocket in southwestern Wyoming. Record-dry conditions occurred in northern and eastern Wyoming, southwestern Utah, and east of Denver. Boulder experienced its driest June in exactly 100 years.
The majority of the region experienced above to much-above normal temperatures. Temperatures of 6-8ยฐF above normal occurred in many pockets throughout the region including eastern Colorado, southern Wyoming, and particularly in northern and southwestern Utah. Temperatures of 8-10ยฐF above normal occurred in northwestern and southeastern Wyoming. Record-warm temperatures occurred throughout the region, particularly in southern Utah.
Regional streamflow conditions were near average, with above average streamflow at many sites in northern Colorado and northern Utah. Much-above average streamflow occurred at one site near Logan, Utah and at many sites in northern Colorado along the Front Range and in the Central Mountains, from Larimer County down to Chaffee County.
Regional drought conditions worsened during June and now cover 9% of the region, compared to 8% at the end of May. Moderate (D1) drought expanded in eastern Wyoming and emerged in northern Colorado including the Denver Metro area, with severe (D2) drought emerging in Laramie County in southeastern Wyoming. D2 drought was removed from Prowers and Baca Counties in southeastern Colorado.
West Drought Monitor map July 9, 2024.
ENSO-neutral conditions continue in the Pacific Ocean. However, as ocean temperatures continue to cool, there is a 50% probability of La Niรฑa conditions existing during September-November. The NOAA monthly outlook suggests an increased probability of below normal precipitation for northern Utah, eastern Colorado, and all of Wyoming, and an increased probability of above normal temperatures for the entire region, with a 70-80% chance of above normal temperatures for western and central Colorado, southwestern Wyoming, and all of Utah. The NOAA seasonal outlook for July-September suggests an increased probability of below normal precipitation, with a 50-60% chance of below normal precipitation in the Four Corners region, and it suggests an increased probability of above normal temperatures, with a 70-80% chance of above normal temperatures in the Four Corners region and the majority of eastern Utah.
Significant weather event:ย Flash flooding in Moab. On June 21, 2024, Moab experienced severe flash flooding due to a violent storm that drenched the region in over an inch of rain in just 15 minutes. Major roads, including Highway 191 and city streets such as 500 West, were temporarily closed due to flooding and downed power lines. Water overflowed banks and bridges and people were evacuated by authorities at places in town as a precaution to the flash flooding. In a conversation with the Moab Sun, Grand County Emergency Management Director, Cora Phillips, said she was encouraged by improvements in flood alarm systems from the historic flooding in August 2022, but that more work needs to be done. According to Moab City Manager, David Everitt, this flash flood could leave years of repair work, as he says the city is still doing repairs from the aforementioned floods in 2022.
Milky Way Arches National Park October 2013 via the National Park Service
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
July 12, 2024
Highlights:
Temperatures were above average over much of the globe with Africa, Asia and South America having their warmest June on record.ย
Sea surface temperatures were record warm for the 15th consecutive month.
Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent and global sea ice extent were both below average.
ย Global tropical cyclone activity was below average, with only two named storms.ย
Temperature
Surface Temperature Departure from the 1991โ2020 Average for June 2024 (ยฐC). Red indicates warmer than average and blue indicates colder than average. Credit: NOAA
The June global surface temperature was 2.20ยฐF (1.22ยฐC) above the 20th-century average of 59.9ยฐF (15.5ยฐC), making it the warmest June on record and the 13th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures. According to NCEIโs Global Annual Temperature Outlook, there is almost a 60% chance that 2024 will rank as the warmest year on record and a 100% chance that it will rank in the top five.
June temperatures were above average across most of the global land surface except for western Canada, most of Greenland, southern South America, northwestern Russia, eastern Asia, eastern Australia and much of eastern Antarctica. Africa, Asia and South America each had their warmest June on record while Europe had its second warmest. Sea surface temperatures were above average over most areas, while parts of the tropical eastern Pacific and southeastern Pacific were below average. The global oceans have been record warm since April 2023.
Temperatures in the mid-troposphere (approximately 2โ6 miles above the Earthโs surface) were record warm in June, according to satellite data from NESDIS. Each of the past 12 months set global records for the mid-troposphere.
The year-to-date (JanuaryโJune) global surface temperature was 2.32ยฐF (1.29ยฐC) above the 20th-century average, making it the warmest such period on record. South America, Europe and Africa each had their warmest year-to-date period, whereas North America was second warmest.
Snow Cover
Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent in June was the 12th smallest on record. Both Eurasia and North America were below average (by 310,000 and 290,000 square miles, respectively). In general, snow cover was below average over most areas except for parts of western Siberia and small parts of China, Pakistan and far-western Canada, which were above-average.
Sea Ice
Global sea ice extent was the second smallest in the 46-year record at 8.75 million square miles, which was 810,000 square miles below the 1991โ2020 average. Arctic sea ice extent was below average (by 150,000 square miles), and Antarctic sea ice extent was also below average (by 660,000 square miles), ranking second lowest on record.
Tropical Cyclones
Two named storms occurred across the globe in June, which was below the 1991โ2020 average. Both storms formed in the Atlantic Basin. The first was Tropical Storm Alberto, which made landfall in northern Mexico. The second was Hurricane Beryl, which ultimately became a Category 5 storm that caused extensive and severe damage across the Windward Islands. Beryl was the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record.
In his book โRifle In Hand: How Wild America Was Saved,โ renowned hunter-conservationist Jim Posewitz wrote, โIn 1776 freedom and equality were radical thoughts. It took a Declaration of Independence, a Revolutionary War, a United States Constitution, and a Bill of Rights to validate these ideas and launch the American aspirations.โ
However, a recent Supreme Court decision granting U.S. presidents immunity for any โofficial actsโ has upended these aspirations. For an example of what may follow see the June 2024 op-ed in the Washington Examiner, โSolve the housing crisis by selling government land,โ written by William Perry Pendley.
Pendley led the Bureau of Land Management for former President Donald Trump.
Pendley is an anti-public lands zealot and a dire threat to our great public lands hunting and angling heritage. To prove the point, in a July 2020 Vail Daily op-ed I wrote: โIn July 2019, Interior Secretary Bernhardt signed an order naming Pendley โ a lawyer with a long history of opposition to public lands โ acting director of the Bureau of Land Management.โ
I added, โDuring his three-plus years in the White House, Donald Trump has orchestrated the largest reduction of protected public lands in U.S. history, according to a study published in Science, an academic journal โฆ The Trump administration has worked to weaken safeguards for nearly 35 million acres โ nearly 1,000 times more than the administration has protected.โ
โIn addition, the Trump administration has attempted to roll back nearly 100 environmental rules,โ I explained. โAmericaโs greatest hunter-conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, encountered extremists like Donald Trump and William Perry Pendley during his day too. โThis country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country,โ Roosevelt said.โ
Unfortunately, since the Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot be prosecuted for anything a presidentโs lawyer might spin as an โofficial act,โ the chances of him ever seeing the inside of a jail cell is slim to none, and you can bet he will double down on his efforts to dispose of our public lands should he regain the presidency.
If anyone has any doubts that American law is now just politics (i.e., the Supreme Court is captured), consider that nowhere in the Constitution is it ever suggested that the holder of the highest office may have free rein to break the law.
In fact, it explicitly states that public officials may be subject to โindictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.โ This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America, but Trumpโs Supreme Court has paved the way for him to be one, if we let him.
A June 2024 Accountable.US press release documents Pendleyโs plans to dispose of our public lands estate: โControversial former Trump administration official and author of Project 2025โs section on the Department of the Interior William Perry Pendley is calling for a massive sell-off of lands owned by all American taxpayers.โ
In โBeyond Fair Chase,โ Jim Posewitz wrote: โThe natural world sustains us with clean air, unpolluted water, recreation, and natural resources. If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.โ If youโre a hunter, angler, hiker, climber, mountain biker or anyone who recreates on or values our great public lands estate, beware.
Pendley and Project 2025 are coming for our public lands, and democracy, if โWe The Peopleโ let them. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, โWith fear for our democracy, I dissent.โ
Save The Poudre is suing the city of Thornton and the Larimer County commissioners. The lawsuit, filed in Larimer County District Court, specifically names Commissioners John Kefalas, Jody Shadduck-McNally and Kristin Stephens. It asks the court to find that the board exceeded its jurisdiction and/or abused its discretion in granting permission for a 10-mile water pipeline that would convey Poudre River water to Thornton…
The lawsuit said Save The Poudre was denied due process rights because it and members of the public weren’t allowed to combine public comments into an extended group presentation exceeding three minutes, while the commissioners placed no time limits on Thorntonโs presentations, “which lasted hours and allowed for group presentations.” It said the board erred in not requiring Thornton to present an alternative that would use the Poudre River itself to convey the water and not requiring presentations outlining alternative water diversion locations.
The lawsuit also cited several sections of the county’s land use code that it believes Thornton’s application did not meet. Save The Poudre alleges the project:
does not have “benefits, in terms of physical improvements, enhanced services, or environmental impacts, of the proposed projectโ that โoutweigh the losses of any natural resources or reduction of productivity of agricultural lands.”
does not, โto the greatest extent possible,” mitigate impacts to the environment and natural resources.
will โexacerbate or worsen climate change.”
does not โmitigate impacts on rivers, streams and wetlands to the greatest extent possible.”
โwill have a significant impact on natural resources of statewide importance.โ
does not significantly mitigate and will have significantly adverse impacts on water quality and quantity in the Poudre River.
does not โimplement the vision and policies of the Larimer County Comprehensive Plan.โ
does not โregulate development in a manner consistent with legitimate environmental concerns.”
does not โreflect principles of resource stewardship and conservation.”
The lawsuit also states the board exceeded its jurisdiction and/or abused its discretion by not requiring “complete co-location of the Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP) pipeline, a separate project also set to run through Larimer County. And it says the board was wrong in its finding that water diversion and water right are beyond the scope of the 1041 review.
In 1953, the Anaconda Minerals Company leased nearly 8,000 acres of land in central New Mexico from the Pueblo of Laguna to mine uranium for nuclear weapons. The company gouged and blasted away at the earth, constructing the three massive holes known as the Jackpile-Paguate Mine.ย
The Jackpile-Paguate became the worldโs largest open-pit uranium mine, producing some 24 million tons of ore. It employed hundreds of Laguna Pueblo members and transformed the communityโs economy. But mining companies and regulators gave little thought to the safety of miners and nearby residents. Miners were exposed to radioactive and toxic heavy metals daily, even spending their lunch breaks sitting on piles of radioactive ore. Blasting sent tremors through the puebloโs adobe homes, and a cloud of poisonous dust drifted into the village of Paguate, just 2,000 feet from the mine, coating fruit trees, gardens, corn and meat that was set out to dry.
In 1982, uranium prices plummeted, and Atlantic Richfield, Anacondaโs successor, shut up shop, conducted a cursory reclamation and walked away.
Aerial view of Laguna Pueblo, Rio San Jose, and Interstate 40 in New Mexico. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
But the pollution didnโt end when the Jackpile closed. A toxic plume continued to spread through groundwater aquifers, and the Rio Paguate, a Rio Grande tributary, remains contaminated more than a decade after the facility became a Superfund site, despite millions of dollars in cleanup work. And Laguna residents and former mine workers still suffer lingering health problems โ cancer, respiratory illnesses and kidney disease โ from the mine and its pollution.
There are at least 250,000 abandoned mining โfeatures,โ including at least 4,000 involving uranium, scattered across the Western U.S. โ mines, waste piles, prospect holes and other infrastructure. Some are harmless and invisible to the untrained eye. Others continue to threaten the environment, people and wildlife, even after millions of dollars have been spent attempting to clean them up. Mining is hard โ but healing the earth and the health of the communities affected by it is immeasurably harder.ย [ed. emphasis mine]
Data visualization by Jennifer Di-Majo/High Country News
Data visualization by Jennifer Di-Majo/High Country News
Data visualization by Jennifer Di-Majo/High Country News
โถ The Iron Mountain Mine operated from the 1870s until it was abandoned in the 1960s. It was listed as a Superfund site in the 1980s and cleanup continues, including round-the-clock treatment of draining, heavily contaminated water so acidic it can devour a metal shovel blade in less than 24 hours.
โท Cold War-era uranium mining companies left behind more than 100 waste piles contaminated with radium and heavy metals in and around the Navajo Nation community of Cove. This March, some 50 years after mining ended, it was designated as the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District Superfund site.
โธ The Formosa Mine โ shuttered and abandoned in the early 1990s โ discharges millions of gallons of acid mine drainage into the Umpqua River each year. It was designated a Superfund site in 2007, and cleanup efforts received additional Infrastructure Act funding in 2021.
โน Mining ended and groundwater pumps shut down at theย Berkeley Pitย in the early 1980s, allowing the massive hole to fill with acidic, heavy metal-laden water. More than 3,000 snow geese died in 2016 after landing on the Berkeley โlake,โ which is part of the Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund site.
โบ The Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site โ nearly 50 abandoned mines and related features โ was designated following the 2015 Gold King Mine blowout, when some 3 million gallons of acid mine drainage spewed into the Animas River drainage.
โป Mining occurred at the Questa Molybdenum Mine from 1920 until 2014, contaminating soil, surface- and groundwater. A water treatment plant operates in perpetuity to keep contaminants from streams at a cost of more than $5 million annually.
โผ Thousands of uranium mines were abandoned after the Cold War in the Lisbon Valley, White Canyon, and Uravan Mineral Belt in Utah and Colorado. (The USGS labels many of this areaโs uranium sites as โunknown.โ)
Data visualization by Jennifer Di-Majo/High Country News
Hardrock mining introduces oxygen and water to sulfide-bearing rocks, and the resulting reaction forms sulfuric acid. The now-acidic water dissolves and picks up naturally occurring metals such as zinc, cadmium, lead, arsenic, mercury and even uranium, ultimately depositing these harmful minerals in streams or lakes long after mining ceases. Acid mine drainage is miningโs most insidious, pervasive and persistent environmental hazard.
Data visualization by Jennifer Di-Majo/High Country News
SOURCES: U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Research Service, University of New Mexico Native American Budget & Policy Institute, Mining and Environmental Health Disparities in Native American Communities, by Johnnye Lewis et al.
A double rainbow arches over the Painted Wall in Black Canyon at Gunnison National Park.
Photo Credit: Dave Showalter
From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):
Releases from the Aspinall Unit will be increased from 1900 cfs to 2200 cfs by Friday, July 12th. Releases are being increased in response to declining river flows on the lower Gunnison River.
Flows in the lower Gunnison River are currently below the baseflow target of 1500 cfs. River flows are expected to remain low into next week.
Pursuant to the Aspinall Unit Operations Record of Decision (ROD), the baseflow target in the lower Gunnison River, as measured at the Whitewater gage, is 1500 cfs for July and then drops to 1050 cfs in August.
Currently, Gunnison Tunnel diversions are 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon are around 950 cfs. After this release change Gunnison Tunnel diversions will still be 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon will be nearing 1200 cfs. Current flow information is obtained from provisional data that may undergo revision subsequent to review.
Craig station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 9, 2024
Colorado legislators said coal communities should be helped in the energy transition. This agreement with Craig and Moffat County provides a picture of what that looks like in practice.
No other place in Colorado may be so dependent upon one company, one industry, as Craig and Moffat County.
Snow matters greatly to Aspen and Vail and the other ski towns who are linked at the hip, sometimes uncomfortably, with the big ski companies who sell the thrill of sliding downhill. But summer tourism, less dependent on uphill conveyance, has been coming on for decades. In Crested Butte, summer surpassed winter in the 1990s. Second-home development itself is a major economic sector, skiing just one of the amenities. Sales tax figures between a good snow year and a bad year vary relatively little.
In Craig, the mining and burning of coal has delivered the community a paycheck for nearly a half-century. The coal plant and the two primary coal mines that deliver fuel to the plant generate 43% of the total property taxes paid to Moffat County and various school, fire, and other districts this year. The 437 jobs in this smaller community that are being lost are, according to one analysis, the equivalent of 141,000 jobs in metropolitan Denver-Aurora.
Now, with the last coal-burning units to close down by 2028, a settlement agreement has been reached that some call a landmark. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, the operator and primary owner of the three coal-burning units at Craig Generation Station and Colowyo, one of the two coal mines that supply it, has agreed to pay the local community up to $73 million in payments beginning in 2026.
In addition, Tri-State has also agreed to give Moffat County augmentation water rights with a value estimated by Moffat County at $2 million to $3 million.
This agreement has been submitted to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission which can amend it, even reject it. If the past is precedent, the PUC commissioners are likely to approve it with little change.
Local officials involved in the negotiating say that it wonโt make their community economically whole, but it will help them as they try to figure out how to rebuild their economy. One hope is that a revitalized rail service authorized by state legislators this year from Denver to Craig may interest manufacturers or create a stronger, safer connection to the Steamboat resort economy. Others have suggested that expanding tourism amenities can soften the departure of coal; others stoutly reject the idea of becoming โsheet changers.โ
The Tri-State settlement agreement also applies to the broader electric resource plan being reviewed by the PUC. It has several major provisions:
Addition of 940 megawatts of renewable generation and 310 megawatts of battery storage to its generating capacity in its territory.
Retirement of Craig Unit 3, previously scheduled for 2030, by Jan. 1, 2028.
Solicitation of 290 megawatts of dispatchable combined-cycle gas plant, with first preference in Moffat County but somewhere in western Colorado or southwestern Wyoming if the bids for a Craig-area plant arenโt competitive.
Retirement of a coal-burning unit in eastern Arizona called Springerville 3 that was commissioned in 2006. That unit is to be closed by September 15, 2031, leaving Tri-State with ownership in just one coal-burning unit at the Laramie River Station in Wyoming.
Tri-State expects to achieve an 89% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels.
Important in Tri-Stateโs pivot from coal in Colorado and Arizona is whether Tri-State gets federal aid. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 carved out $9.7 billion to assist electrical providers in rural America with stranded assets. Individual G&Ts can apply for up to 10% of the total amount in the New ERA program. That means that Tri-State may have applied for up to $970 million. Tri-State has not disclosed publicly how much it has applied for. The agreement, however, is not dependent upon whether Tri-State gets federal money. It will be needed, though, given the existing debt on the coal infrastructure.
Matt Gearhart, an attorney representing the Sierra Club in the proceeding, noted the importance of the New ERA funding in allowing utilities to think about retiring even relatively new coal-fired plants. Springerville came on line in 2006.
He also noted that the major natural gas plant in Craig is not a given. Whether that makes sense beyond providing local tax base and jobs is a discussion for a later day…
The settlement agreement can be found in the PUC files; itโs proceeding number 23A-0585E.
The three units of Craig Station were constructed from 1974 to 1984. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Coal is abundant in northwest Colorado. Thatโs why Public Service Co., now a subsidiary of Xcel Energy, in the 1960s built a coal plant near Hayden, 15 miles to the east of Craig and far distant from most of the utilityโs consumers in metro Denver and elsewhere in the state.
Construction of the coal-burning units at Craig were started in 1974, a time when demand for electricity was soaring and utilities had learned how to build ever-bigger coal plants. Coal-plant construction was also induced by the expectation that oil shale in the nearby Piceance Basin would drive demand for greater amounts of electricity. That demand did not materialize, and in the late 1980s the utility, Colorado Ute, was forced into bankruptcy. Tri-State and other utilities picked up the pieces.
Tri-State owns the third unit outright but is a minority owner in the first two units. Other owners are Arizona-based Salt River Project (29%), the Oregon-based PacifiCorp (19.28%), Fort Collins-based Platte River Power Authority (18%), and Public Service Co., a.k.a. Xcel Energy (9.2%).
In 1979, during the construction years, I was in Craig briefly to work on local newspapers but returned rarely until 2015.
New EPA regulations governing pollutants had dampened the prospects of coal. WildEarth Guardians had launched an anti-coal campaign. Among its supporters was New Belgium, the brewery in Fort Collins.
I arrived on a September Sunday to conduct interviews. Later, out of curiosity, I wandered into a liquor store just before a Denver Broncos game. Beer was moving by the case, but none were Fat Tire or other New Belgium brews. They had become brews non grata in Craig, a place where coal was akin to religion.
In September 2015, Craig was feeling under siege as enforcement of federal regulations began drawing a smaller circle around emissions from the three coal-fired electrical generating units. Photo/Allen Best
But while locals virtuously posted signs that said โCoal: It Keeps Our Lights On,โ renewables were increasingly doing so, too, and with rapidly declining prices.
In April 2018, Tri-State brought on board a new chief executive, Duane Highley, with a clear mission to begin the pivot. In January 2020, in a ceremony at the Colorado Capitol, Highley announced that Tri-State planned to shut down the last of the coal units at Craig by 2030.
If the writing had been on the wall, there was still disbelief among many. That was evident in a March 2020 session at the high school in Craig. Anger was evident in remarks made to state representatives, but the more common thread was disbelief. What would replace the jobs, the tax base? And why was this necessary?
Among those listening that night and in a session the following day at Northwest Colorado Community College was Wade Buchanan. That week he had started as the first administrator of Coloradoโs new Office of Just Transition. The department had been created by state legislators the previous spring. At that time, he had no staff and not much budget.
While adopting sweeping legislation to accelerate Coloradoโs response to climate change, state legislators in 2019 had made it clear that coal-dependent communities were to be given a helping hand as Colorado made the necessary pivot from coal because of the climate and health impacts of burning coal.
The just transition law,ย HB19-13140,ย said this: โColorado must ensure that the clean energy economy fulfills a moral commitment to assist the workers and communities that have powered Colorado for generations, as well as the disproportionately impacted communities who have borne the costs of coal power pollution for decades, and to thereby support a just and inclusive transition.โ
What exactly that means in practice for Craig, though, was not spelled out. Other legislation more precisely laid out the expectations of Xcel Energy for its remaining coal communities. Legislators clearly thought that Xcel Energy, the stateโs largest utility, and its customers needed to help out the Pueblo and Hayden communities, where coal plants will be retired, and at Brush, where the coal plant will be converted to burn natural gas.
Tri-State, if the stateโs second largest electrical generator, has a different business model. Itโs an electrical cooperative that was formed by its member cooperatives to deliver power. It has no overt profit motive.
Coal for the Craig units comes principally from two coal mines in Moffat County. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Tri-State insisted, even days prior to the settlement agreement, that it was not required by state law to submit a community assistance plan or a workforce transition plan. It further pointed out that, unlike Xcel Energy, its member cooperatives โserve some of the most economically disadvantaged rural consumers in the West, many of whom reside outside of Colorado.โ Indeed, Tri-State has members in four states, including Arizona, Wyoming and Nebraska.
However, even in 2022, Tri-State had agreed in a prior settlement to participate in planning that would provide community assistance.
Discussions about what that would look like became more vigorously discussed in monthly meetings facilitated by the Great Plains Institute that were held in Craig beginning in June 2023.
Tri-Stateโs first proposal was for community improvement projects, such as a new swimming pool.
Craig Mayor Craig Nichols says that after considering the offer, the local leaders quickly decided that wasnโt the best option.
โOnce they closed the local plants and were gone, how would we continue to pay for those things?โ says Nichols. โSo we switched our No. 1 priority to the payments into a perpetual trust for the community.โ
Joseph Pereira, the deputy director of the Office of Utility Consumer Advocate, the state agency charged with looking after the interests of consumers in utility matters, entered key arguments.
โThis is an issue of fundamental fairness,โ said Pereira in a May filing. โIt would be fundamentally unfair to treat coal communities differently dependent upon what type of utility (investor owned or cooperative) generated energy. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive the intent of the legislature was to ensure a community like Pueblo, served by PSCo (Xcel), should be provided community assistance, but Craig is left to fend for itself.โ
Buchanan, in his filing on behalf of the Office of Just Transition, painted a dark picture.
โCraig and Moffat County face a near-existential threat by the end of this decade. When a handful of entities that generate 43% of the property taxes in a community go out of business at the same time, it signals the potential for a broad, deep, and long-lasting โ perhaps even permanent โ decline in economic activity and opportunities from which no community can quickly or easily recover.โ
Jennifer Holloway, the executive director of the Craig & Moffat County Chamber of Commerce, points to a memorial at the one-time mining coal mining camp of Mt. Harris where her grandfather lost his life in 1942. Mt. Harris lies about 25 miles east of Craig. Mining no longer occurs there. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
In his testimony, Buchanan compared Craig and Moffat County with other places in Colorado. The property tax hit is probably twice that of local jurisdictions where the Comanche and Pawnee coal plants are located in Pueblo and Morgan counties, and 2.9 times that of the coal plant at Hayden, in Routt County.
The job loss was also outsized compared to the other locations: 5.1 times the percentage loss in nearby Routt County, 16.8 times the expected percentage loss in Morgan County and 33.7 times the expected percentage loss in Pueblo County.
โThose three will also warrant sizable community and worker assistance commitments by Xcel Energy, the primary owner and operator of the coal plants,โ Buchanan said in his testimony. โBut none of the impacts in these counties will come close to those faced by Moffat County.โ
Since it created the Office of Just Transition with a skimpy budget, legislators have allocated $35 million to the office and its efforts. Buchanan estimated that more than $17 million of that money will be awarded to Yampa Valley communities, mostly in Craig and Moffat County, in grants or to assist in what are called pre-closure strategies for potentially dislocated workers and their families. Somebody with the very unusual job description of โtransition navigatorโ has been hired to help workers figure out their futures.
One grant of $40,000 went to Moffat County and Craig to develop infrastructure in the Yampa River to attract outdoor-based tourism.
Another $150,000 was given Moffat County to fund a socio-economic study to assess the impacts of a proposed pumped-storage hydro power project that could create 300 construction jobs and 30 high-paying permanent jobs โ and also generate property tax.
Still another grant of $50,000 was given to help Moffat County retain independent legal counsel. In PUC proceedings, Denver and Boulder routinely enter filings in cases they deem important to their interests. Pueblo does, too. But this was something of foreign terrain for the northwest Colorado communities.
The settlement โis a big deal,โ said Buchanan when I talked with him after the settlement agreement had been filed. He identified what he saw as several key elements.
One, he and his staff found their footing. โWe realized that from the stateโs perspective, that if we were going to do our job, we first and foremost had to be an effective partner with the affected communities. No coming and telling them what to do or how to do it or that we had the answers for the challenges they were facing,โ he said.
The message was that โwe are here to stand with you in this transition.โ
Thatโs why the money was allocated for an outside attorney, to give the local communities an opportunity to have a voice.
The Office of Just Transition plans to make the same offer for Hayden and Routt County, he said.
Part of it was the stakeholder process facilitated by the Great Plains Institute.
A second key element was that Tri-State, despite its legal protestations of exemption from requirements, decided to step up. โThe commitment they made in that settlement agreement is pretty significant.โ It will โgreatly empower the communities to have the resources to drive their own transition in the future.โ
Third is that these communities have evolved in their thinking. The transition remains a huge challenge, and for the most part, โthey donโt like the ideaโ of making this change. But they have โresolved to do what they can to take control of the transition they are a part of. Thatโs a very important thing.โ
In summary, โwe found our footing about how to do our work, Tri-State stepped up to the plate, and Craig and Moffat County found their voice in the process.โ
Buchanan recommended that the PUC require Tri-State to provide $118 million in community assistance. How should the settlement of $73 million be seen? One individual involved in the case, talking only for background, said that it reflects the normal negotiating process. You ask for high and accept something less.
Nichols, the mayor of the city of 9,000 people, praised Tri-State for doing โmore than they had to do. They had to do nothing. It really set the bar for future transitions.โ
โThis shows what the actual cost of decarbonization looks like,โ he added.
Randy Looper, now a city council member, at the Elk Run Inn that he operated in 2020. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Randy Looper, a city council member and retired hotelier, said he doesnโt expect overnight transformation but he expects Craig can achieve a more diversified economy.
Looper especially likes the structure of the aid. Moffat County and Craig are to get $22 million in direct payments from 2026 to 2029. The money is to be used at their discretion.
From 2028 to 2038, Tri-State has agreed to provide up to $48 million more. But the agreement also specifies that this can be reduced if Tri-State reinvests in Craig and Moffat County. If Tri-State builds a natural gas plant that pays $2 million in property taxes, that can be deducted from the $7 million that Tri-State would ordinarily pay the city and county.
โThey have incentive to build new things in Moffat County,โ Looper said. โItโs a win-win for Craig and Moffat County.โ
I met Looper maybe 10 years ago on a visit to Craig. He himself had left a job in banking in downtown Denver many years before, first to run a motel in Iowa until, becoming weary of the muggy summers, relocated to Craig. The older motel that they operated in Craig was wonderfully esoteric. His wife had advised wildlife themes for each room, and this went far beyond hanging photos or other art. Even toilet fixtures managed to have that unitโs theme. I stayed in the sheep, elk, and antelope roomsโ and many more โ but not the rattlesnake room. I wouldnโt have slept well.
In March 2020 I was there for the mildly stormy meeting at the high school. Two days later, Gov. Jared Polis arrived in Craig and toured a boating store. It was just Polis and the two store owners โ and me. That afternoon, he was at the Hayden Town Hall to hear testimony. Sometime that afternoon, word was sent out that Colorado had its first confirmed case of Covid-19.
That summer, instead of sinking real estate prices, Craigโs market actually gained. People were ready to leave behind the cities, whether in Colorado or Utah or wherever, for more rural living, if they could. Today, Craig hasnโt gained population, but neither has it lost any, said Looper. That has occurred even as the employment at the coal plant has dropped significantly, from about 300 to about 110.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis stopped by a store in Craig devoted to boating gear prior to a meeting about coal closures in early March 2020. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The larger question is what exactly does this agreement represent and how may it influence other cases in Colorado? Xcel even now is readying an application for a just transition electric resource plan that will speak to how it can help Pueblo, Hayden, and Morgan County as the coal plants close or, in the case of the latter, get converted to natural gas. The application is due Aug. 1.
No doubt, this settlement agreement will in some way influence the other cases in Colorado. How could it not.? (And to be fair, some of Xcelโs agreements to Pueblo influenced this settlement).
โI donโt want to speculate about how this one will inform other commitments, but Iโm pretty sure it will,โ Buchanan told me.
A still larger question is how do we see this component of just transition in the broader conversation of this energy transition?
The coal communities thought they were doing good, meaningful work โ and work that happened to pay well. Not like the high-tech jobs in Boulder or Denver, but good enough for a solid living. Craig is not a place of extremes in wealth. Itโs solidly working class, middle class. Big pickups, sure, but not enormous houses.
Inevitably, when your job is digging and burning coal, your identity gets tied up in those duties. Then, to be told that what youโre doing is somehow wrong? That would be hard to reconcile.
True, even in the 1950s and 1960s, we had very strong, very firm evidence that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere was a very risky endeavor. A book I recently read, โFire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World,โ makes that even more clear than I had previously understood. But as a society, we had not made that decision.
In the absence of other technologies, electricity generated by combustion of coal made our lives easier.
Now, at least in Colorado, and to a large degree in the United States and the world, we have concluded we must change directions. How, as the legislators put it, do we achieve a just transition, not leaving the coal communities behind?
Buchanan, in his filings and in our conversation, repeatedly emphasized the enormity of change for fossil fuel communities. โThey served our economy well, and now they are being asked to do something that is extraordinarily difficult and potentially quite painful.โ
What Colorado is trying to do is make this transition a little less painful. Pereira, at the Office of Utility Consumer Advocate, emphasized the social contract between energy communities and the broader society.
โIf you create bogeymen out of communities, youโre undercutting the ultimate goal you are trying to achieve. We are not trying to decarbonize for the sake of climate. We are trying to decarbonize for social reasons, so we have a better place to live. If you are not including the social aspect of taking care of the communities, you are undercutting your overall goals.โ
Downtown Craig has freshened up but has lost business to the chain retailers on the cityโs edge. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
This particular case was more difficult because there was no defined policy solution in regulations.
โThe Legislature defined what it wanted for investor-owned utilities. This was unique because it required purely novel arguments. So there was new advocacy by our office, these novel arguments, to come to a position that worked for them.โ
To get there required strong community advocacy, which Craig and Moffat County delivered.
The result was a very rare outcome over public policy. It was not a matter of somebody wins, somebody loses. โYou know how rare that is in policy making?โ he said.
How much of this applies to Pueblo? There, an advocacy group aligned with Xcel has made the case that Xcel should build a nuclear power plant to replace the lost jobs and revenue from Comanche Generating Station. That argument is hard to accept divorced from the reality of the current cost of nuclear technology. Weโll see where this lands.
As the mayor of Craig mentioned, there is a cost to the decarbonization. True, renewables are coming in cheaper, but there is a cost. Every utility manager recites โcost and reliabilityโ morning, noon, and night. So what do we make of the cost here? Tri-State will spread its costs among its members, as will Xcel among its customers.
Among the parties to the settlement agreement was a member cooperative based in Holyoke called Highline Electric. Dennis Herman, the general manager, did not speak to the assistance to Craig and Moffat County, but he did testify in a press release that Tri-Stateโs plans will add significant renewable resources while demonstrating how to deliver reliable power to its members, even in extreme events.
Less than 20 years ago I traveled to Holyoke for a story about why the farmers there supported another Tri-State coal plant in Kansas. There, in the land of center pivots, theyโve made a big pivot in their thinking, as has Tri-State altogether and Colorado altogether.
The first landfalling tropical storm of the season came ashore in east Texas and brought significant precipitation to the area and up into the Ozark Plateau. Temperatures were cooler than normal over a large extent of the country from the Rocky Mountains and into the Plains and Midwest where departures from normal temperatures were 3-9 degrees below normal. Excessive heat dominated the West Coast where departures from normal temperatures over much of California were 12-15 degrees above normal. Many records were set, including 120 degrees in Las Vegas, beating the old record by 3 degrees, while Death Valley had 5 consecutive days with high temperatures over 125 degrees topping out at 129 on July 7. Near-normal to slightly above-normal temperatures dominated much of the East and Southeast. Along with the heat, much of the West was dry during the last week. Areas of the Plains recorded well above-normal precipitation with some areas receiving 400-800% of normal precipitation for the week. Spotty rains were common over the Southeast with a very typical summertime pattern of widely scattered thunderstorms accounting for most of the precipitation. The driest areas were from Mississippi and northern Alabama into Tennessee and the Mid-Atlantic. Portions of northern Illinois eastward into Ohio were also dry throughout the week…
Like the Midwest, most of the region recorded precipitation during the week with pockets of heavier rains in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota and southeast Colorado. Cooler-than-normal temperatures dominated the region with almost all areas below normal for the week. The greatest departures were in Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming with temperatures 6-8 degrees below normal. With much of the region drought free, there were pockets of improvement over Nebraska, western Kansas and southeast Colorado where abnormally dry and moderate drought areas were reduced. Dryness in the Black Hills of South Dakota remained, and some expansion of severe drought took place this week. The driest areas remained in eastern Wyoming and eastern Colorado, where most places did not record much precipitation this week and moderate and severe drought conditions expanded along with more abnormally dry areas…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 9, 2024.
It was a hot and dry week over the region with only some spotty precipitation in areas of California and Idaho and more widespread precipitation over Montana, western Colorado, and New Mexico. Temperatures were above normal over most all the West with only Idaho, Utah, Montana, Colorado and northern New Mexico below normal for temperatures. Abnormally dry conditions were expanded over a large area of northern California, western Nevada, and Oregon as well as in central Idaho. A significant expansion of moderate drought was introduced over much of Oregon where the short-term dryness coupled with the recent heat has worsened conditions in the state. Additional expansions of abnormally dry conditions were over northeast and southwest Utah, eastern Washington and southwest Wyoming. Moderate drought expanded over central Washington while severe drought expanded over northern Idaho. Improvements were made this week in western Montana to the severe drought and the moderate drought in northern New Mexico. Abnormally dry conditions were removed over much of southwest Colorado and portions of northeast Arizona…
Outside of western Oklahoma and north Texas where temperatures were 4-6 degrees below normal, most of the rest of the region was 4-6 degrees above normal for the week. The greatest rains fell over Oklahoma and into portions of central and north Texas. Significant rains were associated with Beryl in east Texas into Louisiana and Arkansas. Those areas that did miss out on rains coupled with the warmer-than-normal temperatures did see drought expand and intensify, mainly over west Texas. Severe and extreme drought expanded over west Texas while all the moderate drought was improved over Arkansas with some additional abnormally dry areas removed. Even with the significant rains in western Oklahoma, only slight improvements were made to the moderate drought and abnormally dry conditions as long-term conditions remained dry in this region…
Looking Ahead
Over the next 5-7 days, some monsoonal precipitation is anticipated over portions of the Southwest, but most of the West overall remains quite dry. The dryness is anticipated to develop over much of the Plains and continuing over much of the Southeast. Coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern seaboard are anticipating the most precipitation, with the greatest amounts from South Carolina into the Mid-Atlantic. The Midwest is anticipated to remain wet with this pattern extending into the Northeast. Temperatures are anticipated to be above normal over most of the country with the greatest departures from normal over the Pacific Northwest and in the Southeast into the Mid-Atlantic. The Southwest into western and southern Texas is anticipated to be cooler than normal, albeit slightly.
The 6-10 day outlooks show that much of the country is anticipated to have above-normal temperatures during the period, with the greatest chances over the northern Rocky Mountains and the Southeast. The highest chances of above-normal precipitation will be over the Four Corners region and along the Rio Grande in Texas as well as over the coastal regions of the Carolinas. The best chances of below-normal precipitation occurring are from the northern Rocky Mountains into the Great Basin and into central California.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 9, 2024.
Rainbow and brown trout are free to move as they please through Eleven Mile Canyon once again, following the removal of an unused dam on the stretch of South Platte River near Lake George. The 1952 Colorado Springs Utilities diversion dam was removed last year as part of a $4.8 million project to unite 45 miles of river. The river and its surrounding ecosystems have already seen significant benefits, particularly for fish who make their home in the clear waters of the mountain canyon.
โWe have photos of fish attempting to jump the dam when it was in place,โ said Charles M. Shobe, a Research Geomorphologist with the Forest Serviceโs Rocky Mountain Research Station. โNow that theyโre able to move upstream, theyโre bringing their biomass upstream which provides a better distribution of nutrients throughout the watershed.โ
[…]
Scientists from the Rocky Mountain Research Station along with members of the South Park Ranger District conducted river sampling on April 25, mapping the bottom of the riverbed to get information on the shape of the river channel, collecting sediment samples to look at the aquatic habitat of the riverbed and bagging insect larvae to get a measure on whoโs there. Measuring in April wasย essential for the team, Shobe explained, as it was after the damโs disassembly but before the river that was diverted through a spillway while the dam was taken down, filled the canyon once again. Another sampling will be taken likely in June and then annually through 2027…
Returning the stretch of the South Platte to its pre-dam state will likely first improve habitat for the little insects that live in the stream bed, which in term will revitalize the whole system as fish feed on the insects, and bigger animals like eagles feed on the fish. While the research is still in the works, Shobe said theyโve observed anecdotally a change in the former pond area from finer sediment like mud and sand to coarser, larger sediments like gravel which will be a positive change for the aquatic organisms that swim in the stream as they tend to not do as well in a muddier environment. The buildup of sediment is a unique aspect of the Eleven Mile Canyon dam removal project as unlike other dams where removal of the river obstruction has flushed a wave of collectedย sediment downstream, a lot of the sediment was able to be dug out from behind the dam before removal. For that reason, downstream impacts arenโt expected, and the scope of the ongoing research will only include a couple 200 feet downstream of the former dam.
The traditional homelands of the Navajo (Dinรฉ) are marked by four sacred mountains that stretch across modern-day Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Credit: Native Knowledge 360ยบ
A bipartisan coalition of Arizonaโs congressional delegation introduced legislation to address one of the longest-running water issues facing three Arizona tribes.
โThis legislation and the settlement it ratifies represent a historic step forward in resolving a decades-long water rights dispute, providing certainty and stability for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe,โ Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly said in a written statement.
Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, an independent, introduced the act in the U.S. Senate on July 8. Identical legislation was also introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, where it is cosponsored by Reps. Juan Ciscomani (R-Tucson), Raรบl Grijalva (D-Tucson), Greg Stanton (D-Phoenix) and David Schweikert (R-Scottsdale).
โOur historic bipartisan legislation delivers real, lasting results for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe by strengthening water security, creating economic opportunities, and providing certainty and stability so their communities can continue to thrive,โ Sinema said in a press release.
The Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement will settle the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribeโs claims to the main stem of the Colorado River, the Little Colorado River, and relevant groundwater sources in Arizona.
โSecuring water rights for these tribes upholds their sovereignty and lays the path for their growth and prosperity through increased investment in water infrastructure,โ Kelly said. โRatifying this settlement honors our commitment to the tribes and helps secure our stateโs water future, and weโll work together as Republicans and Democrats to get it done.โ
The bill states that the legislation aims to achieve a fair, equitable and final settlement of all claims to rights to water in Arizona for the three tribal nations.
In addition to settling the tribesโ ongoing water claims in the Colorado River Basin, it includes billions in funding for essential water development and delivery projects for the tribes.
Ciscomani said in a written statement that the settlement and legislation will provide a โlong-lasting partnershipโ between Arizona and the tribes.
โThis not only gives much-needed certainty to the Tribes but allows Arizona to better plan for a secure water future while providing for improved water infrastructure throughout the region,โ he said.
As part of the settlement, the three tribes would gain access to reliable and safe water for their community through various outlets, including the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River, aquifers, shared washes and water infrastructure development.
โThe Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement is a monumental achievement and the product of negotiations spanning almost 30 years,โ said Leslie A. Meyers, the associate general manager of water resources for the Salt River Project. โSalt River Project has participated in the negotiations from their inception.โ
Meyers said SRP enthusiastically supports the bills because the settlement provides the three tribes with the desperately needed water supplies and infrastructure to secure their futures.
The water settlement authorizes $5 billion to acquire, build, and maintain essential water development and delivery projects, including a $1.75 billion distribution pipeline.
The three tribes would be guaranteed access to over 56,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water and specific groundwater rights and protections.
Grijalva said that the legislation deserves the full support of Congress because the settlement was the historic culmination of a decades-long effort to bring water to the three tribes.
โAs the climate crisis continues to exacerbate an already devastating multigenerational drought, the federal governmentโs obligation to deliver clean, safe water and water infrastructure to the tribes could not be more pressing,โ he said. โI urge my colleagues to move this legislation to the presidentโs desk quickly.โ
Tribal leaders commend legislation introduction
Leaders from the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe commended the work of everyone involved in writing the settlement and introducing legislation to Congress.
Tribal councils from all three tribes initially passed bills supporting the water settlement in May. However, Congress must approve the settlement before it can go into law.
โFor decades, our Navajo people have lived without piped water in their homes, with many of our elders hauling water over 30 miles roundtrip,โ Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said during a press conference on Tuesday. โMore than 30% of the homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water. This is unacceptable.โ
Nygren said that the Navajo people are American people, and no one in America should be denied access to water because of where they live.
โThis settlement ensures that the Navajo people will have rightful access to water, providing certainty for our homelandโs future and an equal opportunity for health and prosperity,โ he added.
If the act passes Congress, the Navajo Nation water infrastructure it would fund will bring substantial clean, safe and reliable drinking water to Navajo communities in Arizona, according to Nygrenโs office. The infrastructure will allow tens of thousands of Navajo people in Arizona to have piped water in their homes for the first time.
โIt is a great opportunity here to claim what is ours as Navajo people,โ Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley said Tuesday. โWater is essential to every living thing that we possess in the Navajo way.โ
She said this is the first time a tribe is bringing this large of a water settlement to Congress, and she said it is unfortunate that the Navajo Nation is one of the last tribes in Arizona to bring its water settlement to a federal level.
Curley said itโs as if the Navajo Nation is going up to Congress with an empty cup and begging for both what is rightfully theirs and what they deserve.
โWithout this settlement, our communities will remain disproportionately vulnerable to diseases, and development on the Reservation will continue to be restricted by the lack of water infrastructure,โ she said in a press release.
Curley noted how the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Navajo Nation particularly hard due to the tribeโs lack of access to clean water and plumbing.
Through the water settlement, the Navajo Nation would gain access to 44,700 acre-feet per year of the Upper Basin Colorado River Water and 3,600 acre-feet per year of the Lower Basin Colorado River Water.
The Navajo Nation will also lease, exchange, and accrue long-term storage credits for its Arizona water as part of the settlement. The tribe could store Arizona water in two reservoirs in New Mexico and aquifers on the Navajo Navajo for later recovery.
The Navajo Nation would also be able to engage in inter-basin transfer of Colorado River water in Arizona and divert its water from New Mexico and Utah for use in Arizona. [ed. emphasis mine]
Explorer John Wesley Powell and Paiute Chief Tau-Gu looking over the Virgin River in 1873. Photo credit: NPS
The San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, which spans Arizona and Utah, will not only receive water rights from the settlement but also ratify the treaty and create their reservation boundaries.
โWe are so thankful to Senator Kelly and Senator Sinema for introducing legislation that will not only provide our Tribe with water but will also ratify a treaty negotiated and entered into by the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe and the Navajo Nation decades ago,โ Robbin Preston Jr., president of the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, said in a press release.
โThe Tribe has waited far too long to have an exclusive reservation of its own,โ Preston added. โThe opportunities made available through this legislation will change the lives of our Tribal Members and the trajectory of our Tribe.โ
As part of the settlement, the tribe will gain 5,400 acres of land within the Navajo Nation, which will be proclaimed the San Juan Southern Paiute Reservation. The land will be held in trust by the United States.
Preston said the settlement would provide the San Juan Southern Paiute people with reliable electricity, water, and housing.
โOur people will have opportunities that have never been available to us before,โ he added. โThis legislation is more than a settlement of water rights; it is the establishment of an exclusive reservation for a Tribe that will no longer be forced to live like strangers in our own land.โ
For the Hopi Tribe, the settlement guarantees access to 2,300 acre-feet per year of the Upper Basin Colorado River Water and a little over 5,900 acre-feet per year of the Lower Basin Colorado River Water.
Hopi Chairman Timothy Nuvangyaoma expressed his gratitude to the state, tribes and neighboring communities for working to make the settlement a reality.
โOur collective action means a more secure water future for the Hopi Tribe and all of our neighbors in Northern Arizona,โ Nuvangyaoma said.
As part of the settlement, the Hopi Tribe can lease, exchange, and accrue long-term storage credits for its water, store it in aquifers on Hopi land for later recovery and engage in inter-basin transfer of the Colorado River within Arizona.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
Writing about weather in the climate crisis-era is like navigating an obstacle course littered with critics. One faction chides me if I write about insane rainstorms and flash flooding without attributing them to human-caused climate change; another blasts me for bringing up climate change too often, whether itโs to explain an especially active avalanche cycle or a long-term drought. Even the spate of โbillion-dollar disastersโ in recent years could be blamed on climate change, sure, but also on more development and humanity in the path of those disasters.
Quite often those critics are the voices in my own head. Part of this is due to my hankering to learn the history of a place, particularly southwestern Colorado. Every time thereโs an โunprecedentedโ drought or flood, I can look back into my mental archives and find an example of an equally severe one. There was the huge snow year of 1932, when the Durango-to-Silverton train was blockaded for 90 days straight; the great floods of 1911, 1884, 1927, and 1970, which wreaked havoc along the regionโs streams and rivers; the dismally dry and warm winter of 1878-79 that preceded the Lime Creek Burn; and the grainy 1918 photo of a water-wagon doing dust control on Silvertonโs streets โ in January.
Weather is and always has been wacky, with or without human-caused climate change. So Iโm always careful before saying some meteorological event is โunprecedented.โ
But this heat? Damn. It sure does look unprecedented โ if the temperature alone isnโt shattering records, the duration of the heat waves are.
A better term than climate change is climate heating, because thatโs exactly whatโs happening: The planet is heating up as a result of Industrial (and Information) Age humans spewing oodles of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And while it may be difficult to find climate changeโs figurative fingerprints on every incidence of severe weather, its coal-smudged paw-prints appear to be all over the longer and more severe spells of extreme heat weโve been perspiring through in recent years. No, every record-breaking high temperature cannot be attributed unequivocally to climate change, but climate change does make these events far more likely to occur.
Last year was the warmest year on our planet since global record-keeping began in 1850, clocking in at 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average of 57ยฐ F. And guess what? This year will likely be even hotter: This June was the hottest June on record, globally, and the 13th consecutive monthly high temperature record. Eeek.
So, when the mercury in Las Vegas tops out at 120 degrees F and shatters the previous record of 117ยฐ F, as occurred last week, I think itโs not a stretch to attribute this specific weather wackiness to the warming climate (with a helping hand from the urban heat island effect, of course). And when this sort of heat stretches across a good portion of the West, follows record-setting, flash-flooding rainfall by a few weeks, and coincides with a hurricane ripping through the Carribean, well, itโs probably safe to assume that itโs all connected, via a warming climate. It is not safe, however, to go outside.
So, with that out of the way, hereโs a rundown of some of the wackiness of late:
Phoenix just endured its hottest June on record, with an average monthly temperature of 97ยฐF, or nearly six degrees above the 1990-2020 normal. So far this summer the daily high temperature has reached 110ยฐ F or warmer on 21 occasions, and 118ยฐ F on two days; the city has received just .02 inches of precipitation since April 2. Maricopa County officials have confirmed heat caused or contributed to 13 deaths so far this year, with another 162 fatalities under investigation. Thatโs significantly more than last year at this time.
Dozens of monthly maximum high temperature records were broken across the West in June and early July, especially along the West Coast, where the mercury was โ and still is โ reaching the triple digits day after day. Oregon officials suspect five deaths in the western part of the state in recent days areย heat-related.ย
A new daily record was set in Death Valley, at 129 F. A motorcyclist touring through the national parkย died of heat exposure.ย
Sixteen locations in the West set monthly precipitationย recordsย in June, including:
Hovenweep National Monument, with 1.05 inches on June 28;
Arches National Park, 1.58โ on June 28;
Panguitch, Utah, 1.50โ on June 26;
Quemazon, New Mexico, 5.50โ on June 21;
Arivaca, Arizona, 2.25โ on June 24;
Ely, Nevada, 1.58โ on June 26;
Mormon Mountain, Arizona, 2.30โ on June 27.ย
Major wildfires are burning across the West. Before I get into the details, do spare a thought for the thousands of people fighting these fires. Not only do the flames and smoke threaten their health and lives, but so does the brutal heat. This is a sampling of some of the new starts (stats as of early a.m. July 9):
Silver King in Piute County, Utah, at 10,026 acres, 0% containment;ย
Deer Springs in Kane County, Utah, (north-northeast of Kanab) at 11,000 acres, 0% containment;ย
Fisher in Socorro County, New Mexico, at 2,500 acres, 1% containment;
Lake in Santa Barbara County, California, at 21,763 acres, 8% containment;ย
Shelly in Siskiyou County, California, at 4,203 acres, 0% containment (this one is likely to burn a โcarbon offsetโ forest, where corporations pay the owner to not chop down trees so they can continue polluting). Whoops.;
Salt Creek Rd in Jackson County, Oregon, 1,700 acres, 2% containment;
North in Modoc County, California, 4,380 acres, 50% containment;ย
Thompson in Butte County, California, which is 100% contained after burning 3,789 acres. I include it here because it forced the shutdown of transmission lines, taking the Oroville Dam hydropower plant offline and depriving the California grid of valuable energy when it needs it to keep air-conditioners running. Itโs yet another example of how extreme weather can strain the power grid.ย
Itโs difficult to see how this is sustainable. Consider for a moment the misery the more than 9,000 unhoused people in Phoenix must be experiencing each and every day this summer. Many of them live on the streets and sidewalks, literally, where the concrete and asphalt can reach 160ยฐ F or more, hot enough to cause severe burns. Poorly insulated housing without cooling can be nearly as bad. Public cooling centers provide refuge, of course, but are there enough?
Sure, if you can afford it, you can hunker down in your home and crank up the air-conditioner and simply wait out the heat. But you could be waiting for quite some time these days; meanwhile, the growing fleet of air-conditioners will strain the grid, increasing the risk of a widespread power outage, which literally could be deadly in this heat.
There is a limit to this sort of thing, and it seems as if we must be getting close to the point where some places simply become uninhabitable. But if weโve already reached that point, a lot of folks arenโt aware of it: Maricopa County remains one of the fastest growing metros in the U.S. And during the 12 months from June 2023 through May 2024, 48,000 building permits were issued in the metro area for new, private housing structures โ numbers not seen since the great housing bubble of a couple decades ago.
Surely the housing bubble will burst, as it has in the past, before too long. But what about the air-conditioning bubble? Can it really last forever?
๐ Random Real Estate Room ๐ค
Speaking of people moving to hostile environments, the Amangiri resort near Lake Powell (and the polygamist settlement of Big Water) is now selling lots to those who can afford it. But donโt worry! While homeowners can avail themselves of the resort amenities, they are separated from those low-brow folks (who are forking out up to $6,500 per night to stay there) by a big slab of sandstone โ saving them from having to rub elbows with the Kardashians next to the pool under 100ยฐ+ heat. And it will only cost you between $5 million and $12 million. For the lot, that is. Gross.
Follow Up
Remember my diatribe from a couple weeks ago about data centersโ excessive power use?ย Well, the pitfalls of all of that are playing out as I write this. Arizona Public Service, the stateโs biggest utility, predicts its customers collectively willย set new electricity-demand recordsย this year. And itโs not because of all those new folks moving in or the new homes being built โ efficiency gains have actually led to a 5% decrease in overall residential power consumption. Itโs thanks to those data centers, of which there are 79 in the state (71 in Phoenix, seven in Tucson, and one in Nogales). Itโs all fine and good until the grid crashes on a 118ยฐ F day.
Last night’s storm (July 30, 2021) was epic — Ranger Tiffany (@RangerTMcCauley) via her Twitter feed.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
Key Points:
The average temperature of the contiguous U.S. in June was 71.8ยฐF, 3.4ยฐF above average, ranking second warmest in the 130-year record.
Approximately 24 million people across portions of the West, South and Northeast experienced their warmest June for overnight temperatures.
Heat waves impacted the Southwest, Great Lakes, Northeast and Puerto Rico this month, breaking temperature records and creating life-threatening conditions.
The South Fork fire, one of the most devastating fires in New Mexico history, burned over 17,000 acres, destroyed around 1400 structures and claimed two lives.
Catastrophic flooding occurred in parts of the Midwest after days of heavy rains caused rivers and streams to overflow their banks, forcing residents to evacuate as water destroyed roads and bridges and led to the partial failure of the Rapidan Dam in Minnesota.ย
On June 30, Beryl became the earliest Category 4 hurricane and the only Category 4 on record during the month of June in the Atlantic Ocean.
June temperatures were above average to record warm across much of the contiguous U.S. Arizona and New Mexico each had their warmest June on record with 18 additional states ranking among their top 10 warmest Junes on record.
The Alaska statewide June temperature was 52.8ยฐF, 3.6ยฐF above the long-term average, ranking sixth warmest in the 100-year period of record for the state. Above-average temperatures were observed throughout most of the state, with near-average temperatures observed across much of the Aleutians and South Panhandle.
For the JanuaryโJune period, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 50.9ยฐF, 3.4ยฐF above average, ranking second warmest on record for this period. Temperatures were above average across nearly all of the contiguous U.S., while record-warm temperatures were observed in parts of the Northeast, Great Lakes, southern Plains and Mid-Atlantic. New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each saw their warmest JanuaryโJune period. An additional 24 states had a top-five warmest year-to-date period. No state experienced a top-10 coldest event during this six-month period.
The Alaska JanuaryโJune temperature was 24.6ยฐF, 3.3ยฐF above the long-term average, ranking in the warmest third of the historical record for the state. Much of the state was warmer than average for this six-month period while temperatures were near average across parts of the Panhandle.
Precipitation
June precipitation for the contiguous U.S. was 2.74 inches, 0.18 inch below average, ranking in the driest third of the historical record. Precipitation was below average across much of the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley and across portions of the Plains and California to the Northern Rockies. Portions of the Southeast experienced dry soils, low streamflow and distressed crops in June. Virginia had its driest June on record and North Carolina had its second driest June. Conversely, precipitation was above average across much of the Upper Midwest and Southwest and in portions of the Northeast, Plains and southern Florida. Minnesota had its fourth wettest June, while Wisconsin had its sixth wettest.
Alaskaโs average monthly precipitation ranked fifth driest in the historical record. Much of the state was drier than average for the month of June, while near-average precipitation was observed in the North Slope region.
The JanuaryโJune precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 17.36 inches, 2.06 inches above average, ranking 11th wettest in the 130-year record. Precipitation was above average across a large portion of the Upper Midwest, Northeast and Deep South as well as in pockets across much of the contiguous U.S., with Rhode Island having its second-wettest year-to-date period on record and Minnesota and Wisconsin ranking third wettest. Conversely, precipitation was below average across parts of the Northwest, northern Plains, west Texas and eastern North Carolina during the JanuaryโJune period.
The JanuaryโJune precipitation for Alaska ranked in the middle third of the 100-year record, with below-average precipitation observed across parts of the Central Interior, Cook Inlet, Northeast Interior and South Panhandle regions, near-average precipitation in the Aleutians, Northwest Gulf, Northeast Gulf and North Panhandle and above-average precipitation observed across the remaining climate divisions.
Billion-Dollar Disasters
Four new billion-dollar weather and climate disasters were confirmed in June 2024, including two hail events that impacted Texas and Colorado at the end of April and end of May, respectively, one severe weather event that impacted the central, southern and eastern U.S. in mid-May and a tornado outbreak that impacted portions of the Central U.S. in mid-May.
There have been 15 confirmed weather and climate disaster events this year, each with losses exceeding $1 billion. These disasters consisted of 13 severe storm events and two winter storms. The total cost of these events exceeds $37 billion, and they have resulted in at least 106 fatalities.
The U.S. has sustained 391 separate weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2024). The total cost of these 391 events exceeds $2.755 trillion.
Other Notable Events
The Correll Fire, which started on June 1 in San Joaquin County, CA burned over 14,000 acres.
The Darlene 3 Fire, which started on June 25 in Deschutes County, OR burned over 3,800 acres, prompted emergency evacuations and left thousands without power.
On June 2, an extreme rotating thunderstorm dropped cantaloupe-size (>6.25 inches in diameter) hail in the Texas Panhandleโthis could be the new state record for largest hail diameter.
A series of heat waves brought record-breaking temperatures to portions of the U.S. during June:
The National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine, issued its first-ever Excessive Heat Warning due to โfeels-likeโ temperatures getting close to 110 degrees on June 19.
For the first time on record, the entire island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were placed under a heat advisory or warning by the National Weather Service on June 24.
Alberto, the first named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, made landfall in Mexico on June 20 as a tropical storm.
Some Texas communities saw nearly three times their June average for rainfall over 48 hours from Tropical Storm Alberto, including the Gulf Coast-area city of Rockport, Texas, which received 9.97 inches of rain from the storm; its June average is 3.66 inches. Similarly, Alice, Texas, received 6.57 inches of rainโnearly triple its June average of 2.32 inches.
Drought
According to the July 2 U.S. Drought Monitor report, about 19% of the contiguous U.S. was in drought, up about 6% from the end of May. Drought conditions expanded or intensified across most of the Southeast, much of the Mid-Atlantic and portions of the Ohio Valley, Tennessee, eastern Oklahoma and northern Plains this month. Drought contracted or was reduced in intensity across much of the Southwest, Kansas, the panhandle of Oklahoma, southern Texas and southern Florida.
US Drought Monitor map July 2, 2024.
Monthly Outlook
Above-average temperatures are favored to impact areas across the western and southern portions of the U.S. in July, while below-average precipitation is likely to occur in the Northwest and south-central Plains. Drought is likely to persist in the Mid-Atlantic, Southwest, Northwest and Hawaii. Visit the Climate Prediction Centerโs Official 30-Day Forecasts and U.S. Monthly Drought Outlook website for more details.
Significant wildland fire potential for July is above normal across portions of the Mid-Atlantic, West, Hawaii and Alaska. For additional information on wildland fire potential, visit the National Interagency Fire Centerโs One-Month Wildland Fire Outlook
Most of the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast improved. Most of the Northwest, Central Rockies, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic worsened. The 2 states at 90% s/vs: MD and WV.
The case concerned a 40-year-old precedent known as โChevron deference.โ That doctrine held that when a federal law is ambiguous, the courts must defer to the interpretations offered by the agencies the law covers โ as long as those interpretations are โreasonable.โ On Monday,ย the court discarded Chevron deference. This may sound like an abstruse legalistic squabble, but it has massive implications for Americans in all walks of life. It could subject agency decisions on scientifically based issues such asย clean air and water regulations and healthcare standardsย to endless nitpicking by a federal judiciary that already has displayed an alarming willingness toย dismiss scientific expertise out of hand,ย in favor of partisan or religious ideologies. The ruling amounts to an apogee of arrogance on the part of the Supreme Courtโs conservative majority, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But itโs not a new development.
โThe Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,โ Kagan wrote; โits own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education…. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue โ no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden.โ
Conservatives have had it in for the Chevron doctrine for a long time; given their current majority on the court, the doctrineโs death has been a foregone conclusion, awaiting only the appearance of a suitable case to use as a bludgeon. Indeed, the majority was so impatient to kill the doctrine that the courtโs six conservatives chose to do so by using a case that actually is moot. That case arose from a lawsuit brought by the herring industry, which objected to a government policy requiring herring boats to pay for government observers placed on board to make sure the boats were complying with their harvesting permits. The rule was imposed under the Trump administration, but it wasย canceled in April 2023 by Biden, who repaid the money that had been taken from the boat owners โ so thereโs nothing left in it for the court to rule on.
Interestingly, Chevron deference was not always seen as a bulwark protecting progressive regulatory policies from right-wing judges, as itโs viewed today. At its inception, it was seen in exactly the opposite way โ as giving conservative policies protection from progressive-minded judges.
Once settled in Colorado, Audrey and Chris reached out to their local FSA office to apply for a farm ownership loan to purchase their land. Photo courtesy of Billy Goat Hop Farm LLC.
The Heritage Foundationโs policy document for a second Trump term has more to say about horses than healthcare.
Project 2025 has been so much in the news lately that former President Donald Trump had to respond to the right-wing policy proposals, which the Heritage Foundation put together in hopes of implementation under another Trump presidency.
โI know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,โ Trump said. โI disagree with some of the things theyโre saying and some of the things theyโre saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.โ
In a familiar rhetorical pattern, Trump says two contradictory things at the same time: Parts of Project 2025 are โabsolutely ridiculous and abysmalโ and โanything they do I wish them luck.โ
Well, there is a third contradictory thing: โI know nothing about it.โ
But anyone reading through the nearly 1,000 pages of Project 2025 might easily be two-minded, or three-minded, about it. It is vast and dense.
Nevertheless, there is a predominant theme threaded throughout: Federal government must be downsized, decentralized, and disempowered as much as possible, as rapidly as possible, just as soon as conservatives gain control the federal government. And embedded within this theme is a prominent second thread: that the enemy โ variously named โthat institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars,โ โLGBT advocates,โ โthe pursuit of racial parity,โ โracial and gender ideologies,โ etc. โ must be vanquished.
You may see different patterns, but this is what I discerned. Readers should look for themselves. Find the chapter(s) that matter to you. You may choose from sections titled โTaking the Reins of Government,โ โThe Common Defense,โ โThe General Welfare,โ โThe Economy,โ and โIndependent Regulatory Agencies,โ with each major federal government agency discussed. I spent a couple days reading through the 1,000 pages to glean what is being proposed to support healthy rural populations and thriving rural communities. Not very much.
In fact, the entire subsection โRural Healthโ (Chapter 14, Department of Health and Human Services, at p. 449) is shorter than the subsection on โWild Horses and Burrosโ (Chapter 16, Department of the Interior, at p. 528). Empathy for the four-footed ungulates is conveyed by discussion of their โiconic presenceโ described as โnot a new issue โฆ not just a western issue- it is an American issue.โ We two-footed humans rate similar patriotic rhetoric โ โseeking space for oneโs family and cultivating the land are valued goals that are deeply rooted in Americaโs fabricโ โ but the paltry few policy proposals โ less than one page out of nearly 1,000 โ are insulting.
For example, to increase the supply of health care providers by reducing regulatory burdens on โvolunteers wishing to provide temporary, charitable services across state lines,โ and to encourage โless expensive alternatives to hospitals and telehealth independent of expensive air ambulances,โ Challenge me if I am wrong, but these proposals explicitly, in writing, advise that rural communities can, at best, expect โsecond class,โ maybe just โthird class,โ treatment from Project 2025 Conservative elites. But at least Project 2025 doesnโt advise โhumane disposalโ for sick rural folks as it does for the horses and burros.
Moving on to some other rural concerns Project 2025 advises:
Mobile technologies:ย โ[W]idespread deployment of infrastructure for 5G adoption in rural and exurban areas, which will be a key factor in future economic competitiveness for these under-served communitiesโ [Note: Those charitable volunteers may not come help us without that.]
Veterans: Department of Veterans Affairs should โreimagine the health care footprint in some locales, and spur a realignment of capacity through budgetary allocations,โ for example โCommunity Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) as an avenue to maintain a VA footprint in challenging medical markets without investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campusesโ and โfacility-sharing partnerships between the VA and strained local health care systems to reduce costs by leveraging limited talent and resourcesโ [Note: The context of these proposals is aging facilities and declining patient numbers, particularly in rural areas, that are too expensive and inefficient to replace; but considering the weak proposals for rural health care, these proposals are not likely viable and rural veterans will be treated like other rural residents, โsecondโ and โthirdโ class.]
Farms: Numerous programs that moderate risk faced by family farms are axed: โElimination of the Conservation Reserve Program. Farmers should not be paid in such a sweeping way not to farm their land. โฆ The USDA should work with Congress to eliminate this overbroad program.โ
And โrepeal the ARC (Agriculture Risk) and PLC (Price Loss) programs. โฆ The ARC program is especially egregious because farmers are being protected from losses, which is another way of saying minor dips in expected revenue. This is hardly consistent with the concept of providing a safety net to help farmers when they fall on hard times.โ [ note: there is considerable curiosity in distant elites advising farmers about โhard timesโ and the risks of farming]
Food security: Numerous proposals in Project 2025 intend to reduce numbers and eligibility for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known commonly as the food stamp program) and for school meals [Note: Food insecurity is rising faster in rural areas.]
Eliminating nutritional labeling and dietary guidelines: โThere is no shortage of private sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs. This includes working with their own health professionals.โ [Note: Rural residents are less likely to have โtheir own health professionalsโ or reliable access to any health professional, or other specific dietary advice.]
Throughout Project 2025โs 1,000 pages are hundreds upon hundreds of proposals. But perhaps these few gleanings advise that despite bashing progressive elites, Project 2025โs conservative elites know and care little about rural realities, problems, values, and priorities.
Palisade peaches ripening on the vine on June 5, 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 8, 2024
June was a hot month in Colorado, among the two or three hottest Junes ever recorded.
Temperatures for the state didnโt top those of June 2012, a very notable one with attendant repercussions for river flows on the Western Slope. But on July 1, with records still being tabulated, Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, said that June ranked either second or third among records that go back to the 1880s. He expects to have the definitive report filed soon.
The heat of June came after a comparatively cool May. It was close to the long-term average across much of Colorado, but cooler than average across northwestern Colorado.
The 10 months prior to May, however, had all been warmer than the 20th century average.
You can study the precise temperature rankings for each month in Colorado (and every other state) at this website maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Centers for Environmental Information.
Coloradoโs coolish May and barn-burner June come even as NASA warns of a climate crisis after an unprecedented 12 months of record highs. Each of the 12 months had a global high.
The last 10 consecutive years have been the warmest 10 since record-keeping began in the late 19th century.
โWeโre experiencing more hot days, more hot months, more hot years,โ said Kate Calvin, NASAโs chief scientist and senior climate advisor. โWe know that these increases in temperature are driven by our greenhouse gas emissions and are impacting people and ecosystems around the world.โ
Schumacher, a professor at Colorado State University, said the really extreme warmth during the last year or so has been over the oceans.
โColorado and the western US have been warmer than average over the last year or so but not breaking records like the globe as a whole,โ he told Big Pivots.
NASA has put together a visualization of the rise in global temperatures that might fascinate you โ or leave you unsettled.ย See that visualization here.
Morrow Point Dam, on the Gunnison River, Aspinall Unit. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):
Releases from the Aspinall Unit will be increased from 1600 cfs to 1900 cfs between Wednesday, July 10th and Thursday, July 11th. Releases are being increased in response to declining river flows on the lower Gunnison River.
Flows in the lower Gunnison River have been dropping quickly towards the baseflow target of 1500 cfs. River flows are expected to continue to decline over the next couple weeks.
Pursuant to the Aspinall Unit Operations Record of Decision (ROD), the baseflow target in the lower Gunnison River, as measured at the Whitewater gage, is 1500 cfs for July and then drops to 1050 cfs in August.
Currently, Gunnison Tunnel diversions are 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon are around 600 cfs. After this release change Gunnison Tunnel diversions will still be 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon will be near 900 cfs. Current flow information is obtained from provisional data that may undergo revision subsequent to review.
Click the link to read the article on the USDA website (Jocelyn Benjamin):
June 13, 2024
A new study reveals that managing habitat for songbirds like the golden-winged warbler also benefits insect pollinators like the at-risk monarch butterfly.
Exploring the young forests and shrublands within the eastern deciduous forests of the United States, this study, which was highlighted in a Science to Solutions report by the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, thoroughly unravels the co-benefits that managing for early-successional habitat offers to both the golden-winged warbler and monarch butterfly. Managing for forest-age diversity improves the overall long-term health of forest communities and wildlife habitat. This research will help USDA strengthen conservation solutions for the Monarch butterfly and other pollinators.
Golden-winged Warbler Male and Female (Vermivora chrysoptera). By Louis Agassiz Fuertes. – 300 ppi scan of the National Geographic Magazine, Volume 31 (1917), page 308, panel C., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167346
Common management solutions promoting early-successional communities like shrublands and young forests, are expensive, due to the management tools needed to simulate natural disturbances like wildfire, beaver activity, and severe weather that revert older sites to early-successional young forest conditions.
To combat these challenges, USDAโs Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offers cost-effective management tools and technical assistance to private landowners through the Working Lands for Wildlife (WLFW) initiative.
WLFW offers management planning to improve forest stand quality and structure while promoting conservation benefits for specific wildlife species, which may also impact non-focal species. In this case, the golden-winged warbler is a focal species for multiple NRCS working lands programs in the Appalachian Mountains and Great Lakes, and shares common habitat goals with pollinators, including butterflies and native bees.
The report outlines several recent studies that assessed how pollinator species respond to avian-focused early successional habitat management in the Great Lakes and provides evidence that breeding habitat management efforts for the Warbler not only benefit pollinators but also many other non-focal species of conservation concern, including the American Woodcock and Eastern Whip-poor-will.
The monarch butterfly populations have declined significantly over the past few decades due to critical population stressors, including reductions in milkweed and nectar plant availability, driven by the loss and degradation of habitat across its range.
This drastic decline has sparked concerted efforts to create and enhance monarch habitat. The studies found that abundant blooming plants within forested landscapes, with emergent herbaceous wetlands nearby, combine habitat components for pollinators by containing pollen and nectar at a single site. Given that many disturbance-dependent flowering herbaceous plants like goldenrod colonize recently managed golden-winged warbler sites, coupling insect pollinators with warbler habitat creation benefits multiple species.
NRCS continues to offer this multispecies benefits approach through its working lands initiative, which nets a win-win for songbirds, pollinators, and owners and operators of working forests.
NRCS will host a free, one-hour Conservation Outcomes Webinar during National Pollinator Week that shares findings on the value of voluntary conservation practices to support pollinators nationwide. Additional details are available on theย Conservation Outcomes Webinar Series webpage.
A monarch caterpillar on a common milkweed leaf. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Lee Walston.)
Monarch butterfly on milkweed in Mrs. Gulch’s landscape July 17, 2021.Monarch butterfly. Photo: Jim Hudgins/USFWSPhotograph of a Male Monarch Butterfly. Photo by and (c)2007 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man)Photograph of a Female Monarch Butterfly. By Kenneth Dwain Harrelson, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14917505Photograph of a Female Monarch Butterfly. By Kenneth Dwain Harrelson, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14917505
Because the town argues that Craft was not qualified to serve on the water providerโs board, the complaint says that legally, โa vacancy existed since his appointment in 2022 by the Town.โ The Kiowa Board of Trustees โ the equivalent of a town council โ object to Craftโs activity on the water providerโs board, according to the suit.
โMr. Craft has publicly stated an intent to unlawfully terminate a separate operating agreement between the Town and KWWA,โ the complaint says. โMr. Craftโs actions create a risk of irreparable harm to the Town of Kiowa and the Board of Trustees, because he is exercising authority and duties to which he has no lawful right.โ
According to the complaint, in order to serve on the water providerโs board, a person must meet one of three criteria:
โข They are a resident of the town who is registered to vote in Colorado;
โข They own โreal propertyโ within the town boundaries;
โข Or they are the person designated by the owner of real property within the boundaries of the town to be qualified to serve on the board by such owner. (The designation by an owner does not require that the person be appointed to the board.)
Craftโs designation to serve did not meet the third criteria, the complaint argues.
A beaver dam on the Gunnison River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the EPA website (Melissa Payne):
June 11, 2024
Considered natureโs engineers, beavers build dams across streams to create ponds. The lodges within these dams can only be accessed through underwater entrances, keeping beavers safe from predators like bears and wolves. After historical overhunting, beaver populations are growingโin part because of recent reintroduction programsโand are settling down in places theyโve never been found before, including Tierra del Fuego and the Arctic. Beavers are a keystone species because of their significant impact on streams, the movement of water, water quality, and the other animals that live there. Beavers can alter their environments in many ways, especially through dam construction. The effects of these dams can be different in geographical regions (also known as biomes), but scientists do not have a clear understanding of how they impact water quality, habitat, and sedimentation in floodplains.
โDue to limited study in many biomes, some research scientists and land use managers must make decisions on how the conservation, expansion, and reintroduction of beavers can alter their local streams based on findings from ecosystems that are more frequently studied and better understood,โ said EPA researcher Ken Fritz.
The Scientific Question
Because stream ecosystems are complex, it can be difficult to understand how disturbances and changing environmental conditions will impact the ecosystem. Additionally, the impacts of beaver dams may vary widely across biomes because the underlying watershed characteristics are different.
EPA scientists Ken Fritz, Tammy Newcomer-Johnson, Heather Golden, and Brent Johnson, in collaboration with researchers from Miami University, Ohio, conducted a scientific literature review to better understand how beaver dams impact stream systems across different biogeographical regions. Their paper, โA global review of beaver dam impacts: Stream conservation implications across biomes,โ used 267 peer-reviewed studies to quantify the effects of beaver dams. Literature reviews summarize the main points of scientific research already published on a specific topic, which helps determine future efforts. The paper provides a current understanding for environmental managers on how the conservation, expansion, and reintroduction of beavers can alter streams in different geographical locations.
Fig. 1. Distribution of beaver home ranges (A) and studies examined across biomes by category; B) morphology, C) hydrology, D) water chemistry, E) aquatic biota, F) habitat. Home range distribution data was attained from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (https://www.iucnredlist.org/).
What the Scientists Discovered
The literature review found that beaver dams had significant environmental effects across all studied biomes. The impacts on stream morphology (the shape of river channels and how they change in shape and direction over time) and stream hydrology (water movement) were similar across geographical regions. Stream integrity, or health, also appeared to improve with beaver conservation in all biomes. The geographical region influenced how water quality and plant and animal life changed in response to beaver dams.
Specifically, results show that while nitrate and suspended sediments (which block the sunlight that bottom-dwelling plants need to survive) decreased downstream from beaver dams, pollutants like methyl mercury, dissolved organic carbon, and ammonium concentrations increased. Total nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations tended to not be affected by beaver dams. The effects beaver dams have on pollutants vary depending on environmental conditions โlike temperature, sunlight, water velocity and depth โ that aid in changing and transporting certain pollutants. EPA scientist Heather Golden noted that โthe effects of beaver dams on water quality can often vary with time of year, or season.โ
On a larger scale, beaver dams slow water flow and increase sedimentation, and most pollutants likely settle out of the water into sediments upstream of the beaver dam. These areas could become zones of high concentration of some pollutants and harmful hotspots for exposed wildlife. For certain pollutants like nitrogen, this temporary storage can provide time for microbes to convert nitrate pollution into harmless nitrogen gas, a process known as microbial denitrification.
โWhen you clean your drinking water in your home, you throw away the dirty filter and put in a new one. This doesnโt happen with beaver dams,โ said EPA researcher Tammy Newcomer-Johnson. โDams slow the flow of water so that heavier particles settle out. Over time, storms and floodwaters can damage the dams and wash the sediments stored behind them downstream.โ
The paper found that beaver dams can significantly influence the areas around them. These findings can be useful for stream conservation and restoration efforts that introduce or protect beavers. The review also found that the impacts of beaver dams were most often studied in temperate forests. Additional studies are needed in dry or cold biomes historically occupied by beavers and in new environments where beaver populations are currently expanding.
Several small loสปi (pondfields) in which kalo (taro) is being grown in the Maunawili Valley on Oสปahu, Hawaiสปi. The ditch on the left in the picture is called an สปauwai and supplies diverted stream water to the loสปi. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2149237
Click the link to read the article on the Associated Press website (Jennifer Sinco Kelleher). Here’s an excerpt:
About two years after 13 children and teens sued Hawaii over the threat posed byย climate change, both sides reachedย a settlementย that includes an ambitious requirement to decarbonize the stateโs transportation system over the next 21 years. Itโs another example of a younger generation channeling their frustration with the governmentโs response to the climate crisis into a legal battle. Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation is the worldโs first youth-led constitutional climate case addressing climate pollution from the transportation sector, according to statements from both sides…
The lawsuitย said one plaintiff, a 14-year-old Native Hawaiian, was from a family that farmed taro for more than 10 generations. However, extreme droughts and heavy rains caused by climate change have reduced crop yields and threatened her ability to continue the cultural practice.
The next Aspinall Operations meeting is officially scheduled for Thursday, August 15th. We have moved from the August 22nd date due to the conflict with Water Congress. Start time will be the usual 1:00pm
The meeting will be held at the Western Colorado Area Office in Grand Junction. Due to the ongoing repairs of the US50 bridge over Blue Mesa Reservoir we have decided not to hold the meeting at the desired location of the Elk Creek Visitor Center at Blue Mesa Reservoir.
This term, the courtโs conservative supermajority handed down several rulings that chip away at the power of many federal agencies. But the environmental agency has been under particular fire, the result of a series of cases brought since 2022 by conservative activists who say that E.P.A. regulations have driven up costs for industries ranging from electric utilities to home building. Those arguments have resonated among justices skeptical of government regulation. On Friday [June 28, 2024], the court ended the use of what is known as the Chevron doctrine, a cornerstone of administrative law for 40 years that said that courts should defer to government agencies to interpret unclear laws. That decision threatens the authority of many federal agenciesย to regulate the environment and also health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more…
But more remarkable have been several decisions by the court to intervene to stop environmental regulations before they were decided by lower courts or even before they were implemented by the executive branch. On Thursday, the court said the E.P.A. could not limit smokestack pollution that blows across state borders under a measure known as the โgood neighbor rule.โ In that case, the court took the surprising step of weighing in while litigation was still pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Iron Fen. Photo credit from report “A Preliminary Evaluation of Seasonal Water Levels Necessary to Sustain Mount Emmons Fen: Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests,” David J. Cooper, Ph.D, December 2003.
The court also acted in an unusually preliminary fashion last year when itย struck down a proposed E.P.A. ruleย known as Waters of the United States that was designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands from pollution, acting before the regulation had even been made final…Similarly, in a 2022 challenge to an E.P.A. climate proposal known as the Clean Power Plan, the courtย sharply limited the agencyโs ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissionsย from power plants, even though that rule had not yet taken effect.
That kind of intervention has little in the way of precedent. Usually, the Supreme Court is the last venue to hear a case, after arguments have been made and opinions have been rendered by lower courts…Collectively, those decisions now endanger not only many existing environmental rules, but may prevent future administrations from writing new ones, experts say…
Imagine Westerners waking up one morning only to discover that many of their most cherished wetlands have dried up, gone. This is not fiction during these times of determining the true value of water.
Most wetlands in the arid West owe their existence to the โinefficienciesโ of unlined irrigation canals and flood irrigation. But when well-intentioned urban folks insist that irrigation companies use water more efficiently by piping their ditches, the result may be more about loss than water โsavedโ for rivers.
One of the least-known truths in the West is that many of our wetlands are the result of irrigated agriculture. For example, an irrigation company in northern Colorado irrigates about 24,000 acres, thanks to 146 miles of ditches.
The area served by the irrigation company also has approximately 1,300 acres of wetlands, and itโs no accident that most of those wetlands lie below a leaking ditch. A study by Colorado State University discovered this connection using heavy isotopes to create hydrographs of groundwater wells, ditch levels and precipitation. This is a West-wide issue.
We all know that climate change has been causing hotter, drier weather, and that helps reduce the flow of the Colorado River that 40 million Westerners depend on. In the Laramie Basin of Wyoming, 67% of its wetlands are attributed to agriculture. In North Park, Colorado, close to 75% of all wetlands are byproducts of irrigated agriculture.
Decades ago, Aldo Leopold wrote, โThere are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One, you think that heat comes from the furnace and two, you think that breakfast comes from the grocery store.โ
May I add a third? We donโt know much about the water we depend on.
Farmers and ranchers produce two โgoods,โ a private good and a public good. Theyโre compensated for the private one by producing food. Their public goods, ecosystem services, are not compensated, though they include wetlands, biodiversity and plants sequestering carbon.
But knowing that rural agriculture uses 79% of the Colorado Riverโs water, our urban neighbors tell their rural counterparts to conserve water or, better yet, sell it to them.
Meanwhile, the environmental community would like rural agriculture to use less water so more could stay in the rivers to help fish and provide recreational opportunities.
Clearly, there are too many demands for the Westโs diminishing water supply. Drinking water, ag water, river health. Where do wetlands fit in?
Wetlands cover 1% of the Westโs land surface, yet half of our threatened and endangered species rely on them. Wetlands serve a similar function to our kidneys: They filter out impurities from human land uses, making our environment healthier.
Perhaps itโs time for all of us to wise up a little. Many of these wetlands are human created; that is, they were created by farmers and ranchers and are not โnatural.โ Many will disappear in the pursuit of water conservation. Must it be water conservation and efficiency at all costs?
Will we prioritize water for urban uses, including urban sprawl? Or will we support more water staying in our rivers to create a healthier environment? Will water for food production be considered a necessity? Do green lawns trump healthy rivers and wetlands?
Richard Knight
With more informed conversations about our region, talks between rural and urban neighbors, perhaps we could pursue a triple bottom line: water for food production, water for urban uses, and, yes, water for our regionโs rivers, streams and wetlands
Wouldnโt we all like that? Letโs figure out how to make that happen.
Rick Knight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that seeks to spur lively conversation about the West. He works at the intersection of land use and land health in the American West.
NREL researcher Diana Acero-Allard presents the University of Oklahoma Team GeoTribe with their first-place certificate for the 2023 Geothermal Collegiate Competition. Photo by University of Oklahoma
Click the link to read the release on the NREL website (Kelly MacGregor):
June 10, 2024
The University of Oklahoma Won 2023 Technical Track With Their Design for Sustainable Greenhouse Heating and Cooling Using Geothermal Energy
How can we sustainably keep greenhouses cool in the summer and warm in the winter?
On May 2, 2024, the first-place team in the Technical Track of the 2023 Geothermal Collegiate Competition held a community event to showcase its innovative geothermal system, developed in partnership with the Osage Nation, which aims to do just that.
The team designed a system of geothermal wells in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, to heat and cool the Tribeโs 40,000-square-foot greenhouse, supporting efforts for native food sovereignty.
The proposed geothermal system design would help alleviate the challenge of maintaining a constant year-round growing temperature, which is critical in an area recognized as a food desert.
โThe Harvestland greenhouse was created to provide the Osage Nation access to fruits and vegetables, especially during the food shortage during the pandemic,โ said Jose Aramendiz, a Ph.D. candidate in petroleum engineering at The University of Oklahoma and a member of the GeoTribe team. โHelping the greenhouse be self-sufficient could lead to cut energy costs, allowing redirection of funds to increase the benefits the greenhouse provides to the community.โ
Nabe Konate, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oklahoma, explains the team’s winning project, which included partnership with the Osage Nation. Photo by University of Oklahoma
Through a geothermal resources assessment, the team found there is enough energy at about 2,000 feet below the surface to directly heat and cool the 40,000-square-foot greenhouse, as well as a nearby fish farm.
The team also investigated converting inactive oil and gas wells near the site, but they were not suitable because of their age and disrepair. But these wells could provide a great deal of information about the geological deposition and temperature of the site, helping inform the geothermal system design.
The studentsโCesar Vivas, Nabe Konate, Jose Aramendiz, Gurban Hasanov, and Vagif Mammadzadaโreceived $10,000 as a first-place prize, as well as additional funding to host the May 2 event. Their stakeholder engagement event included a networking session, presentations by the team and school leadership, and a tour of the Mewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering laboratories.
โIn our experience, the stakeholders were a key part of our success,โ said Konate, University of Oklahoma Ph.D. candidate and Team GeoTribe member. โStakeholder engagement is important because it aligns people with common interest in working together to develop geothermal energy.โ
โThe most important aspect was listening to the Tribal community’s past experiences, concerns, and advice,โ said Aramendiz, also a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Oklahoma and a member of Team GeoTribe. โLearning from them and integrating their beliefs into our concept was key for our group to understand how we could collaborate respectfully.โ
Administered by NREL and funded by the Geothermal Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, the Geothermal Collegiate Competition is an annual challenge that offers college students experience in the renewable energy industry and the chance to win cash prizes for developing real-world geothermal solutions.
C.C. Cragin (Blue Ridge) Reservoir. Photo taken March 30, 2017 by Deborah Lee Soltesz. Credit: USFS Coconino National Forest. Learn more about the C.C. Cragin (Blue Ridge) Reservoir and the Coconino National Forest.
The Yavapai-Apache Nation approvedย its water rights settlement June 26, which will bring new water supplies to the Verde Valley and settle the tribe’s decades-long water rights claims. The settlement is the latest after Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs reversed a state policy that complicated tribes’ efforts to claim their rights to water. Yavapai-Apache Chairwoman Tanya Lewis said the agreement, which was negotiated with local communities, the Salt River Project, and state and federal officials will bring real “wet” water to her tribe. At the center of the settlement: constructing a pipeline from the C.C. Cragin Reservoir on the Mogollon Rim along Forest Service roads to the Verde Valley. SRP manages the reservoir and the water it holds…
In the deal, the pipeline will deliver dedicated sources of water from the Cragin Reservoir to the Yavapai-Apache Nation. It will also allow the tribe to exchange 1,200 acre-feet of its Central Arizona Project water with SRP for an additional delivery of water from C.C. Cragin in the same amount. The settlement will also confirm the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s historic irrigation rights as well as certain rights to pump groundwater, including when C.C. Cragin Reservoir levels are low. The tribe also has the right to acquire future water rights under the settlement. The Yavapai-Apache Nation will also waive, among other things, claims for damages to water rights against existing water users in the Verde River watershed and against the United States.
Central New Mexicoโs Rio Grande water users are perched on the edge of a dangerous precipice because of our failure to deliver enough water to Elephant Butte Reservoir, according to a June 28, 2024, letter from the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer to the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
Weโre currently 121,500 feet behind in deliveries, up from basically zero six years ago. If our debt rises above 200,000 acre feet, according to the letter:
To be clear, this is separate from the ongoing Texas v. New Mexico litigation on the Lower Rio Grande. This is the scary new Compact threat that Norm Gaume and others have been warning about as the Compact debt creeps inexorably higher.
The full letter is included at the tail end of Mondayโs (7/8/2024) MRGCD board packet, and is on the agenda for a possible discussion at that meeting.
The City of Grand Junction will host a ribbon cutting on Tuesday, July 2 at 1 p.m. celebrating the reopening ofCarson Lake (also known as Hogchute Reservoir) on the Grand Mesa now that improvements are complete and the reservoir has been refilled. Carson Lake is part of the City of Grand Junctionโs water supply network. Following the ribbon cutting, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), in collaboration with the city, will restock Carson Lake with fish.
In 2021, the City initiated the dam improvement project for Carson Lake which included proactive measures to preserve the life of the dam, improve operations, and enhance safety for residents in the Kannah Creek basin. The improvements required the draining of the reservoir and included reconstructing the outlet pipe assembly and the overflow spillway and channel. An early warning telemetry system was also added to provide real-time monitoring and communication to emergency services agencies and the public should there be a dam emergency. The work was funded in part with a low-interest, $4.3 million loan from the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
In addition to having to drain the reservoir, during construction, the U.S. Forest Service closed National Forest System Road #108 between Landโs End Road and Carson Lake, the parking lot and access to upper trails that start at Carson Lake which have now reopened.
El Vado Dam and Reservoir back in the day. Photo credit: USBR
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Jake Bittle):
July 6, 2024
Mark Garcia can see that thereโs no shortage of water in the Rio Grande this year. The river flows past his farm in central New Mexico, about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. The rush of springtime water is a welcome change after years of drought, but he knows the good times wonโt last.
As the summer continues, the river will diminish, leaving Garcia with a strict ration. Heโll be allowed irrigation water for his 300 acres just once every 30 days, which is nowhere near enough to sustain his crop of oats and alfalfa.
For decades, Garcia and other farmers on the Rio Grande have relied on water released from a dam called El Vado, which collects billions of gallons of river water to store and eventually release to help farmers during times when the river runs dry. More significantly for most New Mexico residents, the dam system also allows the city of Albuquerque to import river water from long distances for household use.
New Mexico water projects map via Reclamation
But El Vado has been out of commission for the past three summers, its structure bulging and disfigured after decades in operation โ and the government doesnโt have a plan to fix it.ย
โWe need some sort of storage,โ said Garcia. โIf we donโt get a big monsoon this summer, if you donโt have a well, you wonโt be able to water.โ
The failure of the dam has shaken up the water supply for the entire region surrounding Albuquerque, forcing the city and many of the farmers nearby to rely on finite groundwater and threatening an endangered fish species along the river. Itโs a surprising twist of fate for a region that in recent years emerged as a model for sustainablewater management in the West.
โHaving El Vado out of the picture has been really tough,โ said Paul Tashjian, the director of freshwater conservation at the Southwest regional office of the nonprofit National Audubon Society. โWeโve been really eking by every year the past few years.โ
Surface water imports from the El Vado system have generally allowed public officials in Albuquerque to limit groundwater shortages. This echoes the strategies of other large Western cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles, which have enabled population growth by tapping diverse sources of water for metropolitan regions and the farms that sit outside of them. The Biden administration is seeking to replicate this strategy in water-stressed rural areas across the region, doling out more than $8 billion in grants to support pipelines and reservoirs.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
But the last decade has shown that this strategy isnโt foolproof โ at least not while climate change fuels an ongoing megadrought across the West. Los Angeles has lost water from both the Colorado River and from a series of reservoirs in Northern California, and Phoenix has seen declines not only from the Colorado but also from the groundwater aquifers that fuel the stateโs cotton and alfalfa farming. Now, as Albuquerqueโs decrepit El Vado dam goes out of commission, the city is trying to balance multiple fragile resources.
El Vado is an odd dam: Itโs one of only four in the United States that uses a steel faceplate to hold back water, rather than a mass of rock or concrete. The dam has been collecting irrigation water for Rio Grande farmers for close to a century, but decades of studies have shown that water is seeping through the faceplate and undermining the damโs foundations. When engineers tried to use grout to fill in the cracks behind the faceplate, they accidentally caused the faceplate to bulge out of shape, threatening the stability of the entire structure. The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the dam, paused construction and is now back at the drawing board.
Without the ability to collect irrigation water for the farmers, the Bureau has had no choice but to let the Rio Grandeโs natural flow move downstream to Albuquerque. Thereโs plenty of water in the spring, when snow melts off the mountains and rain rushes toward the ocean. But when the rains peter out by the start of the summer, the riverโs flow reduces to a trickle.
โWe run really fast and happy in the spring, and then youโre off pretty precipitously,โ said Casey Ish, the conservation program supervisor at the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the irrigation district that supplies water to farmers like Garcia. โIt just creates a lot of stress on the system late in the summer.โ The uncertainty about water rationing causes many farmers to forego planting crops they arenโt sure theyโll be able to see to maturity, Ish added.
Construction crews attempt to repair the El Vado dam along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The federal government has been unable to find a way to stop seepage behind the steel faceplate dam. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
The beleaguered dam also plays a critical role in providing water to the fast-growing Albuquerque metropolitan area, which is home to almost a million people. As the city grew over the past 100 years, it drained local groundwater, lowering aquifer levels by dozens of feet until the city got a reputation as โone of the biggest water-wasters in the West.โ Cities across the region were mining their groundwater in the same way, but Albuquerque managed to turn its bad habits around. In 2008, it built a $160 million water treatment plant that allowed it to clean water from the distant Colorado River, giving officials a new water source to reduce their groundwater reliance.
The loss of El Vado is jeopardizing this achievement. In order for Colorado River water to reach the Albuquerque treatment plant, it needs to travel through the same set of canals and pipelines that deliver Rio Grande water to the city and farmers, โridingโ with the Rio Grande water through the pipes. Without a steady flow of Rio Grande water out of El Vado, the Colorado River water canโt make it to the city. This means that in the summer months, when the Rio Grande dries out, Albuquerque now has to turn back to groundwater to supply its thirsty residential subdivisions.
This renewed reliance on groundwater has halted the recovery of local aquifers. The water level in these aquifers was rising from 2008 through 2020, but it slumped out around 2020 and hasnโt budged since.
โWe have had to shut down our surface water plant the last three summers because of low flows in Albuquerque,โ said Diane Agnew, a senior official at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, which manages the regionโs water. Agnew stresses that aquifer levels are only flattening out, not falling. Still, losing El Vado storage for the long run would be detrimental to the cityโs overall water resilience.
โWe have more than enough supply to meet demand, but it does change our equation,โ she added.
The Bureau of Reclamation is looking for a way to fix the dam and restore Rio Grande water to Albuquerque, but right now its engineers are stumped. In a recent meeting with local farmers, a senior Reclamation official offered a frank assessment of the damโs future.
โWe were not able to find technical solutions to the challenges that we were seeing,โ said Jennifer Faler, the Bureauโs Albuquerque area manager, in remarks at the meeting.
The next-best option is to find somewhere else to store water for farmers. There are other reservoirs along the Rio Grande, including one large dam owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, but repurposing them for irrigation water will involve a lengthy bureaucratic process.
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Reclamation told Grist that the agency โis working diligently with our partners to develop a plan and finalize agreements to help alleviate the lost storage capacityโ and that it โmay have the ability to safely store some waterโ for farms and cities next year.
In the meantime, farmers like Garcia are getting impatient. When a senior Bureau official broke the bad news at an irrigation district meeting last month, more than a dozen farmers who grow crops in the district stood up to express their frustration with the delays in the repair process, calling Reclamationโs announcement โfrustratingโ and โa shock.โ
โIf we donโt have any water for the long term, I have to let my employees go, and I guess start looking for ramen noodles someplace,โ Garcia told Grist.
Even though there are only a handful of other steel faceplate dams like El Vado in the United States, more communities across the West are likely to experience similar infrastructure issues that affect their water supply, according to John Fleck, a professor of water policy at the University of New Mexico.
โWeโve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow of rivers, and weโre likely to see more and more examples where infrastructure weโve come to depend on no longer functions the way we planned or intended,โ he said.
As the West gets drier and its dams and canals continue to age, more communities may find themselves forced to strike a balance between groundwater, which is easy to access but finite, and surface water, which is renewable but challenging to obtain. The loss of El Vado shows that neither one of these resources can be relied upon solely and consistently โ and in an era of higher temperatures and aging infrastructure, even having both may not be enough.
The headwaters of the Rio Grande River in Colorado. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
The University of Colorado Boulder has earned a major grant to boost drought monitoring and prediction on the Colorado River.
The $750,000 award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) on campus and the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) is part of $4.9 million in funding being distributed nationally by the Biden-Harris Administration to help western communities better prepare for droughts.
The project, โImproving Hydroclimate Forecasts by Multi-Model Combination Approaches for Enhanced Reservoir Operations on the Colorado River,โ aims to develop models that will help water managers and stakeholders enhance the reliability of water supply in the Colorado River Basin. CEAE Professor Rajagopalan Balaji, who is also a CIRES fellow, serves as the principal investigator of the project.
Balaji said the Colorado Riverโs water supply, the “lifeblood of the southwestern U.S. socio-economy,” has been under severe stress since 2000 due to streamflow reduction from the Millennium Drought and increasing demand.
Professor Rajagopalan Balaji. Photo credit: University of Colorado
โThe lack of skillful streamflow forecasts beyond a season has likely contributed to suboptimal water management during this prolonged dry period, exacerbating the water supply stress,โ he said. โDeveloping a skillful streamflow forecasting system is crucial for enabling efficient water resource management and ensuring a sustainable and reliable water supply in the river basin.โ
The CEAE-led project will develop new Colorado River Basin streamflow forecast models at 0-24 months lead time. The project will use NOAAโs advanced seasonal prediction systems and new machine learning techniques to improve lead predictions key to water management in the Basin. In addition, the forecasts will be used in the Colorado River Basin Operational Prediction Testbed and with stakeholder engagement to enable efficient water resources decisions.
Hot air masses, born from the blazing summer sun, expand vertically into the atmosphere, creating a dome of high pressure that diverts weather systems around them. These heat domes can stall and persist over the same region for days to weeks at a time. By U. S. National Weather Service/National Ocean Service
Hot air masses, born from the blazing summer sun, expand vertically into the atmosphere, creating a dome of high pressure that diverts weather systems around them. These heat domes can stall and persist over the same region for days to weeks at a time. As high-pressure systems become firmly established, subsiding air beneath them heats the atmosphere and dissipates cloud cover. The high summer sun angle combined with those cloudless skies then further heat the ground.
But amid drought conditions, the vicious feedback loop doesnโt end there. The combination of heat and a parched landscape can work to make a heat wave even more extreme,ย intensifying the risk of wildfires as well. With very little moisture in soils, heat energy that would normally be used on evaporation โ a cooling process โ instead directly heats the air and the ground. Jane Wilson Baldwin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, explains how feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere combine to make heat domes worse.
โWhen the land surface is drier, it canโt cool itself through evaporation, which makes the surface even hotter, which strengthens the blocking high [heat dome] further,โ she said in an interview.
Comanche Generating Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 26, 2024
In one sense, Adam Frisch was an anomaly on the agenda of an energy conference held in Pueblo last Friday. Heโs a Democrat, making a second run for Congress after narrowly losing in 2022 to Lauren Boebert in Coloradoโs Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District. The districtโs largest city, Pueblo, once was reliably Democratic but has become a political toss-up.
Republican legislators, both current and former, were present at the conference, but I didnโt notice any Democratic legislators, even from Pueblo. Why that is, itโs hard to say.
Credit Frisch with knowing how to play to his crowd. He tipped his hat to natural gas several times even as he talked about how geothermal would use much the same skills sets and machinery.
He talked extensively about domestic energy mining and energy production. โThereโs no green energy without mining, just none,โ he said. He suggested that even now, burning wood may produce more energy than solar โ although he did acknowledge Colorado has far more solar capacity than the national average. He took swipes at the โColorado Capitol,โ a reference to the Democrats who have run the show since the 2018 election and who have passed dozens of bills with the intent of pushing and pulling Colorado into a giant pivot that will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For the conference on the Pueblo campus of Colorado State University, Frisch dressed in a style that suggested allegiance to his party: blue jeans, blue shirt and blue sports jacket. But he has some tip-toeing to do in this Congressional district. Heโs an Aspen resident, a member of the city council when that cityโs municipal utility, Aspen Electric, succeeded in achieving 100% renewables. And Frisch by no means disavows climate change.
โWhether Iโm in Durango or Boulder or up in Rangely, Colorado, I would say the same thing, that there is a climate crisis,โ he said at the outset of his remarks in the conferenceโs opening session. โItโs hotter and drier. Everybody knows this. People are planting at different times, theyโre harvesting at different times, theyโre hunting at different times. But we need to figure out if we truly want to try to solve this problem.โ
When running as an โoutsider,โ itโs useful to point to perceived hypocrisies among the elites. In Colorado, the prime candidate is Boulder.
โI need to poke fun a little bit at my former zip code, because in 2019 Boulder County, of the 3,147 counties in the country, (had) on a per-capita basis the most greenhouse gas emissions per person in the country.โ
Congressional candidate Adam Frisch explains why generation will be important. Photo/Allen Best
True? Well, not really. It wasnโt Boulder County but one zip code within the county that spawned many stories in 2020. And it wasnโt total greenhouse gas emissions per capita, but only those provoked by buildings. For that matter, the University of Michigan researchers reported that were able to include only two-thirds of the nationโs counties in the study.
With those caveats in mind, they did find that the buildings in zip code 80510 produced 23,811 pounds of carbon dioxide per person. That zip code is in and around Allenspark, along the road between Boulder and Estes Park. Itโs a place of knotty-pined cabins that burn a lot of propane gas as well as newer and some very large homes that likely use electricity.
The methodology of the researchers also examined the sources of electricity, and by that measure the heavy coal in the electrical mix bumped the figures higher. That area is served by a member cooperative of Tri-State Generation and Transmission or Xcel Energy, and in 2019 both were still very heavily invested in coal โ including coal burned at Pueblo.
One other detail: that same study found that a zip code in San Francisco, the bastion of woke politics, actually had the nationโs lowest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions for buildings.
Details, details, details
That was par for the day. Just as important as who was at this energy summit and the information they shared was who was not there and what was not said.
The event was sponsored by Action Colorado, formerly known as Colorado 22, a reference to the counties of southwestern Colorado and the San Luis Valley that are included. Think of it as patterned after the much older Club 20.
The morning agenda had various speakers, but most notable was a defense of natural gas in buildings. The afternoon was almost entirely about the promise of nuclear energy.
Interspersed through the day were speakers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, or IBEW. They told about their lives and about their work. They spoke very well, very effectively. I spent eight years in Toastmasters trying to smooth my tongue of rusted iron into moments of silver. These guys were like professionals as they talked about growing up on ranches, about the dangers of working with electricity, about building better lives for themselves and their families.
The background question for the dayโs conversation was what will happen when the last of Puebloโs three coal-burning units becomes quiet. One of the three coal-burning units at Comanche Generating Station has closed, another will in 2025, and the third is to become silent no later than Jan. 1, 2031, as per the decision by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.
(In my message to Big Pivots subscribers of June 13, I vaguely and imprecisely referred to 2030. To add some confusion, Gov. Jared Polis last week said 2029.)
What will replace the tax base and jobs in Pueblo and Pueblo County?
President Joe Biden visited the CW Wind factory in Pueblo, the worldโs largest manufacture of towers for wind turbines, in November 2023. Photo/Allen Best
Pueblo is a river town, bisected by the Arkansas River. Itโs a transportation hub for both highways and rail. It is above all a place that makes things. I am sure it has Ph.D.s among its 111,000 residents, but it has blue-collar DNA. Work gloves could be the cityโs logo.
The steel mill was first and maybe even now remains foremost, hulks of rust rising above I-25 even as a new mill is now taking shape. The mill began producing rail in 1882, and thatโs still the primary product, if the lengths have been extended to quarter-mile sections. It was called CF&I when I was young, and although I have no personal memories, Pueblo was still a rich ethnic stew in the mid-20th century, a cauldron of immigrants who labored under a film of coal smoke. You donโt have to go far to find people whose fathers and grandfathers and perhaps great-grandfathers had walked to the mill, lunch buckets in hand, from their houses in the Bessemer and other close-by neighborhoods.
That includes the former mayor, Nick Gradisar, and the fellow I had lunch with at the conference, Joseph Griego. Gradisar, a former board chair for Action Colorado, the organization sponsoring this conference, had a vison of pivoting Pueblo to a green-energy economy. He was handily defeated in the election last year.
Some of that pivot, however, had already started before he even became mayor.
On Saturday morning, after the conference, I awoke in our motel room on Puebloโs north side soon after daybreak and set out to get photographs. I drove south on I-25, pausing during shift change at the gates of the steel mill, which is now owned by EVRAZ North America. Based in London, majority ownership was held by Russian oligarchs, cronies of Putin, most notably Roman Abramovich, who alone owned between a quarter and a third of the company. Evraz said in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that it would sell its North American assets, but nothing has come of that. As best I can tell, Putin cronies still have a stake in Pueblo.
Continuing south out of the city, I turned off from I-25 at the Stem Beach turnoff, then headed northeast on Lime Creek Road, putting Greenhorn Mountain in the rearview mirror.
Greenhorn was originally Cuerno Verde, the name given by Spanish colonizers to two leaders, the father and son, of a band of Comanches. They were known for their distinctive headdress.
The younger Cuerno Verde was killed there in 1779 by the Spanish troops led by Juan Batiste de Anza and their Apache, Ute and Pueblo allies. And with the Comanche weakened, the Great Plains in Colorado with their plentiful bison became more available to some other immigrants, the Cheyenne and Arapahoe.
The alignments of what became Colorado were, in the 18th century, as convoluted as they are in the 21st century, but the conflicts for the time being now draw only figurative blood. By that measure, these disagreements about the energy transition are mild indeed even if one former legislator at the Pueblo conference described the politics he left behind at the Colorado Capitol as โtoxic.โ
The Lime Creek Road constitutes Puebloโs industrial alley. First in this sequence is the former wind turbine factory formerly owned by the Danish company Vesta but purchased in 2021 by CS Wind, a South Korean company. The factory produces towers that are 90 meters tall and weigh 240 tons. President Joe Biden was there last November to give a pep talk about the clean energy agenda.
A little farther along is a turnoff to another set of gray industrial buildings rising up from the plains, the GCC cement plant and limestone quarry, one of two remaining cement plants in Colorado with the recent closure of a plant at Lyons.
The day before, a speaker at the conference โ in the morning, non-nuclear session โ representing a company called Carbon America, had spoken about the hopes to sequester carbon dioxide under cap rock in a geologic formation northeast of Pueblo. Two potential partners exist in the Pueblo area, this one and another near Florence. They manufacture cement from lime.
Carbon America sees carbon dioxide created in this process โnone of it through combustion โ as being one market for carbon sequestration along with the almost pure stream of carbon dioxide being emitted by corn ethanol plants. The companyโs office is about a mile from my own in suburban Denver.
As I continued north, the three giant smokestacks of Comanche 3 rose higher. Before I got there, though, I first saw the low-rising rows of solar panels, a virtual sea of them amid the cacti.
The first solar farm, located directly east of the coal plant, was developed by Eric Blank, who has now become the chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Then, in 2021, completion of a far larger array of solar panels was completed. This project, Bighorn, was on land owned by Evraz around Comanche Station. It can generate 300 megawatts of direct current or 240 megawatts of alternating current. Through the artifice of credits, the solar production allows the steel mill to proclaim it has solar-made steel. (It also matters that the plant works with recycled steel, which requires less heat).
Still heading toward Comanche, I drove under transmission lines. whether generated by solar or for by coal units. However electricity is generated, it must be transmitted to metro Denver and wherever else. Will a nuclear plant transmit electricity at Comanche sometime in the 2030s?
The Pueblo area has Coloradoโs two remaining limestone quarries and cement kilns, including this one along Lime Creek Road. Photo/Allen Best
The tone for the conference was set by the panel that followed Adam Frisch.
The panel consisted of representatives of three of Coloradoโs four privately-owned utilities that sell methane, the primary constituent in natural gas, to consumers for building heat and water cooling.
Curbing methane emissions from Coloradoโs buildings may be Coloradoโs most difficult nut to crack. We donโt swap out buildings the way we do cars or cell phones.
Ken Fogle is a marketing vice president for Atmos Energy, one of Coloradoโs two regulated gas-only utilities, meaning that they donโt also sell electricity. Black Hills Energy does sell both electricity and gas, but not necessarily in the same place. It was represented by Tom Henley, the senior public affairs director. And there was Michael Sapp, the state public affairs director for Xcel Energy, with sells both gas and electricity, and in largely the same areas.
The Monday prior to the conference, the Colorado PUC commissioners had issued their formal 141-page decision about Xcelโs proposed clean heat plan. The PUC commissioners rejected a lot of Xcelโs ideas.
The plan was in response to legislation adopted in 2021 that said that the gas utilities needed to figure out how to start reducing emissions from the natural gas they delivered to their customers for heating of space and water. Itโs one of maybe a half-dozen bills taking aim at methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that the Environmental Defense Fund says is responsible for about 30% of todayโs global warming driven by human action.
โFor those of you donโt know, natural gas has been kind of under the microscope, shall we say, for a number of years now down at the state capitol,โ said Black Hillsโ Henley.
The panelists in Pueblo said they thought the clean-heat legislation adopted in 2021 required too much, too soon. A major grievance is that the legislation required a 4% reduction in emissions by 2025 compared to a 2015 baseline โ but ignoring the role of population growth. In effect, said several panelists, this means a 20% reduction.
Nobody argued whether climate change is real or the role of greenhouse gas emissions in causing climate change. That debate has, at least formally, passed. The argument is whether the reduction goals are realistic.
Itโs a legitimate question. But this was not a panel created to further the dialogue. Instead, aided by softball questions, the remarks drifted toward preserving the status quo. These are companies who donโt want to change their business models in light of the evidence of climate change.
โHow do we support legislators who favor an all-of-the-above energy mix,โ they were asked.
โWeโve got to talk to people that are electing their officials to make sure they know what their officials are doing in Denver,โ said Fogle, the Atmos representative. โI donโt think a lot of folks would agree with whatโs happening in Denver when you go to these places like the Western Slope or Southeastern Colorado. I donโt think theyโd agree with whatโs happening in Denver. So you got to get the people involved and activate the base.โ
Then another question. โDems control the House, Senate and governorโs office, how do you navigate policies that are aimed at mandated, forced beneficial electrification, and what strategies do you try to deploy to work with that agenda?โ
The key strategy that emerged in the remarks of panelists is to emphasize cost of adopting other technologies that will end the need for natural gas in buildings. Going electric is expensive, and natural gas is affordable. And thereโs truth to that. Staying the course is the cheapest alternative. Cost can matter.
Ironically, along the way in this discussion about natural gas, there was a plug for nuclear. But when the agenda moved to nuclear that afternoon that cost almost entirely disappeared from the conversation.
That seems to be a pattern.
Former PUC commissioner Frances Koncilja explains the task force perspective as to what Pueblo needs after all the units in the Comanche Generating Station close. Photo/Allen Best
While some reading this might conclude otherwise, I am actually neutral about nuclear as a long-term solution. As Iโve written before, one of the leading climate change scientists, James Hansen, has embraced the need for nuclear. I know people in Boulder County โ yes, in that place that many want to see as a hotbed of cross-breeding of privilege and wokeism โ who believe it is necessary.
It would certainly solve a lot of problems. Even now, 20% of U.S. power comes from nuclear power plants.
Then thereโs the matter of Coloradoโs declared intention of not leaving behind coal communities in this transition. Frances Koncilja, a former PUC commissioner, in 2023 co-chaired a task force created by Xcel Energy that produced a report in January. The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee Report heartily recommended a nuclear power plant to replace Comanche.
Pueblo County has done its part to reduce emissions, she said. Pueblo County will be responsible for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by Xcel Energy and 20% statewide from the electric sector.
She emphasized the obligation of Colorado. โJust transition means that coal communities should not only be no worse off with the closure of coal facilities but also replace the coal generation with high-paying and highly-skilled jobs and lost tax base so that coal communities have an opportunity to prosper, grow and reimagine their local economies.โ
Koncilja did not specifically cite the 2019 law, which in my read is a little more fuzzy than how she summarized it. Colorado does not owe Pueblo a one-for-one replacement.
The law says the โeffects of coal plant closures on works and communities have the potential to be significant if not managed correctly.โ It also mentions the stateโs intention to โassist workers and communities impacted by changes in Coloradoโs coal economy.โ It also mentions a โmoral commitment.โ
The Pueblo Innovative Energy Solutions Advisory Committee she co-chaired recommended nuclear because of the 300 jobs with a salary range of $60,000 to $200,000 and annual tax payments of $95 million. In 2021, Xcel and its two co-owners of Comanche 3, one of the coal-burning units, collectively paid $31 million.
She also pointed to strong comparisons in wealth to other counties in Colorado, specifically Aspen/Pitkin County, Vail/Eagle County, Boulder County and Denver.
Exploitation of fossil fuels has left Pueblo far, far behind these other locations.
One unit of Comanche Generating Station has ceased operation and the other two will before 2031 gets underway. Photo/Allen Best
The afternoon was rich with speakers with a wealth of information about different types of nuclear technology that are in some stage of development. There were many details, but almost entirely absent were those most useful for relevancy in Pueblo and Colorado altogether. That begins with cost.
One speaker said his companyโs technology will be able to deliver electricity for 3 cents a kilowatt-hour โ making it competitive with renewables. But, of course, it has not been deployed yet.
When the representative from nuclear powerhouse Westinghouse concluded, she took several questions. The first was: What is the cause of the most significant pushback you get?โ Cost, she replied.
Cost infamously rose to $35 billion, more than double original projections, on the two Vogtle units that have come on line recently in Georgia.
But what about the advanced nuclear designs? True enough, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in early 2023 approved the design of small modular reactors. But NuScale, the company that had sought the approval for deployment at Idaho Falls, just a few months later cancelled the order. The problem? Escalating costs.
Can Bill Gates disprove us naysayers? He was in Wyoming on Monday to help break ceremonial ground for a nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. The company has a pending application with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the plant design. Gates and company hope for completion in 2030, a brisk pace.
Gates has put in $1 billion into TerraPower and the U.S. Department of Energy has $2 billion promised for the project. Gates, in an interview on Face the Nation on Sunday morning (see transcript), said he expects to invest several billion more. He estimated completion price at $10 billion. He also said he hopes to 100 projects using the same nuclear technology โto really make an impact.โ
A sea of solar panels exists around Comanche Generation Station along with many transmission lines that export the power to Xcel Energyโs customers. Photo/Allen Best
In a seminar several weeks before, Duane Highley, chief executive of Tri-State Generation and Transmission, said he thought the price will not be bent down until about 2035 or beyond to a point where it can be justified for his members in places like the San Luis Valley and the corn-and-millet and wheat-and-ranch country of eastern Colorado.
To be fair, Highley said the cost of geothermal for electrical production is no better at this point. The comparison may not be the most useful. The technologies compete in two different cost arenas. Simply put, nuclear is a bigger gamble, the entry bid at a higher level.
But the larger point is that we have a whole host of technologies competing to be the final answer to 100% emissions-free energy โ and nuclear is just one.
So why the bandwagon for nuclear? Will Colorado really throw cost considerations out the window and became the test lab for advanced nuclear technologies?
Highley, in his interview,(which you can read elsewhere in this issue), said he wished the federal government would bankroll the next-generation nuclear technology, such as for use on military bases. That would get us over this gigantic hump of price.
It would still leave us with puddles of radioactive waste hither and thither with that huge issue unresolved. Our past recklessness in places such as Rocky Flats, between Arvada and Boulder, leaves many uncomfortable.
And finally, there is this question: Why do nuclear advocates in Colorado think they can continue to make their case without addressing these hard questions.
The best I can figure is that nuclear has become a stand-in for coal and a political statement that borders on religion. Because Aspen, Boulder and Denver likes renewables, we need to be for nuclear. Thatโs why I found the talking points of the congressional candidate from Aspen so interesting. (And, to be honest, speaking to a Pueblo crowd and leading with the fact that youโre from Boulder likely would not be the wisest way to introduce yourself).
But what was Xcel Energy up to in creating this task force? What did it truly hope to accomplish? A mere distraction, a way to gain leverage against the Democratic majority at the Colorado Capitol?
Iโm still scratching my head. I probably will be still until Xcel submits its proposal to the PUC in five weeks.
The outflow at the bottom of Navajo Dam in New Mexico. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):
As the forecast weather becomes warmer and drier again, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 350 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 500 cfs for tonight, July 3rd, at 9:00 PM.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please contact Susan Behery (sbehery@usbr.gov or 970-385-6560), or visit Reclamationโs Navajo Dam website athttps://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
Ridgway’s Rail. Photo: Robert Groos/Audubon Photography Awards
Click the link to read the release on the Audubon website (Jennifer Pitt):
May 21, 2024
The Colorado River is flowing again in its delta. While this is welcome news for birds and people, the long-term progress to keep the Colorado River alive in Mexico with habitat restoration and water deliveries depends on high stakes negotiations currently underway.
For the third time since 2021, the United States and Mexico are collaborating to deliver water to improve conditions in the long-desiccated delta. Environmental water deliveries began mid-March and will continue into October, ensuring the river flows through the summerโs heat, making restored riverside forests and wetlands more hospitable to birds like Abertโs Towhees and Crissal Thrashers and other wildlife including beavers and lynxes. We know that birds rely on water in the Delta as they migrate to locations all over the United States.
Restoration in the Colorado River Delta is implemented by Raise the River, a coalition of NGOs including Audubon, in partnership with U.S. and Mexican federal agencies. Funds, water, and collaboration for this work were committed first in Minute 319 and again in Minute 323, the United StatesโMexico treaty agreements that have been widely hailed for modernizing Colorado River management with a host of benefits to water users in both countries including rules for sharing water shortages, as well as work to use relatively small volumes of water to revive the delta for wildlife and people. The terms of Minute 323 sunset in 2026, but delta restoration efforts remain a work in progress.
The good news: the United States and Mexico are poised to negotiate a successor agreement to Minute 323 in parallel with new federal rulemaking in the United States for Colorado River management. Domestic Colorado River rules, like the binational agreements, have for decades been the result of consensus-based negotiations, in this setting between the seven Colorado River Basin States with concurrence of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. This domestic rulemaking also has a 2026 deadline.
The bad news: at the moment, the Colorado River Basin states appear to be nowhere near consensus, with disagreements about which states, and which water users, will cut back when thereโs not enough to satisfy all. These are difficult and high stakes negotiations. Failure to reach agreement increases the risk of water supply crises and could even throw the dispute in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.
That brings me back to the Abertโs Towhees and Crissal Thrashers, the beavers and lynxes in the Delta. If the Colorado River Basin states fail to reach consensus, thereโs considerable risk that the work of restoring the Colorado River in its delta comes to a halt. Delta restoration depends on binational consensus, and binational consensus depends on a U.S. domestic consensus. Itโs an extraordinarily complex decision-making framework for governance of water supply for 40 million people. The failure to reach consensus may create problems for some people who use Colorado River water, but it is certain to create collateral damage in Colorado River ecosystems including the Delta.
East of the Rocky Mountains, there was a mixture of worsening and improving drought conditions this week. With the passage of a couple of frontal boundaries across the eastern contiguous U.S. (CONUS), in addition to a steady moisture flow from the southwestern CONUS into parts of the Central Plains, several areas across the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. received heavy precipitation. However, heavier amounts varied greatly from region to region and were highly localized east of the Mississippi River. Rates of evaporation of moisture from land and vegetation (known as evapotranspiration) are high across the eastern CONUS, due in large part to several days of excessive heat. Therefore, targeted improvements are depicted in regions picking up above normal precipitation (at least 1 inch above normal rainfall for the week) and where improvements to soil moisture and stream flows were apparent. Given the very dry and hot antecedent conditions leading up to this week, drought degradation is merely halted in most other areas receiving above normal rainfall, as indicators did not show marked improvements. Conversely, for locations receiving below normal rainfall, another week of degradation is warranted. In the West, the Four Corners region was the beneficiary of yet another wet week, aided by a couple of low pressure systems bringing an influx of moisture into the region. Elsewhere in the West, conditions worsened, with several pockets of abnormal dryness (D0) popping up and the expansion of drought conditions, particularly across the northern Rockies. A slight westward expansion of abnormal dryness and moderate drought (D1) in the Alaska Mainland and the introduction of abnormal dryness near the Kenai Peninsula is warranted, supported by short-term derived drought indicators and precipitation deficits. A status-quo drought depiction is depicted in Hawaii this week, but stream flows are slowly falling as the trade winds continue to lack meaningful moisture. Puerto Rico continues to remain drought-free…
The High Plains region experienced a mixture of both deteriorating and improving drought conditions this week, which has also predominantly been the case over at least the last month. A couple of troughs of low pressure moved across the western and central U.S. this week, helping to tap into some moisture from the Pacific Ocean and draw it into the region. This resulted in heavy rainfall across parts of the Four Corners and extending eastward into the Central and Eastern Plains. Parts of Kansas and eastern Nebraska received well in excess of 3 inches of rainfall. Unfortunately, several locations across the western High Plains region were not so lucky and received below normal weekly rainfall. Temperatures were also unseasonably warm, running anywhere from 4ยฐF to 8ยฐF above average for the week in many areas, helping to exacerbate worsening conditions…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 2, 2024.
In the Western U.S., drought improvements were limited to southern parts of the region, where a couple of troughs of low pressure were able to bring some moisture from the Pacific Ocean northward into the Desert Southwest and Four Corners. Elsewhere across the West, conditions have slowly dried out in recent weeks. With another week of below normal precipitation and above normal temperatures, with much of the Great Basin running 4ยฐF to 8ยฐF above average for the week, conditions worsened…
Expansion of drought and abnormal dryness is warranted this week in the South, as much of the region experienced another week of hot and dry conditions, and this has been the case since the start of June for many locations. The only areas where improving conditions were observed is across northern Oklahoma, extending into Kansas, where another week of heavy rain fell (locally more than 3 inches in north-central Oklahoma). After a very wet May, precipitation has been lacking entirely across large parts of central and eastern Texas, extending eastward into Louisiana. Indicators have shown a drying trend and topsoil moisture has really started to dry out. These areas will bear watching in the coming weeks…
Looking Ahead
During the next five days (July 3 – July 7), High pressure is likely to build over the western U.S., leading to hot, potentially record-breaking temperatures and below normal precipitation. Farther eastward, East of the Rockies, temperatures are forecast to become more seasonal for the most part. In addition, parts of the Middle and Upper Mississippi Valley are likely to experience a couple of rounds of heavy rainfall. Rainfall in excess of 1 inch is favored across parts of the Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast.
The Climate Prediction Centerโs 6-10 day outlook (valid July 8 – 12), favors enhanced chances of above average, potentially record-breaking, temperatures across parts of the Intermountain West, with above normal temperatures changes extending into the Western Plains, along the Gulf Coast, and into the eastern U.S. Below normal temperatures are favored in the interior central U.S. Near and below normal precipitation is likeliest across the western and north-central U.S., with above normal precipitation favored elsewhere. Eyes will be on the tropics over the next 6 to 10 days, with enhanced chances for above normal precipitation across southern Texas and the western Gulf Coast. Near to below normal temperatures and above normal precipitation is favored in Alaska and Hawaii.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 2, 2024.
Just for grins here’s a slideshow of early July US Drought Monitor map for the past few years.
American beaver, he was happily sitting back and munching on something. and munching, and munching. By Steve from washington, dc, usa – American Beaver, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963858
Beavers were once abundant in North America. Bringing them back could have serious climate benefits.
After a decade of work, the Tule River Tribe has released nine beavers into the nationโs reservation in the foothills of Californiaโs southern Sierra Nevada mountains. The beavers are expected to make the landscape more fire and drought resistant. Beaver dams trap water in pools, making the flow of water slower so the surrounding ecosystem can reap the benefits of the moisture while making it more difficult for forest fires to start. They can also help a forest heal after a fire by rehydrating the area.
โWeโve been through numerous droughts over the years,โ Kenneth McDarmet said, who is a Tule River tribal member and former councilman. โItโs going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing.โ
Around 80 percent of the Tule River Reservationโs drinking water comes from the Tule watershed. Because the area is so important for the health of the community, the tribe has been preparing the area since 2014, building man-made dams to help the new beavers adapt more quickly.
Temperatures worldwide are expected to get hotter, increasing drought and creating conditions that make wildfires bigger and more deadly. In California, some of the worst wildfires on record have happened in the last five years partly due to drought. In 2020, three fires burned almost a million acres in the Sierra Nevada Forest, and in 2021 a wildfire burned an additional 1.5 million acres. Bringing beavers back may offer a break.
Prior to colonization, the North American beaver population was estimated to be around 200 million. But in the 1800โs, beavers were hunted for their pelts by settlers, decimating the population, while farmers and landowners viewed โ and still view them โ as pests. Today, the beaver population is estimated to be about 12 million.
But in recent years there has been a growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge from tribes, and the beaver has become celebrated as an ecological engineer.
In 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, secured funding for the Beaver Restoration Program, a program designed to restore the beaver population and support conservation efforts. In 2023, the CDFW recognized beavers as a keystone species, an animal that affects other animals on the landscape like bison or bees, and thus influences the ecosystem in major ways. Their absence typically has negative effects on the landscape and its interconnected ecosystems.
Today, the CDFW program partners with tribes, non-profit organizations, land-owners, and state and federal entities to restore beaver populations and habitats in an effort to improve climate change, drought, and wildfire resilience in California.
โWe expect better habitat conditions for native critters on the land,โ said Krysten Kallum, a public information officer with the CDFW. โIt creates a refuge for plants and wildlife.โ
More water means more plants that can attract other types of animals to the area. The CDFW expects to see better habitat development for amphibians like the western pond turtles, southern mountain yellow-legged frogs, and southwestern willow flycatchers, which will help increase biodiversity.
McDarment, of Tule River, said that tribal pictographs show beavers living in the area, and itโs good to see them here again.
โMy hope is to have beaver throughout the reservation,โ he said.
Map showing the Tulare Lake Basin in Central California, USA. Shaded relief data from USGS. Solid blue: Perennial streams Dashed blue: Seasonal streams Dashed light blue: Man-made aqueducts Beige: Dry lake beds. By Shannon1 – PNG version of File:TulareBasinMap.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46989267
Take an animated tour of the unique construction process.
Raising the height of a dam involves many steps, literally and figuratively.
After two years of excavation and preparation work on the canyon around Gross Dam, workers in May began placing concrete, starting the three-year process of raising the height of the dam itself.
Denver Water is raising the height of Gross Dam by 131 feet as part of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. Once complete, the dam will be able to store nearly three times as much water in Gross Reservoir, which will add more resiliency and flexibility to Denver Waterโs water storage system.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Raising the dam is being done by building 118 steps made of roller-compacted concrete. Each step will be 4 feet wide with a 2-foot setback. The existing dam is 340 feet tall. The completed dam will be 471 feet tall.
Check out this animated video to see how the process works.
This animation shows how Denver Water plans to raise the height of Gross Dam in Boulder County, Colorado, as part of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. #grossreservoir#civilengineering#howtoraiseadam
The construction site at the bottom of Gross Dam with equipment used to place concrete and build the new steps. Photo credit: Denver Water.
It will take roughly three years to complete all the steps, with a final completion date set for 2027.
The dam raise process begins at the bottom of the dam using roller-compacted concrete to build the new steps that will go up the face of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Planning and permitting for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project began in 2002. Take a look at this video to learn about the process and major accomplishments.
Denver Water is raising the height of Gross Dam in Boulder County, Colorado as part of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. This video looks at the history of the project and the work being done to raise the dam.
Hurricane Beryl was the latest Atlantic storm to rapidly intensify, growing quickly from a tropical storm into the strongest June hurricane on record in the Atlantic. It hit the Grenadine Islands with 150 mph winds and a destructive storm surge on July 1, 2024, then continued to intensify into the basinโs earliest Category 5 storm on record.
Berylโs strength and rapid intensification were unusual for a storm so early in the season. This year, that is especially alarming as forecasters expect an exceptionally active Atlantic hurricane season.
What causes hurricanes to rapidly intensify, and has climate change made rapid intensification more likely?
I research hurricanes, including how they form and what causes them to intensify, and am part of an initiative sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to better understand rapid intensification. I also work with scientists at the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration to analyze data collected by reconnaissance aircraft that fly into hurricanes. Hereโs what weโre learning.
How did Hurricane Beryl intensify so quickly?
Rapid intensification occurs when a hurricaneโs intensity increases by at least 35 mph over a 24-hour period. Beryl far exceeded that threshold, jumping from tropical storm strength, at 70 mph, to major hurricane strength, at 130 mph, in 24 hours.
A key ingredient for rapid intensification is warm water. The ocean temperature must be greater than 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 Celsius) extending more than 150 feet below the surface. This reservoir of warm water provides the energy necessary to turbocharge a hurricane.
Scientists measure this reservoir of energy as ocean heat content. The ocean heat content leading up to Beryl was already extraordinarily high compared with past years. Normally, ocean heat content in the tropical Atlantic doesnโt reach such high levels until early September, which is when hurricane season typically peaks in activity.
Ocean heat content of the Atlantic Ocean region where a large proportion of hurricanes form. The bold red line is 2024โs ocean heat content, and the blue line is the 2013-2023 average. Brian McNoldy/University of Miami
Beryl is a storm more typical of the heart of hurricane season than of June, and its rapid intensification and strength have likely been driven by these unusually warm waters.
In addition to the high ocean heat content, research has shown other environmental factors need to typically align for rapid intensification to occur. These include:
Low vertical wind shear, where the winds steering the hurricane do not change much in strength or direction over the depth of the storm. Strong wind shear makes it difficult for a storm to stay organized and maintain its strength.
My research has shown that when this combination of factors is present, a hurricane can more efficiently take advantage of the energy it gathers from the ocean to power its winds, versus having to fight off drier, cooler air being injected from around the storm. The process is called ventilation.
Simultaneously, there is an increase in air being drawn inward toward the center, which quickly increases the strength of the vortex, similar to how a figure skater pulls their arms inward to gain spin. Rapid intensification is akin to a figure skater pulling in both their arms quickly and close to their body.
Has climate change affected the likelihood of rapid intensification?
As oceans warm and ocean heat content gets higher with climate change, it is reasonable to hypothesize that rapid intensification might be becoming more common. Evidence does suggest that rapid intensification of storms has become more common in the Atlantic.
Additionally, the peak intensification rates of hurricanes have increased by an average of 25% to 30% when comparing hurricane data between 1971โ1990 and 2001โ2020. That has resulted in more rapid intensification events like Beryl.
This increase in rapid intensification is due to those environmental factors โ warm waters, low vertical wind shear and a moist atmosphere โ aligning more frequently and giving hurricanes more opportunity to rapidly intensify.
Two long-term datasets show an upward trend in the proportion of Atlantic hurricanes that rapidly intensified from 1982 to 2017. Bhatia et al. (2022)
The good news for anyone living in a region prone to hurricanes is that hurricane prediction models are getting better at forecasting rapid intensification in advance, so they can give residents and emergency managers more of a heads-up on potential threats. NOAAโs newest hurricane model, the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System, shows promise to further improve hurricane forecasts, and artificial intelligence could provide more tools to predict rapid intensification.
This article has been updated with Cayman Islands hurricane watch upgraded to a hurricane warning.
Coyote Gulch’s Leaf charging at a -chargepoint+ facility in Oakley, Kansas July 2, 2024.
I took a few days off to drive to Kansas City, Missouri for a baseball game between the Kansas City Quitters and the St. Louis Skeletons. The Skeletons are a new team having formed from an extended circle of friends in St. Louis, just over a year ago, and they emerged from the game victorious over the home team. The Quitters fell behind early but staged a furious comeback in the late innings and came up one run short at the end. I love the diverse player rosters which included women in key positions.
“Skeleben” trying to keep the Skeletons ahead during the late innings June 29, 2024. Coyote Gulch is in the photo upper left white t-shirt.
At least for this game the league has an innovative format. The game was paused after the 4th inning for a Punk Rock concert with two local bands. The players got the chance to relax with some dancing and some time to hydrate (It is hot in Kansas City in June). I don’t often listen to Punk Rock but I have great respect for the musicians that played on Saturday. How many times is the venue a baseball diamond facing home plate? Probably not many.
4th inning Punk Rock concert during the baseball game between the Kansas City Quitters and the St. Louis Skeletons June 29, 2024 at Penn Valley Park in Kansas City, Missouri.
I don’t like to take my Leaf on these long drives. It has an old charging technology and it takes planning to find chargers with CHAdeMO connectors. This trip was necessitated by Hertz cancelling my Tesla rental the day before I was to leave — they said a hail storm had left them short of Teslas to fulfill my contract.
I charge fairly often so that I don’t have to spend too much time at each stop and so I can chew up charge at highway speeds without concern.
Charging was a breeze however as -chargepoint+ chargers were available in Limon, Burlington, Oakley, and Topeka and -chargepoint+ has CCS and CHAdeMO connectors on all of their chargers that I’ve used. There is a sort of CHAdeMO desert in Kansas but in Hays the Walmart has an Electrify America facility with one CHAdeMO connector and in Salina I’ve charged at Casey’s General Store near I-70. That charger was out of service however both ways on this trip but I was able to charge at Marshall Motor Company (a Nissan dealership) in Salina. It is very fast but only available during business hours. After Salina I charged in downtown Topeka (I unplugged an F-150 Lightning that had a full charge since there is only one -chargepoint+ charger there) then proceeded to my hotel in Kansas City.
Charging for the way home was at Wyandotte Plaza in Kansas City, Kansas on a very fast EVGO charger, then Topeka, Salina, Hays, Oakley, Burlington, and Limon.
If you are looking to buy an EV I don’t recommend the Leaf if you plan to go on long drives, charging just adds too much time. I don’t have any experience with the newer EVs with CCS connectors but they potentially charge very quickly if the KW potential at charging infrastructure is a fair indicator.
The Tesla charging network is fantastic and is integrated with their vehicle navigation system so that is my EV of choice for long trips. The navigation system takes you to the Tesla Superchargers and they are all about getting you in, charged, and out. Hopefully Hertz will get their supply in order before I need to rent the next one.
Two fishing companies challenged regulations that required Atlantic herring fishers to pay some costs for observers on their boats. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Federal Chevron deference is dead. On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old legal tenet that when a federal statute is silent or ambiguous about a particular regulatory issue, courts should defer to the implementing agencyโs reasonable interpretation of the law.
The reversal came in a ruling on two fishery regulation cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce.
This decision means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. Whatโs not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense.
While courts and judges will vary, as a scholar in environmental law, I expect that the demise of Chevron deference will make it easier for federal judges to focus on the exact meaning of Congressโ individual words, rather than on Congressโ goals or the real-life workability of federal laws.
Who decides what the law means?
Chevron deference emerged from a 1984 case that addressed the Environmental Protection Agencyโs interpretation of the term โstationary sourceโ in the Clean Air Act. The EPA asserted that a โsourceโ could be a facility that contained many individual sources of air pollutant emissions. This meant, for example, that a factory with several smokestacks could be treated as a single source for regulatory purposes, as if it were enclosed in an imaginary bubble.
In upholding the EPAโs decision, the Supreme Court created a two-step test for deciding whether to defer to a federal agencyโs interpretation of a statute that it administers.
In Step 1, the court asks whether Congress directly addressed the issue in the statute. If so, then both the court and the agency have to do what Congress directs.
In Step 2, however, if Congress is silent or unclear, then the court should defer to the agencyโs interpretation if it is reasonable because agency staff is presumed to be experts on the issue. Justice John Paul Stevens reportedly told his colleagues, โWhen I am so confused, I go with the agency.โ
The central question in both the Loper Bright and Relentless cases was whether the U.S. secretary of commerce could require commercial fishers to pay for onboard observers they were required to bring on some fishing voyages to collect catch data. Lower courts in these cases deferred to the agencyโs interpretation that, under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, it could require fishers to pay.
However, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court majority concluded that Chevron deference contradicts the Administrative Procedure Act. This broad law governs both the procedures that federal agencies must follow and, more importantly, the standards that federal courts must use to review agency actions.
As the majority pointed out, under the Administrative Procedure Act, โcourts must โdecide all relevant questions of lawโโ โ explicitly including interpreting statutes.
Curbing the administrative state
Since 1984, Chevron deference has become pervasive in federal administrative law. By the Supreme Courtโs count, 70 of its own decisions in that time have turned on Chevron deference.
More importantly, thousands of lower federal court decisions โ more than 400 a year on average โ have deployed Chevron deference on issues ranging from Social Security benefits to workplace safety standards, immigration eligibility and environmental protection requirements.
Chevron deference gave many federal agencies broad flexibility to use laws to address new and emerging problems that Congress did not anticipate. But some members of the current Supreme Court โ as well as some federal appellate judges โ criticized this doctrine, for two key reasons.
First, it authorized executive branch agencies to interpret federal law and forced courts to accept agenciesโ reasonable interpretations. However, since the Supreme Courtโs 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, it has been the duty of courts โ not federal agencies โ to say what the law is.
Second, Chevron deference arguably allowed federal agencies to grab more regulatory authority than Congress intended them to have, usurping the legislative branchโs responsibility to make law and delegate authority.
Regulatory agencies take general directions written in laws from Congress and develop specific policies to achieve the goals Congress defined. EPA
How much does Loper Bright undo?
The court majority emphasized that prior court decisions upholding agency interpretations based on Chevron deference cannot be challenged solely because of that fact. As Roberts wrote, these holdings โare still subject to statutory stare decisis.โ
Stare decisis, or โthe thing is decided,โ is legalese for why courts will respect prior decisions. In other words, no challenger can go back to a court that relied on Chevron deference and ask the court to change its original decision that the agencyโs interpretation was OK.
Thatโs good so far as it goes. However, many agency interpretations of statutes can be challenged multiple times.
For example, the Clean Water Act protects โwaters of the United States.โ In 2023, the Biden administration issued new regulations interpreting which bodies of water the law covers. Challengers who disagree with that interpretation can attack the regulations directly and argue that the agenciesโ reading of the law is wrong, as the fishing companies did in the Loper Bright cases.
However, under many laws, businesses and individuals can also challenge an agency interpretation at the moment when the agency decides that a general regulation applies specifically to them. These are called โas appliedโ challenges. After Loper Bright, any time an agency that benefited from Chevron deference goes to apply its interpretation to a new regulated entity, that regulated entity can challenge the agency interpretation โ and this time the agency wonโt get Chevron deference.
Will federal courts still listen to regulators?
Eliminating Chevron deference will likely worsen an existing division among judges, and justices, about how to go about interpreting statutes. It centers on how much a statuteโs purpose and context should matter โ or, instead, how much the judge should focus on the โplain meaningโ of the particular words that Congress chose to use.
Suppose, for example, that a federal court faced the issue of how to define a vegetable for purposes of determining whether import taxes apply to imported tomato sauce. A plain meaning approach would emphasize that Congress decided to tax vegetables and that tomatoes are fruits; hence, tomato sauce is not subject to the import tax.
An approach focused on Congressโ purpose, in contrast, would emphasize that Congress wanted to tax all imports of savory foods that the public generally considers to be vegetables. Using this approach, the Supreme Court in 1893, in fact, decided that tomatoes were vegetables subject to import taxes.
Federal agencies typically take Congressโ purpose and the context in which regulators act very much into account when they decide what laws mean. For example, when the Food and Drug Administration had to distinguish proteins, which qualify as biologics for regulatory purposes, from chains of amino acids, which qualify as drugs, it focused on Congressโ reasons for creating the two categories. Ultimately, the agency decided that a molecule made up of amino acids had to have a certain level of complexity to qualify as a protein, and hence a biologic.
In contrast, ever since the late Justice Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986, federal judges โ and especially Supreme Court justices โ have taken an increasingly โplain meaning,โ or textualist approach, to statutory interpretation. The current Supreme Court, for example, would almost certainly never have allowed a tomato to be a vegetable.
Dissenting Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, along with many other legal experts, foresee serious problems for future cases that turn on highly technical issues. What will happen when a statuteโs nonexpert plain meaning makes no practical sense in a highly technical or scientifically nuanced regulatory regime, such as the FDA classifying biologics and drugs?
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, shown during his confirmation hearing on March 22, 2017, argued in 2022 that Chevron deference โdeserves a tombstone no one can miss.โ AP Photo/Susan Walsh
How long will the APA matter?
This ruling also may signal that the court plans to pay greater attention to the 1946 Administrative Procedure Actโs primacy in federal administrative law. This statute had been in place for almost 40 years when the Supreme Court decided Chevron in 1984, and the Chevron majority did not see it as a problem at the time.
Now, however, it has become a reason to overturn Chevron deference. Other court-created glosses on administrative law may also be dead doctrines walking.
Congress can and has created different standards of review in other statutes, including the Clean Air Act that led to the Chevron decision. What if a future Congress specifically directs that the implementing agency should take the lead in interpreting a particular statute?
I expect that the Supreme Court would reach for the Constitution and declare any such delegation unconstitutional. In other words, it is probably only a matter of time before Loper Brightโs overruling of Chevron deference becomes a matter of federal constitutional law.
This is an updated version of an article originally published January 17, 2024.
by Priscilla Totiyapungprasert, El Paso Matters June 27, 2024
CLINT, Texas โ When pecan farmer Guadalupe Ramirez glanced up at the overcast skies last Friday morning, he felt a sense of relief. The drizzle that came wasnโt much, he said, not like the burst of rainfall parts of El Paso received earlier that week. But still, he welcomed the light sprinkle of rain and cooler temperatures โ a break, finally, from the relentless stretch of dry, 100-plus degree weather.
โThe skies were gray, but not gray in sadness,โ Ramirez said. โI thought โOh, this is nice. Itโs going to be a nice day.โโ
Ramirez was flood irrigating his trees at Ramirez Pecan Farm that morning. The family-run farm, located in the small town of Clint east of the El Paso city limits, has 300 trees whose fruit are small and green in the summer. As the pecans ripen, the husks will turn brown and crack open, ready for harvest in late fall and winter.
But if the trees donโt get enough water, the pecans drop too early. Last summerโs brutal, record-breaking heat could even affect the quality of this yearโs pecans if the orchard doesnโt experience a decent monsoon season, Ramirez said.
New pecans, tiny and green, appear in the foliage of trees at Ramirez Pecan Farm, June 21, 2024. Co-owner Lupe Ramirez says that o save resources, a tree stressed by heat and drought may drop its pecans early, leaving him with a far-reduced crop. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
As climate change and human activities cause higher temperatures, longer heat waves and lower water levels, local farmers have no choice but to adapt if they want to keep their crops alive.
Longer stretches of hotter days โnot a one-time dealโ
About 9 miles north of Ramirez Pecan Farm, the Loya family also received a sprinkle โ not the amount of rain they wanted. Ralph and Marty Loya manage Growing with Sara Farms in Socorro, selling fruit and vegetables from their farm store Bodega Loya, as well as through Desert Spoon Food Hub in El Paso.
Their farm has lost a couple rows of squash already. Workers will have to replant the lost crops, which requires more seed and compost, Marty said.
This June, workers had to harvest crops more quickly because the food canโt sit out in the sun, Marty said. Some food will dry out. Other foods, such as okra, grow bigger and harder. Timing is more critical than ever.
Ralph Loya finds ripe tomato on the vine at Growing With Sara farm, where he employs growing practices he learned from his father and grandfather. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Itโs not just the timing of harvest. The timing of planting has also affected some crops, said Raymond Flores, farm assistant at La Semilla Food Center in Anthony, New Mexico, just west of El Paso.
Last year the first crop of corn planted in early spring didnโt do well, he said. The area experienced a streak of more than five consecutive weeks of triple-digit temperatures in June and July. Prolonged heat stress sterilized the pollen and affected the flowers, which couldnโt produce much corn.
The second planting around the end of May fared better, Flores said. The extreme heat wave had begun to subside by the time the corn stalks began flowering.
Tomato fertility is also particularly sensitive to the heat, he added. Last yearโs tomato harvest came later than usual because the plants couldnโt produce until it cooled down. Workers use shade covers for the tomatoes.
Farmers in general are resilient and have already made changes because of the ongoing drought,โ said Tony Marmolejo, operations development manager at Desert Spoon Food Hub. But the duration of last yearโs high temperatures caught people off guard.
โWhen we got hit with the heat wave last year, everyone knew it wasn’t a one-time deal,โ Marmolejo said. โLocal farmers started making adjustments before this one came about.โ
A basket of locally-grown carrots at Desert Spoon Food Hub on May 31, 2023. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Marmolejo coordinates with suppliers, mostly organic farms in El Paso and New Mexico, to place orders based on what they have available.
Desert Spoon Food Hub would usually get baby carrots around this time from a farm in Vado, New Mexico. But the carrots came earlier in the year and for a shorter time, Marmolejo said. So far, heโs seen less tomatoes and asparagus coming in. The squash and peaches arenโt coming in as early either.
โNot everybody got rain,โ Marmolejo said of the recent break in weather patterns. โThey have to use more water because thereโs less moisture in the air, less moisture in the soil. But thereโs less water supply, so itโs a no-win situation here.โ
The El Paso area normally receives an inch of rain from May through June, but has only received 0.07 inches in the past two months, according to National Weather Service data.
Dwindling water supply also a concern
While most of the Ramirez farm is dedicated to pecan trees, it also grows alfalfa for livestock. But Ramirez said they stopped planting alfalfa in the last couple years because they need to save all the water for the pecan trees.
A grackle flies through an irrigated orchard at Ramirez Pecan Farm, June 21, 2024. The water that floods the orchards attracts animals in the summer heat. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
To plan ahead, workers trim down the trees in the winter so, come summer, thereโs less branches to hydrate. Itโs a balancing act of quantity and quality. When water is limited, Ramirez has to be efficient if he wants his trees to produce quality pecans.
Ramirez waters his trees through flood irrigation every two to three weeks.
Letting the soil get too dry and start cracking will stress the roots and make it difficult to retain moisture, he said. Older trees have deeper roots that can tap into the underground water basin, but if itโs a dry year, the water basin level also goes down.
If he receives less water from his allotment, he reduces irrigation to just enough to keep the trees alive, but thatโs not enough to have the healthiest trees, he said.
His water allotment fluctuates depending on water levels at Elephant Butte reservoir in New Mexico. The reservoir feeds the Rio Grande canal system from which he and other El Paso farmers draw their water.
Lupe Ramirez, co-owner and manager of Ramirez Pecan Farm, shows the size difference between what he says is an average-sized pecan leaf and a leaf whose growth is stunted by heat and drought, June 21, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
Rain helps in ways beyond water conservation. Rainwater has a different profile of nutrients, which includes nitrates, a form of nitrogen, Ramirez explained. The rain also knocks down pests such as aphids from the leaves, he added.
โMaybe itโs wishful thinking,โ Ramirez said. โIโm hoping for a good wet season, but climate is changing.โ
Monsoon, when the region normally receives the majority of its rainfall, runs from June 15 to Sept. 30. Last year, El Paso received 4 inches of rain, below its historic annual average of 9 inches.
His wife, Marty, said theyโre considering putting more shade structures on their produce fields as well as a new cover on their greenhouse next year. The shade creates cooler temperatures, which help the soil retain moisture.
Ramirez said he has a shallow well and has thought about installing a deeper well. But wells come with a hefty price tag and donโt address tightening water restrictions, he said.
Lupe Ramirez, co-owner and manager of Ramirez Pecan Farm, poses for a portrait in front of his farm store, where he sells homemade pecan candies and baked goods and raw, unshelled pecans, June 21, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
If drought and extreme heat waves continue, small farms with less capital and access to resources could get pushed out of the industry, Flores said.
โThe best time to take action against climate change is as soon as possible, but thereโs only so much we can do,โ Flores said. โItโs a giant system. Itโs going to take the collective effort of everyone to change.โ
This article first appeared on El Paso Matters and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
In this archive photo, an ATV races along the dry bed of the Arkansas River at Dodge City, Kansas. Because of irrigation and other factors, the river has been dry since the late 1970s. Max McCoy
In the summer of 1894, a curious railway car plied the tracks of western Kansas, a chemical soup wafting to a sky ruled by a demon sun and chastened by moisture-devouring winds. At the helm of this experiment on wheels, owned by the Rock Island railroad, was a 32-year-old train dispatcher who had convinced railway officials and town leaders across the state that he had the secret to make it rain.
The aspiring rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, was an instant celebrity in a parched land thirsting for heroes. Rock Island officials were so confident of his ability they eventually designated three cars for his rain-making experiments, which by their count had succeeded in all of 52 attempts.
Jewell kept the concoction of chemicals he sent to the sky a closely held secret and scoffed at others who said they had achieved similar results with his method. In an 1895 letter to his hometown newspaper, the Topeka State Journal, he boasted that if only he had the necessary equipment he would โwager my life itself that I could produce rain in ten minutes in the clearest of skies.โ
Jewell traversed western Kansas in his rainmaking car during the worst drought in Kansas that anybody could remember and the seventh straight year of crop failures. The drought had lasted an agonizing 20 months. The resulting economic chaos had ruined farmers and threatened the businesses, like railroads, that depended on profits from hauling and selling crops.
At Clay Center, W.I. Allen, assistant general manager of the Rock Island line, had in April sat in his private car at Clay Center, and surveyed the dry Kansas prairie.
โWe will stop this thing,โ Allen declared, as reported by the Kinsley Mercury. โWe will send our rainmakers into southern and western Kansas, temper this heat and save the corn crop.โ
โThe great Arkansas Valley, one of the richest west of the Missouri River, with its great underflow of water, is to-day a vast desolate waste,โ reported the New York Times in August 1894. โHundreds of square miles of fine crops have been burned up in less than three days, and the cornstalks are scarcely worth cutting for fodder, as all the blades will fall to pieces when handled.โ
The harsh reality of agriculture beyond the 100th Meridian, which runs through Dodge City and roughly separates the arid western third of the state from its more humid majority, was already well known. John Wesley Powell, the Grand Canyon explorer and director of the U.S. Geological Survey during the late 19th century, had argued that plans for settlement and development west of the line should be different because of the lack of water. Powellโs warning was ignored, according to Wallace Stegnerโs 1954 book on Powell and the West, โBeyond the Hundredth Meridian.โ
After the Civil War, a myth took hold on the Great Plains that โrain follows the plow.โ This phrase, which expanded on previous notions that once broken the sod would absorb rain like a sponge, was coined in 1881 by Charles Dana Wilber, a journalist and land speculator. Simply planting lush green crops, Wilber wrote, would cool the earth and attract showers.
Many homesteaders staked their futures on the belief that simply breaking ground for crops would attract enough precipitation to allow rain beyond the 100th Meridian, and for a few years it seemed to work. Then came trials that must have seemed Biblical in nature: the locusts and the periodic droughts and terrifying twisters. The economic spasms of bust and boom continued until the Dust Bowl of the 1930s wiped just about everyone out, with southwest Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle at the center of the disaster.
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s wiped out Midwestern farmers and prompted a mass migration. (Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress)
The Dust Bowl was the result of severe drought, economic collapse, and poor soil conservation. It was an environmental crisis made worse by greed and bad decisions, and it prompted one of the largest migrations in American history. By 1940, some 2.5 million people had abandoned the plains states. Powellโs warning about settlement west of the 100th Meridian had proven true.
After World War II, technology provided a solution to the problem of farming in the arid West: irrigation.
Flood irrigation — photo via the CSU Water Center
In western Kansas and most of the Great Plains in the first decades of the last century, irrigation meant โflood irrigation.โ It was an inefficient method of flooding cropland by diverting the flow of water from a river by way of a canal (or โditchโ as they are mostly called in the West). Ditches are still used to move water from one place to another, but by far the most water used in agriculture in western Kansas is groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer. The aquifer is one of the worldโs largest and lies beneath eight states, from South Dakota to Texas.
McGuire, V.L., and Strauch, K.R., 2022. Data from U.S. Geological Survey.
In the 1950s, it was thought the water in the aquifer was inexhaustible. More and more wells were drilled to reach the aquifer and new delivery methods, chiefly center point irrigation, revolutionized farming. But unlike surface water such as that found in a river, with a relatively quick recharge from rain and snow, the groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer is prehistoric. It is recharged on a geological time scale. Now we know the aquifer is not inexhaustible. In some places, such as beneath the community of Jetmore, north of Dodge City, the aquifer is already nearing depletion. That depletion is accelerated by climate change and continued over pumping of water.
Once the water is gone, itโs gone for the rest of our lifetimes โ and because geologic recharge is so slow, several hundred or perhaps thousands of lifetimes to come. Kansas Reflectorโs Allison Kite, in partnership with Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy, reported in May that despite the grim prognosis, one of the stateโs locally controlled water management districts has resisted adopting meaningful water conservation methods.
Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District 3, perched just above the Oklahoma panhandle in the extreme southwest corner of Kansas, is under fire for its travel expenses, lack of a formal conversation policy and its alienation of farmers who would like to conserve water. Despite a budget of $1 million, it has spent little of it on conservation, although executive director Mark Rude argues everything the district does is in the name of conservation. But in contrast to other districts, District 3 is clearly lagging.
The stateโs five groundwater management districts were established in the 1970s, according to the Kansas Geological Survey. In 2020, for example, Groundwater Management District 1 used a state law that allows for the creation of โLimited Enhanced Management Areasโ to commit farmers to reduce consumption by 50% over seven years.
By 2026, according to a new state law, all districts โ including District 3 โ will be forced to submit reports to the Legislature and file a water conservation action plan with the stateโs chief engineer.
Much of the resistance in District 3 is cultural. Locals like being in control, dislike being told what to do, and consider their legacy water rights sacred. On the districtโs website you can read about how the district was organized to โprovide for the stabilization of agriculture by establishing the right of local users to determine their own destiny with respect to the use of groundwater.โ
Such declarations ignore the rest of us, who have a reasonable right to expect that prehistoric groundwater in the Ogallala Aquifer should belong to us all. But Kansas water rights are based on the โfirst in time โ first in rightโ principle, which means the earliest users are given priority.
Kansas Aqueduct route via Circle of Blue
Perhaps the thinking of District 3 officials is best represented by a couple of stunts in which thousands of gallons of Missouri River water was trucked 400 miles to southwest Kansas. The project was meant to drum up support for an aqueduct that would take water from the Missouri River in northeast Kansas to a reservoir in Utica. Since water flows downhill, and taking water to the west in Kansas is literally an uphill battle, 15 pumping stations would be required. The ground-hugging aqueduct โ really, just a glorified ditch โ would cost an estimated $18 billion to build and another billion a year in ongoing costs.
The Kansas aqueduct is a nutty idea, but one that has taken root among some individuals in western Kansas desperate for a solution to continue irrigation after the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. Aside from its expense and impracticality, it is a regressive idea that harkens back to the days of ditches and avoids a conversation about us having squandered the resource beneath our feet. It also ignores any objections the folks on the other side of the Missouri River, in Iowa and Missouri, might have to say about us taking water from a river we share.
Sprinklers irrigate a field in Hamilton County, Kansas, where some farmers have petitioned to be removed from a local groundwater management district. State lawmakers are pressuring the district to do more to conserve water in the Ogallala Aquifer. (Allison Kite/Kansas Reflector)
The aqueduct is something our 1890s rainmaker, Clayton B. Jewell, might have understood. At least, he might have appreciated how desperate some folks are to believe in a solution that doesnโt really address the problem.
The problem is that agriculture in the state is unsustainable beyond the 100th Meridian without irrigation. Instead of an anomaly, the magnitude of drought that drove the Dust Bowl can be expected to occur with alarming frequency.
โPaleoclimatic data collected for western Kansas indicate a drought as severe as the Dust Bowl occurs there, on average, three to four times a century, according to a Kansas Geological Survey circular. โBased on that probability, there is a 35% chance for a severe drought year in any decade, a 70% chance within a 20-year span, and a 100% chance over the estimated 40-year working lifetime of a western Kansas farmer.โ
The new law that requires District 3 to deliver a water conservation action plan was passed in response to the Kansas Water Authority saying last year that the stateโs longstanding policy of simply slowing depletion was insufficient to protect the Ogallala aquifer. The law is a step toward the state taking control of water management from local districts if consumption continues to outpace conservation.
The battle over the aquiferโs decline pits good policy against powerful agricultural and political interests. Add to the mix the independence that seems woven into the cultural fabric of southwestern Kansas, and you have the ingredients for a water war that might define the region for decades to come.
But this is one war we may already have lost.
Weโve already killed the Arkansas River in western Kansas, leaving just a dry bed behind. Every other river and stream and creek in that third of the state has also vanished. The natural recharge just isnโt enough to keep water in them. Worse, climate change appears to be driving the arid zone to the east, creating an even bigger water crisis.
About a third of Kansas counties are currently in a moderate to severe drought, with some of the worst conditions in the area served by District 3, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The drought puts pressure on farmers to pump more water instead of voluntarily committing to conserve. Itโs difficult to get people to do the right thing when itโs against their economic interests.
If only Jewellโs apparatus had really worked.
The rainmaking railway car was inspected in 1892 by a newspaper reporter who described the mysteries within.
โInside the laboratory part of the car a wide shelf about two feet from the floor extends from one end to the other,โ the correspondent wrote. โOn this are many curious-looking bottles and boxes said to contain the chemicals from which the rain producing gases are made.โ
There were also pipes, bottles, other laboratory apparatus, and a 24-cell battery. Jewell said the gases produced would rise to 8,000 feet, then condense, creating a vacuum that would be filled with moisture โ and produce rain.
โThere are many thinking people in Kansas who believe absolutely in Jewellโs rain-making system, and they are encouraging him in every possible way,โ wrote the observer. In other quarters, however, Jewellโs work was received with skepticism, and sometimes superstition, as those who prayed for rain regarded his apparatus as the work of the devil.
Jewell died in Coffeyville in 1906, aged 44, from pneumonia.
โFor two or three seasons Mr. Jewell did little else besides operating this (rainmaking) car and apparatus,โ noted his obituary in the Topeka Capital, โbut it was finally abandoned.โ
No rainmaker, no aqueduct, and no prayer will save western Kansas from the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The best we can hope for is to reduce consumption, buy a little more time, and adjust to a changing climate and economy. It is time to heed the warning John Wesley Powell gave us so long ago โ and prepare for the new Dust Bowl.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Multiple officials with the City of Aurora, the third-largest municipal water provider in Colorado, attended the June board meeting of the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District in Salida to discuss their recent purchase of water rights in the Arkansas River Basin.
Aurora paid $80.4 million to buy an Otero County farming operation, including water rights used to irrigate 4,806 acres โ about 7,500 acre-feet of water per year, depending on the annual conditions like snowpack and streamflows. Most of those rights are shares in the Catlin Canal Co.
The 2003 IGA between Aurora and the Southeastern District states, โAurora shall not initiate or seek to implement any further permanent transfer of water rights โฆ from sources in the Arkansas River basinโ for the next 40 years.
Interruptible Water Supply Agreements
During the meeting, Rick Kienitz, Arkansas Basin water resources manager for Aurora, acknowledged that the city plans to export its newly acquired water three out of every 10 years for at least 30 years using an Interruptible Water Supply Agreement, or IWSA.
IWSAs allow the State Engineer (Division of Water Resources) to approve temporary changes of water use for three out of 10 years without the due process provided by Water Court, which provides a higher degree of protection for water rights that could be injured by changes in water use.
In 2003, the same year that Aurora signed its IGAs with the Southeastern and Upper Ark water conservancy districts, the General Assembly passed legislation (HB 03-1334) allowing these temporary changes of water use.
IWSAs allow water rights owners to lease water for uses other than the court-approved use for that water โ e.g., a farmer who owns an irrigation right can lease his water to a city for municipal or industrial use. In this case, Aurora is leasing out the farm and promising to keep the water on the farm for seven out of 10 years.
Prior to 2003, changes of water use had to be approved in Water Court. HB 03-1334 circumvented Water Court, and 10 years later, HB 13โ1130 allowed for IWSAs to be re-approved twice for a total of 30 years.
Aurora was a major supporter of this legislation, which allows the city to export 30% of its Ark Basin water out of the basin over the course of 30 years, and as Kienitz noted, Aurora already gets 25% of its municipal water from the Arkansas Basin.
At the Upper Ark meeting, board member Mike Shields emphasized that Auroraโs plans would take 30% of its newly purchased water out of the basin for decades, which seems to be at odds with the IGAs.
Kienitz asserted that the transfer of this water does not violate the IGAs because it is temporary.
Upper Ark board member Tom Goodwin, who also serves on the Southeastern District board, said the original intent of the IGAs was that โAurora would not buy more water in the Arkansas Valley.โ
Auroraโs plan โseems like a shell game,โ Goodwin said. โIt gives the impression that, โWeโll try to manipulate this any way we can.โ And a lot of our constituents are saying very loudly, โDonโt let Aurora take another drop of water.โโ
Upper Ark attorney Kendall Burgemeister pointed out that state law does not allow Aurora to use an IWSA โin perpetuity. So eventually, youโll have to go to Water Court.โ
Kienitz said Aurora would โgo to the legislature to address thatโ in order to avoid Water Court, essentially admitting that Aurora will continue to use its political influence to erode state water law enshrined in the Colorado Constitution* โ i.e., to continue taking 30% of its Ark Basin water for as long as possible.
Moving Water Upstream
When Upper Ark General Manager Terry Scanga asked if Aurora is planning on drying up all 4,800 acres of farmland in a single year, Kienitz replied, โWe canโt rotate acreageโ for more than 4,000 acres because the IGAs are more restrictive than the IWSA legislation.
Scanga asked how Aurora plans to move that much water out of the basin in a single year.
โWhen this is needed, it will be a dry year,โ Kienitz responded. โThere should be storage space in reservoirs.โ
Aurora needs reservoir storage because the process of transferring water from Auroraโs Otero County farming operation into the cityโs municipal water system is complicated.
First, it requires a โreservoir exchangeโ of water โ i.e., Catlin Canal water is traded for water stored upstream in Pueblo Reservoir, normally Fryingpan-Arkansas Project water.
Moving water upstream through an administrative or decreed physical exchange is only possible when river flows are sufficient to permit the exchange without injuring senior water rights between the two exchange points.
In dry years exchange potential is limited, but Kienitz did not address this limitation when responding to Scangaโs question.
Little by little, when river flows allow, Aurora can exchange its water into Pueblo Reservoir, built as part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project, which brings water into the Arkansas River from the West Slope.
Once Aurora exchanges its Catlin Canal water into Pueblo Reservoir, it plans to trade that water for Fry-Ark Project water in Twin Lakes.
From Twin Lakes, the water could then be diverted and pumped into the South Platte Basin through the Otero Pipeline, jointly owned by Aurora and Colorado Springs.
As stated in the Upper Ark Districtโs resolution opposing Auroraโs plan, trading water from Pueblo Reservoir for water in Twin Lakes and then exporting it through the Otero Pipeline would reduce Arkansas River flows between Twin Lakes and Pueblo Reservoir.
Preserving Agriculture
Kienitz repeatedly emphasized Auroraโs commitment to preserving agriculture in the Arkansas Basin. He said Aurora plans to maintain ag production on the newly acquired Otero County property by leasing it to โa farming company.โ
Upper Ark board member Bill Donley, a rancher in Custer County, asked Keinitz, โHow do you keep an alfalfa field if you dry it up?โ (Alfalfa is a perennial crop, but in Colorado, it requires irrigation to survive year-to-year.)
โYou canโt,โ Kienitz replied, so weโve addressed that through the lease with the farmer to compensate for that loss,โ adding that the farmer could also look at growing dryland crops.
According to long-time farmers like Matt Heimrich, attempts at dryland farming on dried-up Ark Basin farmland have not succeeded.
Heimrich farms in Crowley County, which borders Otero County, and he said heโs never seen a dryland crop in Crowley County, nor has his family, which came to the county in the 1950s.
Heimrich told the Colorado Springs Gazette that dryland farming โis a terrible challengeโ because soils change after decades of farming. โItโs not that healthy, native soil that you would see on the prairie. โฆ Itโs very silty, and when the ground has been used for crop rotation, its ability to sustain dryland seeding or farming is diminished.โ
Farmer vs. Developer
The โfarmerโ with whom Aurora has contracted to run a profitable agricultural business is C&A Companies.
C&A Companies is registered with the State of Colorado as a โholding company,โ and its website identifies C&A as โa diversified real estate firm based in Denver.โ
The website also states, โC&A and its stakeholders currently own and control one of the largest privately owned water holdings in the West. โฆ The principals โฆ sit on the boards of various metropolitan districts,โ which include municipal water operations.
One of those principals is C&A co-founder Karl Nyquist, whose background is in real estate and investment banking.
As Marianne Goodland wrote in a 2018 Colorado Springs Gazette article, โNyquist isnโt a farmer. Heโs a developer with a portfolio of multimillion dollar deals all along the Front Range. Heโs also been generous with political contributions over the past half-dozen years.โ
Writing for the Pueblo Chieftain in 2011, Chris Woodka reported that Nyquist attempted to export up to 12,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Arkansas Basin to growing Front Range communities in the South Platte Basin.
Nyquist proposed building a $350-million, 150-mile pipeline to move the water but withdrew the proposal in the face of stiff opposition from Lower Ark Basin farming communities.
โMr. Nyquist claims his pipeline would benefit Prowers County,โ reads a Chieftain editorial from 2011. โWe think heโs peddling snake oil.โ
The Chieftain criticized another of Nyquistโs efforts to remove water from Ark Basin farmland in 2016, stating, โNyquist has a notorious history of diverting agricultural water from the Arkansas River Valley to the Northern Colorado cities surrounding Denver. โฆ We donโt trust Nyquist.โ
Photo: Twin Lakes Reservoir is part of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. For Aurora to use its newly acquired water, it will need to get the water into Twin Lakes and then pump it into the South Platte River Basin through the Otero Pipeline.
* During the past 15 years, Ken Bakerโs reports to the Upper Arkansas Water Conservancy District have warned that legislative efforts to bypass Water Court are undermining constitutional water law. Baker played a key role in establishing the District, served as its attorney for many years, and consulted with the District on legislative matters until his recent retirement.
Coyote Gulch’s Leaf charging at Red Rock Hyundai in Grand Junction May 23, 2023. The Biden administrationโs effort to boost sales of electric vehicles while cutting emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles could face a tough test in the courts
Three years ago,ย President Bidenย promisedย to โdeliver a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis,โ including by makingย half of all new cars electricby 2030. Now the Supreme Court has imperiled that broad agenda โ and possibly other climate and environment rules for decades to come. In recent rulings, particularly two last week, the high court added obstacles tothe governmentโs ability to regulate air pollution, water pollution and the greenhouse gases that are heating Earth. The decisions could empower conservative judges on lower courts throughout the country to block even more environmental regulations โ not only under Biden but presidents who follow him. The recent rulings are โespecially valuable for conservative judges who are inclined towards striking down [environmental] regulations,โ said Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at the environmental law firm Earthjustice. โThey had a knife before; they have a chain saw now.โ
On Thursday, the Supreme Courtย put on hold the Environmental Protection Agencyโs planย for cutting industrial air pollution that wafts across state lines. On Friday, the justices overturned the so-calledย Chevronย doctrine,ย severely limiting the power of federal agenciesย to regulate fundamental aspects of American life, including the environment. And court rulings in 2022 and 2023 targeted the EPAโs authority toย curb greenhouse gasesย and toย protect wetlands from runoff. Together, the decisions underscore how a multiyear campaign by industry and conservative groups is successfully weakening the power of the administrative state, and the EPA in particular.
The Eagle River, left, flows into the Colorado River near Dotsero. The Eagle River Coalition recently completed its community water plan, which outlines environmental flow deficits, but does not make recommendations on how to get more water into rivers. CREDIT: BETHANY BLITZ/ASPEN JOURNALISM
In an effort to elevate the needs of the environment in water management, the state of Colorado is convening a new committee that is scheduled to begin meeting this summer.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board and Boulder-based nonprofit River Network are creating a pilot program known as the Environmental Flows Cohort, which will assess how much water is needed to maintain healthy streams and how to meet these flow recommendations. The cohort will include not just environmental advocates, but agricultural and municipal water users, who may initially feel threatened by environmental flow recommendations.
The goal of the program is to address the barriers that lead to these recommendations being excluded from local stream management plans. The cohort was one of the recommendations in a January 2023 analysis of SMPs by the River Network.
โThe idea is how can the environmental and recreation side of things better partner with the agricultural users on trying to find win-win projects for keeping more water in the stream,โ said Brian Murphy, director of the healthy rivers program at the River Network. โAn emphasis on making sure stream management plans identify and prioritize projects that include environmental flows, thatโs been kind of a shortfall.โ
An objective of Coloradoโs 2015 Water Plan was to create SMPs for most of the stateโs important streams by 2030. SMPs are meant to focus on water for the environment and recreation, which are โnonconsumptiveโ needs where โusingโ the water means that it stays in streams. The idea is that these flow targets could then result in projects designed to get that agreed-upon amount of water in streams.
SMPs were originally intended as a tool to legitimize and enhance the role of environmental and recreation groups in water management, but a 2022 report by the River Network found that focusing on water to maintain a healthy environment was inconsistent, problematic and unpopular among the stakeholders who were creating the SMPs. Just 6% of project recommendations at the time focused on environmental flow targets and only 1% focused on recreation flow targets, even though SMPs were supposed to have been a tool specifically for the benefit of nonconsumptive water uses.
In some cases, the SMPs broadened in scope and morphed into Integrated Water Management Plans that included an agricultural water needs assessment and ditch inventories.
โOne of the big challenges, it was found, was just a lot of perceived negativity regarding flow recommendations,โ said Andrea Harbin Monahan, a watershed scientist with CWCB. โThereโs a perceived animosity between the recreation community versus agriculture, for example. Figuring out a way to get all those people into one room and start those conversations early and build trust early in the process are hopefully the outcomes of this environmental cohort.โ
Under the bedrock principle of Colorado water law, the oldest water rights, which belong to agriculture and cities, get first use of rivers and other user groups have historically had trouble making inroads. The actions of the biggest irrigators often have an influence on how much water is left flowing in the stream, and there are few ways to guarantee there is enough for ecosystems and wildlife. The CWCB holds instream flow water rights intended to โpreserve the natural environment to a reasonable degree.โ But the oldest of these date to the 1970s โ about a century younger than the most powerful agricultural water rights, which limits their effectiveness.
As climate change squeezes water supply and creates shortages for all users, it also ratchets up the tension between groups that take water out of the river and groups that want to leave it in.
Homestake Creek is a tributary of the Eagle River. The Eagle River Coalition recently completed its community water plan, which outlines environmental flow deficits, but does not make recommendations on how to get more water into rivers. CREDIT: BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Eagle River Community Water Plan
The Eagle River Coalition is an organization dedicated to advocating for the health of the Eagle River. After five years of community meetings and technical work, the group recently released the Eagle River Community Water Plan. The plan provides an assessment of current conditions on the Eagle and its tributaries, and what conditions may look like with future risks such as climate change, more municipal water demands and new reservoir projects that take more water to the Front Range.
โThe main takeaway to me is that weโre going to see low flows and less water in the river, so we as a community have to figure out how are we going to prioritize keeping our river flowing,โ said James Dilzell, executive director of the Eagle River Coalition. โFiguring out how to have more water in the river is going to be absolutely critical.โ
The plan is meant, in part, to provide an understanding of environmental and recreational needs gaps and how they are affected by high and low flows and increasing demands for water in Eagle County and on the Front Range.
But although the plan includes a section about environmental flow deficits, which is the amount of water that would be needed to meet the CWCBโs instream flow water right during a typical year, it โ like most SMPs โ does not set a target amount for flows.ย
This map in the Eagle River Community Water Plan shows the environmental flow deficits on the Eagle River and its tributaries. The EDFs reflect the amount of water that would be needed to meet the Colorado Water Conservation Board Instream Flow water right in a typical year. CREDIT: EAGLE RIVER COMMUNITY WATER PLAN
Seth Mason, a hydrologist with Carbondale-based Lotic Hydrological, helped author the Eagle River plan and will be participating in the cohort. He said putting a number on exactly how much water the river needs at different times of year under different future climate and development scenarios is complicated. For example, it might be the case that the only way for a section of river to meet a certain flow target is to build a reservoir to control releases, but a new reservoir project could be at odds with what the community wants.
โWhat we didnโt do was develop a prescriptive flow regime,โ Mason said. โAnd that, I think, is what a lot of people end up looking for. โฆ I think providing the nuance necessary for people to do critical thinking about trade-offs is more valuable than drawing the perfect stream flow regime, which there is no such thing.โ
Dilzell said he is interested in learning more about flow recommendations on the Eagle River and its tributaries, and the completion of the community water plan is just the first step in local watershed management.
Still, river flows can be a proxy for ecosystem health, and some say target recommendations are essential. Bart Miller, healthy rivers director with environmental group Western Resource Advocates, said stream flow recommendations are the bedrock for protecting the environment. WRA is helping to facilitate the cohort.
โFlow has an impact on water quality, temperature, habitat โ everything from spawning cues for fish to just keeping them alive when flows are getting low at the end of the summer,โ Miller said. โThereโs a wide range of benefits from having a clear picture of what stream needs are and articulating recommendations on how to improve or protect what the flows look like.โ
Although they are not required in order to get state funding for SMPs, CWCB officials would still like the groups that develop SMPs to come up with flow recommendations. Harbin Monahan said the cohort will be a way to work through barriers, understand the contentious nature of the topic and build trust among stakeholders so that more SMPS can have flow recommendations in the future.
โThe entire idea behind stream management plans was to help support the environment and recreation community and help them meet the flow needs for specific uses,โ she said. โItโs OK if stream management plans donโt come out with a flow recommendation. Itโs not typically required, but it is a desired outcome.โ
The River Network and CWCB are taking applications for the Environmental Flows Cohort and plan to choose 15 to 20 participants to begin meeting in July. The cohort plans to meet five times between July and next spring and will develop a training program for local watershed groups to follow when they create SMPs.
