#Snowpack news May 13, 2024
Aspinall Unit spring operations update
From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):
Biden-Harris Administration Delivers $60 Million from Investing in America Agenda for Drought Resilience in the #RioGrande Basin
Click the link to read the release on the Reclamation website:
May 10, 2024
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland today announced a $60 million investment from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for water conservation and drought resilience in the Rio Grande Basin. These resources will ensure greater climate resiliency and water security for communities below Elephant Butte Reservoir and into West Texas. Secretary Haaland made the announcement in Albuquerque following a briefing on the Rio Grande Project with state and local officials, irrigators, and other partners.
Through cooperative agreements with the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Bureau of Reclamation will work with the Elephant Butte Irrigation District and El Paso County Water Improvement District #1, the International Boundary and Water Commission, and local stakeholders to develop supplemental water projects or programs to benefit Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project and endangered species in the basin. The water savings from the proposed projects are anticipated to be in the tens of thousands of acre-feet per year.
“The Biden-Harris administration is committed to making communities more resilient to the impacts of climate change, including the Rio Grande basin and the people, wildlife and economies that rely on it,” said Secretary Deb Haaland. “We continue to make smart investments through President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to safeguard water resources, invest in innovative water conservation strategies and increase overall water efficiency throughout the West.”
Stretching over 1,200 miles, the Rio Grande provides water supplies for agricultural food production as well as renewable drinking water to fast-growing cities and municipalities throughout New Mexico and Texas. The river supports eight federally recognized Tribes, habitat for migrating birds and other species, and a robust and highly profitable tourism and outdoor recreation industry. Despite improved hydrology in recent months, a historic 23-year drought has led to record low water levels throughout the basin. The Biden-Harris administration continues to deliver historic resources to address ongoing drought and strengthen water security across the region now and into the future.
Today’s announcement comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $500 million for water management and conservation efforts in areas outside the Colorado River Basin experiencing similar levels of long-term drought. Funding for other basins will be announced through the summer and fall. The Biden-Harris administration has already invested almost $59 million in the Rio Grande Basin, including more than $30 million for aging infrastructure repairs to improve water supplies and water delivery systems in the Rio Grande and Middle Rio Grande Projects through Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding.
“The Rio Grande, like many rivers in the West, has struggled with the impacts of severe drought for decades,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “This funding from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda gives Reclamation and our partners the ability to explore options for stormwater capture and other activities to ease the impacts of climate change.”
On the Rio Grande, this funding will help efforts to increase storage at existing sediment dams and new off-channel storage to capture stormwater. This water will be used to recharge the aquifer, reduce irrigation demands and improve and create riparian wildlife habitat for threatened and endangered species like the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo and Southwest Willow Flycatcher. Other projects will improve irrigation infrastructure efficiency and fund forbearance and fallowing programs.
Prolonged drought within the project area and heavy regional reliance on groundwater pumping has caused a reduction in surface water supply, resulting in a decrease in project efficiency and loss of wildlife habitat.
Implementation of these programs and projects will benefit Rio Grande Project farmers, residents within the counties of Doña Ana and Sierra in New Mexico, and El Paso County in Texas, as well as the Republic of Mexico. These communities are identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged and vulnerable to climate change based on the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
Lincoln Park/Cotter Community Advisory Group encourages well owners to participate in monitoring program — The #CañonCity Daily Record #ArkansasRiver
Click the link to read the article on the Cañon City Daily Record website. Here’s an excerpt:
May 10, 2024
In February 2023, the current Radiation Materials License holder, Colorado Legacy Land (CLL), declared insolvency and stated they could no longer maintain staff to ensure site security or continue regular operations. The Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) took emergency action and contracted with the existing company, Ensero Solutions LLC, to continue with the necessary on-site activities. CDPHE assumed the monitoring program including wells and air monitoring stations because CLL had abandoned these responsibilities.
At the end of February, the CDPHE sent a letter to residents of Lincoln Park who have been part of the well-monitoring program established decades ago to keep track of groundwater contamination associated with the former Cotter Uranium Mill. The agency was asked for permission to access properties and test wells as had been done routinely in the past by either Cotter or CLL.
At the Community Advisory Group (CAG) meeting on April 16, Shiya Wang, CDPHE Radiation Project Manager, announced that of the 38 letters sent to well owners, only 16 responses were received to allow CDPHE representatives to continue the monitoring program. If you, the well-owner, receive a follow-up letter, please take the time to complete your information and get it back to the CDPHE. Any questions can be directed to the agency or the CAG at its Facebook page, “Lincoln Park/Cotter Community Advisory Group”
The reason for monitoring, as stated in the letter, is: “Continuous sampling of environmental media provides valuable data to both the State and to the Lincoln Park Community regarding the migration of hazardous constituents in the environment that have been associated with historical operations at the Site. Residents are encouraged to continue providing access to the sampling location so that this information can continue to assist the State’s, as well as the community’s, understanding of the current conditions in the area.
Dozens of law professors say Utah failed to protect #GreatSaltLake: Brief filed in environmental lawsuit argues #Utah violated its public trust responsibilities — Utah News-Dispatch
Click the link to read the article on the Utah News-Dispatch website (Kyle Dunphey):
May 9, 2024
Law professors from around the country threw their support behind a lawsuit filed against the state of Utah, arguing officials haven’t done enough to help the Great Salt Lake.
In an amicus brief filed in Utah’s 3rd District Court last week, 36 law professors say Utah is violating public trust doctrine, which requires the state to protect cultural or natural resources for public use, including bodies of water, land, artifacts or wildlife.
It’s the latest in a lawsuit filed in September by Earthjustice, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, American Bird Conservancy, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Utah Rivers Council, all conservation groups.
Public trust doctrine was in place when Utah was granted statehood in 1896, according to the Utah Law Review, designed to ensure the state’s navigable waterways would be protected and available for public use. As the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands noted in a 2023 presentation to lawmakers, “The beds of navigable bodies of water must be managed in a way that does not interfere with navigation, commerce, fishing, and the ecological value of the waterbody.”
The lawsuit notes that public trust doctrine is “well established” in Utah code and has been upheld by several state Supreme Court decisions. In the brief filed this week, the professors cited court rulings that found states have an obligation to preserve public resources.
“Consistent with this growing judicial chorus, Utah’s public trust duties are to protect and preserve the Great Salt Lake. Utah has not come close to meeting those responsibilities,” the brief reads.
In a statement given to Utah News Dispatch on Thursday, officials pushed back on that argument.
“We have been — and will continue to — work to protect the interests of the state of Utah. Each division within the Department of Natural Resources is mindful of its responsibilities. Together, we are addressing the need to protect the Great Salt Lake,” said Joel Ferry, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources.
The lawsuit names several state agencies, including the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, and the Utah Division of Water Rights.
The state has filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit, writing earlier this year in court documents that “The legal solution offered by Plaintiffs is unsupported by Utah law and disregards the many and varied mechanisms the State is utilizing to manage Great Salt Lake.”
That sentiment was echoed in a social media post from Republicans in the Utah Legislature, which didn’t specifically reference the lawsuit, but criticized “litigious outside interests.”
“The Legislature’s progress on the Great Salt Lake has been nothing short of historic,” reads a post on X from the House Majority account. “To continue this work, we need real solutions — not symbolism and theatrics. We need local involvement, not litigious outside interests.”
The brief references several state actions it says endangered the public trust resources. That includes “actively authorizing water appropriations that divert upstream water.”
“Rather than address that problem, the state has instead focused on ‘trying to persuade individual water users to undertake voluntary measures to reduce their consumption,’” the professors write. “Seeking voluntary measures from water users is insufficient to meet the state’s duty to ensure against the ‘substantial impairment’ of the Great Salt Lake while the lake continues to shrink and its ecosystem is undergoing collapse,” the group of professors write, urging the court to force Utah to develop and enforce a plan to restore the lake.
That plan could include “changing surplus water management in wet years, managing flows outside the irrigation season for conservation, and requiring efficiency improvements with the conserved water released to the Lake,” according to court documents.
In a statement, Ferry said the department received and reviewed the brief, and plans to oppose it.
“It is largely duplicative of the Plaintiffs’ arguments and that Utah’s district court rules do not authorize such filings,” he said.
The brief was signed by law professors from around the country, including the Georgetown University Law Center, University of Baltimore School of Law, University of Oregon School of Law, and University of Houston. However, there were no Utah-based signatories.
An amicus brief is a court document usually filed by academics, businesses, subject-matter experts or trade associations who side with one party in a lawsuit. They typically present additional information, perspectives or precedent for the court to consider.
Here’s what you need to know about proposals to save the #ColoradoRiver — KUNC #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
May 9, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The Colorado River is in trouble. More than two decades of megadrought fueled by climate change have sapped its supplies, and those who use the river’s water are struggling to rein in demand. Now, with current rules for river sharing set to expire in 2026, policymakers have a rare opportunity to rework how Western water is managed.
The river is shared across seven states and parts of Mexico. It’s an area that includes about 40 million people, a multibillion-dollar agriculture industry, 30 federally-recognized native tribes and countless plants and animals.
Satisfying the needs of such a diverse group is proving difficult, and the policymakers tasked with shaping the river’s next chapter are stuck at an impasse.
The federal government operates the massive dams and reservoirs that control the river’s flow, but has mostly left decisions about how to share its water to states.
Right now, the states are divided into two groups that have bickered about water management for the past century. One group, the Upper Basin, is comprised of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico. The other, the Lower Basin, includes California, Arizona and Nevada.
Those two camps have each sent proposals to the federal government in an attempt to have their say in shaping the river’s future. Those competing proposals, along with separate recommendations from environmental advocates and tribal groups, are making it hard to coalesce around one set of rules.
The Upper Basin proposal
The Upper Basin is legally required to send a certain amount of water to downstream neighbors each year. After more than 100 years of complying with that standard, Upper Basin states contend they should be allowed to send less. The Upper Basin’s proposal puts that idea into writing.
About 85% of the Colorado River starts as snow in the Upper Basin’s mountains. Climate change, the catalyst for the region’s water shortages, is shrinking the amount of snow that falls in those mountains each year.
Because of that, the Upper Basin states argue, the Upper Basin feels the sting of climate change more sharply than the Lower Basin. Cities and farms within its four states have to adjust their water use in accordance with recent snowfall, Upper Basin leaders say, but the Lower Basin can count on predictable water deliveries from upstream.
Sending less water downstream, however, would be a violation of the Colorado River Compact, the 1922 legal agreement that provides the framework for modern water management in the arid West.
The Upper Basin’s pitch to send less water relies on a specific interpretation of the language in that agreement — one that hasn’t been tested in court. Critics of the plan, particularly leaders in the Lower Basin, say that interpretation isn’t solid enough to be such a big part of Colorado River management going forward.
The Lower Basin proposal
The Lower Basin states released their own proposal for managing the Colorado River on the same day as their upstream neighbors.
Their proposal introduces a new way of measuring how much water is stored in the region’s reservoirs and a new system for figuring out water cutbacks accordingly.
Currently, decisions about when to cut back on water—and by how much—are calculated using forecasts about water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. The Lower Basin wants to, instead, make those decisions based on the total amount of water held in eight reservoirs, including Powell and Mead.
Lower Basin leaders say their new system would be more holistic and sustainable than the current way of doing things.
Under the Lower Basin proposal, water cutbacks would be triggered when the combined amount of water in those eight reservoirs falls below a certain amount.
Cutbacks are split into three tiers. In the first two, when reservoir levels are somewhat low, Lower Basin states would be the only ones to take less water. But when combined reservoir levels drop below 38% full, both the Lower Basin and Upper Basin would have to take cuts.
Read more about the Upper and Lower Basin proposals here.
Environmental groups submit separate proposal
A coalition of environmental nonprofits sent another proposal to the federal government. Those recommendations aim to make sure enough water flows through rivers to sustain healthy ecosystems for plants and animals.
The proposal suggests a new system of measuring water and doling out cutbacks. Like the Lower Basin’s plan, it would measure water in eight reservoirs instead of two. As an added layer, the environmental groups also suggest using recent climate conditions — like the amount of water held in soils — as a factor when deciding how much water to release from reservoirs.
The environmental proposal also wants water managers to take fish habitats into greater consideration when deciding how much water should be released from reservoirs.
In addition, the conservation groups suggest more frequent releases of water into the Colorado River Delta, an area in Mexico where the river used to meet the ocean. Considered an important bird habitat, the Delta now only has water flowing through it when policymakers decide to send it there.
Lastly, the environmental proposal recommends the creation of a “conservation reserve,” a new program that would let water users leave extra water in reservoirs to help the environment and protect infrastructure like dams, both of which can suffer when water levels are too low.
All seven of the organizations that crafted the river management proposal receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.
Read more about the environmental proposal here.
Tribal groups advocate for water interests
Tribes, which have long been left out of conversations about managing water in areas they occupied long before white settlers, are also trying to shape the Colorado River’s future.
The 30 tribes that use Colorado River water are diverse and rarely agree on any one water management policy. Because of that, they sent the federal government a letter with a set of “principles” – broad reaching ideas about water management that don’t specify how much water might flow to individual states or tribes.
So far, 19 different tribes have co-signed the letter. In it, they call for three things that could give Indigenous people a bigger role in managing water:
First, they want the federal government to uphold a longstanding legal obligation to tribes by rejecting any new rules that could cut into their access to water and compensating any tribes that are forced to take cutbacks in times of shortage.
Tribes hold rights to about a quarter of the river’s flow, but many don’t have the funding and infrastructure to use all the water they’re allowed, and instead leave it in the river. In a second tenet, the letter asks the government to make it easier for tribes to take part in conservation programs – in which water users get paid to leave water in the river – and make it easier for tribes to market or lease their water to people who don’t live on tribal land.
Third, the letter asks the government to formalize tribes’ seats at the table. They have largely been left on the sidelines of water negotiations for the last century, and now they’re asking for a more set-in-stone way for tribes to have a say in talks about Colorado River policy.
Read more about the tribal letter here.
What’s next?
The federal government wants states to agree on one proposal, rather than two, before it installs any new Colorado River water rules. States say they’re working towards consensus, but signs of progress have been few and far between.
While the next set of rules won’t go into effect until 2026, the federal government wants to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. The Biden Administration is asking states to agree on one proposal before the end of 2024, in case the current administration loses the White House in the November election.
Without significant changes to the way the Colorado River is used, the problem is likely to get worse. Scientists predict that climate change will keep shrinking the water supply, meaning cutting back on demand will only get more important.
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels set a new record high in April 2024 ~ 427 ppm — @ZLabe #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround
0 years ago April averaged ~402 ppm. Preliminary data: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
With a strong #snowpack, the Dillon Reservoir will ‘fill and spill’ for the 2nd year in a row — Summit Daily News #BlueRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily News website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:
May 11, 2024
Dillon Reservoir will “fill and spill” for the second year in a row, Denver Water announced this week. Dillon Reservoir – which is [part of] Denver’s public water supply – is currently 87% full, matching the average for May, according to Denver Water. Natural streamflow into the reservoir is predicted to be 101% of normal this runoff season and, right now, inflow into the reservoir is about 350 cubic feet per second. With the reservoir levels expected to reach an elevation of 9,012 feet by June 12, Denver Water said that it expects both the Dillon and Frisco marinas could be fully operational by that date. As inflows into the reservoir increase over the next week, Denver Water said it will ramp up outflow to the Blue River to between 200 and 400 cubic feet per second. Then, the following week, outflow may be adjusted to accommodate the Colorado Park and Wildlife’s fish survey and will likely remain in the 250 to 400 cubic feet per second range.
But by the end of May or early June, [Kevin] Foley said that he expects the Blue River will be open to commercial rafting, which requires at least 500 cubic feet per second. He expects the season could last three to four weeks, though it could be longer or shorter depending on weather. With a healthy snowpack peak of 119%, Foley said that the conditions for rafting could be pristine this summer. That is enough of a snowpack to fill the Dillon Reservoir and have other rivers in the state flowing too, but it is not so much that it will create too strong of streamflows for commercial rafting, he said.
Ruedi Reservoir expected to fill again — The #Aspen Daily News #FryingpanRiver #RoaringForkRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification #snowpack
Click the link to read the article on The Aspen Daily News website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
May 10, 2024
Ruedi Reservoir is expected to hit full capacity for only the second time in five years, according to projections shared by reservoir managers. The managers don’t know exactly when the reservoir will hit capacity, though Tim Miller, hydrologist for the Bureau of Reclamation — the federal agency that operates Ruedi Dam — said it will likely stay full through July. Miller said calls for Ruedi water farther down the Colorado River could change that timeline. Ruedi is currently 68.8% full.
Ruedi did not reach its full capacity for three years between 2020 and 2022. Low runoff kept the reservoir from filling in 2020, and then overshoots in inflow projections and dry soils caused the reservoir to miss its capacity again in 2021. Reservoir levels then dropped to a 20-year nadir in March 2022 and never quite reached full capacity during a rebound that summer. Those three years were the only multiyear stretch in which Ruedi failed to fill in the last 10 years. Reservoir levels also fell short in 2018.
Ruedi ended its dry streak after a wet winter in 2023, with Miller reporting in August that last year was almost flawless for reservoir operations. This year, Miller said snowpack and runoff projections look similar to 2023. Water supply forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center project a total Fryingpan River April-July runoff volume at Ruedi roughly 10% higher than projections from the same time in 2023 (this year’s May 1 projection is 135,000 acre feet).
Miller said the Ruedi may receive even greater flows than expected this year because of operational issues at a connected facility on the eastern slope. Miller said water managers may have to leave more water in the Fryingpan River this year than usual if Turquoise Lake, an eastern slope reservoir that receives Fryingpan water through a tunnel under the continental divide, fills up. Miller said Turquoise’s outflow will be limited this year because both pump/turbine units at the Mount Elbert pumped-storage powerplant, which constitutes one outlet for the reservoir, are not operating this summer.
U.S. Senator Bennet announces $2.3 million for Southern Ute water infrastructure — The #Durango Herald
Click the link to read the article on The Durango Herald website (Reuben M. Schafir). Here’s an excerpt:
Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton visited the Pine River Indian Irrigation Project on Monday and announced $147.6 million in investments to 42 projects in 10 states facing water reliability challenges. The announcement included a $2.3 million grant to the Southern Ute Indian Tribe to address the PRIIP’s crumbling infrastructure. The funding is a part of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Watersmart Drought Resiliency program.
“For too long, the United States has failed to live up to its responsibility to adequately fund and maintain the Pine River Indian Irrigation Project,” Bennet said in a news release. “I was grateful to travel to Ignacio (Monday) with Commissioner Touton to welcome this investment to ensure the Southern Ute Indian Tribe can access the water it needs. There is much more work to be done, but this is a great start.”
The project uses water from Vallecito Reservoir, managed by the Pine River Irrigation District, to irrigate about 12,000 acres of land via 170 miles of ditches and raised flumes. Tribal officials have called the degradation of the infrastructure a “ticking time bomb,” and farmers and rancher dependent on the system are routinely shorted the water they need. According to a 2024 estimate reported by the Colorado Sun, PRIIP needs $35.3 million in repairs.
Reclamation finalizes SEIS process to address drought and climate impacts on #GlenCanyonDam and #HooverDam #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Reclamation website:
May 9, 2024
Interior Department announced earlier this year that historic investments led to record water savings, helped stave off immediate collapse of Colorado River system
WASHINGTON – The Bureau of Reclamation today finalized its process to protect the short-term stability and sustainability of the Colorado River System by signing the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for Near-term Colorado River Operations Record of Decision. The Department of the Interior released the final SEIS in March 2024.
Reclamation initiated the supplemental environmental impact statement to protect Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam operations, system integrity, and public health and safety. This supplemental guidance will be effective through 2026 – at which point the existing 2007 Interim Guidelines and the 2019 Drought Contingency Plans expire. This record of decision is a substantial milestone in the ongoing efforts to address water scarcity, the ongoing drought, and climate change challenges in the Colorado River Basin.
Reclamation’s action selected in this record of decision is the preferred alternative that the Department identified in March 2024, which will yield at least 3 million acre-feet of system water conservation savings through the end of 2026, coinciding with the expiration of the current guidelines, and provides additional tools to manage dry hydrology. Selection of the preferred alternative was made possible through Reclamation’s collaborative efforts including those with the seven basin states, 30 basin Tribes, water managers, farmers and irrigators, municipalities, power contractors, non-governmental organizations, and other partners and stakeholders, and underpinned by historic water conservation enabled by President Biden’s Investing in America agenda.
President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is integral to the efforts to increase near-term water conservation, build long term system efficiency, and prevent the Colorado River System’s reservoirs from falling to critically low elevations which would threaten water deliveries and power production. Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Reclamation is investing another $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including water purification and reuse, water storage and conveyance, desalination and dam safety. Since the Law’s signing, the Department has provided more than $2.9 billion to fund 425 projects, including $825 million for 131 aging infrastructure projects; $377 million to 231 WaterSMART grants; $382 million for 12 water storage and conveyance projects; and $698 million to seven rural water projects. The Inflation Reduction Act also provides $4.6 billion to address the historic drought across the West – including for system conservation agreements throughout the Colorado River Basin.
As described in the previously announced final SEIS, key information in today’s record of decision includes:
- System Water Conservation: The preferred alternative will conserve at least 3 million acre-feet of system water through 2026. The results of the supplemental environmental impact statement modeling indicate that the risk of reaching critical elevations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead has been reduced substantially.
- Lake Powell Releases: The preferred alternative allows for reducing annual releases from Lake Powell to 6 million acre-feet if the reservoir is projected to fall below 3,500 feet over the subsequent 12 months. This adaptive approach ensures the long-term integrity of the system.
- Complementary Measures: The preferred alternative builds upon the existing 2007 Interim Guidelines, incorporating additional strategies to mitigate shortages and contributions under the 2019 Drought Contingency Plans.
The short-term supplemental environmental impact statement process is separate from the ongoing long-term efforts to protect the Colorado River Basin after current guidelines expire in 2026. The post-2026 process currently underway is working to develop new guidelines that will replace several reservoir and water management decisional documents and agreements that govern the operation of Colorado River facilities and management of the Colorado River that are scheduled to expire at the end of 2026.
2024 #COleg: Bipartisan group approves law to fill federal regulatory gap that left #Colorado streams, wetlands at risk — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News)
Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):
May 9, 2024
Thousands of acres of Colorado wetlands and miles of streams, left unprotected by a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year, would be shielded under a hard-won measure that was approved this week by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers.
Environmental advocates say Colorado leads the nation in adopting such regulations, which will replace certain Clean Water Act rules that were wiped out last year in the U.S. Supreme Court case Sackett v. EPA.
“Colorado is the first state to pass legislation on this issue,” said Josh Kuhn, senior water campaign manager for Conservation Colorado. “It had a lot of attention because of the magnitude of the bill. There were dozens and dozens of meetings to try and strike the right balance. We’re really happy with this final piece of legislation.”
The Sackett case sharply limited the streams and wetlands that qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act, a decision that water observers said had a particularly broad impact in the West. In Colorado and other Western states, vast numbers of streams are temporary, or ephemeral, flowing only after major rainstorms and during spring runoff season, when the mountain snow melts. The Sackett decision said, in part, that only streams that flow year-round are subject to oversight. It also said that only wetlands that had a surface connection to continually flowing water bodies qualified for protection. Many wetlands in Colorado have a sub-surface connection to streams, rather than one that can be observed above ground.
The legal decision came after decades of federal court battles over murky definitions about which waterways fall under the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction, which wetlands must be regulated, what kinds of dredge-and-fill work in waterways should be permitted, what authority the act has over activities on farms and Western irrigation ditches, and what activities industry and wastewater treatment plants must seek permits for.
With the passage of House Bill HB24-1379, which passed Monday, Colorado wetlands are once again formally protected, as are ephemeral streams, said Kuhn.
“It also sets the federal regulations as the floor, not the ceiling, so that Colorado can go above and beyond those to ensure we are protecting our resources,” Kuhn said.
House Bill 1379, sponsored by House Speaker Julie McCluskie, D-Dillon, Rep. Karen McCormick, D-Longmont, and Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, was one of two proposed bills that sought to address the regulatory gap created by the Sackett decision. Senate Bill 127, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, R-Brighton, was the second.
While Senate Bill 127 ultimately was not approved, a number of exemptions it contained to address concerns of farmers, miners, developers and some cities, were eventually added to House Bill 1379 and Kirkmeyer signed onto the measure as well, becoming a Senate sponsor along with Roberts.
Those exemptions were important to gathering the support of farm and real estate interests, among others, according to John Kolanz, an attorney who represents developers and who served in a state workgroup that helped lay the groundwork for the new regulations.
“There was significant movement from the first draft to the end. Barb’s bill played a big role in that. This is an important program that touches a lot of people, and interests and activities. I think the end result is pretty good,” Kolanz said.
Among the exemptions that were added is a rule that specifically exempts maintenance work on irrigation ditches and canals. Another exempts work that disturbs less than one-tenth of an acre of wetland or 3/100th of an acre of a streambed.
“If you’re a developer … and you’re under those thresholds, you don’t need a permit, you just need to follow best management practices,” said Kuhn, who was among the negotiators who hammered out the details of the final legislation.
In addition, if a pipeline is installed or a ditch is lined, that activity is exempted if it can result in water conservation.
House Bill 1379 also gives regulators the option to add one staff person on the Western Slope to help with program administration in that region, and provides nearly $750,000 in the state 2024-25 fiscal year budget and nearly $250,000 in the next year to get the new regulatory program, housed within the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, up and running.
Senate Bill 127 had proposed housing the program within the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, due to concerns about an existing backlog in the CDPHE’s wastewater discharge program.
With the decision to house the program in CDPHE come requirements that require frequent reporting to lawmakers to ensure that health officials have the resources they need to review and issue permits, Kuhn said.
The Water Quality Control Commission will have until Dec. 31, 2025 to finalize the rules implementing the new law.
The bill is awaiting the governor’s signature.
“In Colorado, where the rivers and streams are the lifeblood of our land, our agriculture, and our communities, the importance of water cannot be overstated,” Kirkmeyer said in a text message. “I believe that House Bill 1379 will be the strongest protection for Colorado streams and wetlands that we have had in the last 50 years.”
More by Jerd SmithJerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
May 2024 #ENSO update: we’re 10! — NOAA
Click the link to read the article on the ENSO blog (NOAA) website (Emily Becker):
May 9, 2024
El Niño weakened substantially over the past month, and we think a transition to neutral conditions is imminent. There’s a 69% chance that La Niña will develop by July–September (and nearly 50-50 odds by June-August). Let’s kick off the ENSO Blog’s tin anniversary with our 121st ENSO outlook update!
Attention!
First things first: our beloved editor, Rebecca Lindsey, has trained us all very well, including being sure to acquaint our newer readers with the fundamentals of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation climate pattern, or ENSO. ENSO has two opposite phases, La Niña and El Niño, which change the ocean and atmospheric circulation in the tropics. Those changes start in the Pacific Ocean and affect global climate in known ways. El Niño and La Niña can be predicted many months in advance, giving us an early picture of potential upcoming temperature, rain, and snow patterns. When neither El Niño nor La Niña are present and conditions are more normal across the tropical Pacific, well, that’s ENSO-neutral conditions.
Hang 10
There was some discussion this week amongst our ENSO forecast team about whether El Niño, much weakened already early last month, is still present. El Niño is a coupled system, meaning the ocean and atmosphere both exhibit characteristic changes. The atmospheric half of El Niño is harder to detect this month; most of the standard equatorial Pacific atmospheric indicators (rain and clouds over the tropical Pacific, trade winds and upper-level winds) were pretty close to average.
However, the April average sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific was still 0.8 °C above average according to the ERSSTv5 dataset (average = 1991–2020). The latest weekly measurement, which comes from the OISSTv2 dataset, was 0.5 °C above average. Given that the El Niño threshold is 0.5 °C, the team decided we’re right on the edge of the transition to neutral conditions. We also can’t rule out some lingering El Niño impacts in other regions of the world.
Once this El Niño ends, it’s likely that our spell of neutral conditions won’t be a long one, with La Niña expected to develop by the late summer and last through the early winter at least.
We’ve seen a quick switch from El Niño to La Niña several times before in our 1950–present record, especially after a strong El Niño. This tendency is one source of confidence in the prediction that La Niña will develop later this year.
Other factors that provide confidence that La Niña is on the way include forecasts from computer climate models and cooler-than-average water under the surface of the tropical Pacific.
10-count
Even if the sea surface temperature in the tropical Pacific lingers near the El Niño threshold for a few weeks, it’s unlikely that there will be noticeable El Niño impacts on global climate conditions this coming summer. Nat looked at how the winter turned out in the US in his recent post, but El Niño causes changes in rain and temperature patterns all around the world, with related impacts on drought, food supplies, and flooding. You can look at El Niño and La Niña’s global patterns of temperature and rain/snow throughout the seasons here.
To get some insight into how this past winter turned out in other regions, I checked in with Steven Fuhrman of NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s International Desk (footnote). Steven had this to say about the effects from El Niño since December:
While many El Niño-related shifts in temperature and rain/snow are strongest during the Northern Hemisphere winter (December–February), some start earlier and last longer, especially in the tropics. One example is a tendency for drier and warmer conditions in central America and northern South America from September through March or April. Rebecca wrote about the impacts on the Amazon Rainforest back in the fall. Steven added this recap:
El Niño’s and La Niña’s shifts in temperature and rain impact communities around the world, including affecting global health and crop yields. This is why we spend so much time studying and predicting ENSO—it can provide an early heads-up of the possibility of severe impacts and allow people time to prepare.
Double digits
Speaking of so much time—who would have thought when we launched this blog back in May 2014 that we’d still have so much to say, 10 years later? In upcoming months, we’ll keep you posted on the ENSO forecast and discuss some of the climate shifts that can be expected during La Niña, including the likelihood of an active Atlantic hurricane season and drier winter conditions through the Southwest U.S. Also, I just checked our “ENSO Blog ideas” doc, which currently runs five pages long, so… here’s to another 10??
Footnote
Fun fact: For many years, Steven and I have regularly donated blood at our local hospital, along with some of our friends. There’s a national blood shortage in the U.S. right now—please consider visiting your local blood donor center!
Topsoil Moisture % Short/Very Short by @usda_oce #drought
22% of the Lower 48 is short/very short; 3% less than last week. Much of the US improved last week. Conditions declined in some states along the East Coast. Already dry soils dried out further in NM & CO.
Another fast, early melt in the southern mountains — Russ Schumacher (@ColoradoClimate Center)
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Climate Center blog (Russ Schumacher):
May 8, 2024
As we’ve covered in previous posts, the peak snowpack in Colorado’s mountains generally looked pretty decent this year, with the amount of water stored in the snow peaking pretty close to the long-term average in most areas. However, in the southern mountains, it’s been another year where the melt has happened a lot faster than it typically has in the past.
As of early April (left image above), all basins in Colorado had above average snow water equivalent, as measured by the SNOTEL network. But a month later (right image), the picture is quite different. The northern basins still look good, with a string of April snowstorms adding to the snowpack there. But southern Colorado largely missed those storms, and warm, sunny conditions, assisted by layers of dust on snow, really accelerated the melt. Cooler conditions this week will slow down the melt a bit, and a storm this weekend will add some much-needed moisture. But once the snow itself gets warmer than 32°F, it’s hard to slow the melt too much. The Rio Grande basin now only has half of the snowpack it typically does on May 6.
The time series graph for the combined San Miguel, Dolores, Animas, and San Juan river basins in the southwest corner of Colorado illustrates this nicely:
The trace for 2024 reached essentially an average peak, and right on time: the peak was 18.1″ of SWE on April 2, compared to an average peak of 18.6″ on April 1. It also stayed near that peak for about another 10 days, but then the melting progressed extremely quickly. In fact, it was the largest 14-day loss of SWE before the end of April in this basin since the start of SNOTEL data in the 1980s.
Before going into those numbers, a quick note on snowpack melt rates. In absolute terms, the fastest melts come in years when there are big snowpacks that linger late into May or early June, like 2019. Eventually that snow can’t stand up to the summer sun, and SWE goes away at a very fast rate. But in years like 2024, what we’re interested in is the snow melting quickly, and early.
So here, we’ll look at the largest two-week declines in SWE prior to the end of April, and we see that the combined southwest river basins lost over 8″ of snowpack from April 12-26 this year. That much melt so early hasn’t been observed before. The Upper Rio Grande and Arkansas basins also saw their largest 14-day SWE declines prior to April 30.
If you look on the bright side, you can’t get rapid melts like this without a good snowpack to begin with. At least, unlike some really bad drought years, the water was there in the first place! But early melts have big implications for the timing of water availability. It means higher-than-normal streamflows in May, but then much lower streamflows later during the heat of summer, when the water is really needed, especially by those who don’t have access to water stored in reservoirs. And the overall water availability situation for this spring and summer isn’t looking great in southern Colorado, with the latest CBRFC forecast projecting only 90% of average flow into Blue Mesa Reservoir, 74% of average on the Animas, and 80% of average into Lake Powell.
And unfortunately, years like this have been getting more common, and that trend is expected to continue as the climate warms. These changes are addressed in detail in the water chapter of Climate Change in Colorado, so dive in to that for more details. But in general, the changes observed up to this point have been toward modest declines in peak snowpack, but robust trends toward earlier melting, and these changes have been most acute in southern Colorado. For the future, there is still considerable uncertainty about what will happen to winter precipitation: some climate projections show more winter snow, others less. But every one of them shows a shift toward earlier snowmelt, and earlier peak streamflow on the Colorado River, meaning changes to when and where our water supply is available. In other words, we might need to get used to the snowpack looking pretty good in the southern mountains in March, but being disappointed in the numbers when May comes around.
The #RioGrande flowing on a windy day — @AlamosaCitizen
Water that used to irrigate #Granby hay fields to return to #ColoradoRiver and Grand County lakes — Sky-Hi News #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Sky-Hi News website (Emily Guitierrez). Here’s an excerpt:
May 7, 2024
Grand County and Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, otherwise known as Northern Water, have agreed to work together on an operational framework that will give Grand County’s waterways as much as 7,000 acre-feet of additional controllable water from the Colorado-Big Thompson Project for stream enhancement. The volume available for streamflow improvement will be dependent on annual river conditions and C-BT Project storage levels. The agreement was approved by the Grand County Commissioners on April 23.
Water made available under this agreement to the county will be released to the Willow Creek Reservoir or the Colorado River. This water will supplement existing flows and could accumulate to nearly 40,000 acre-feet over the course of a decade, according to a joint news release from Grand County and Northern Water…Prior to 2005, this water was used for irrigation of hay fields near the town of Granby. However, the lands have since been converted for residential and commercial development. This additional water will benefit Grand County’s recreation and agriculture industries.
Digging into Snow Survey History — Fresh Water News
Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Patty Rettig):
May 7, 2024
After trekking on skis up a mountain, two men unpack equipment, use a long metal tube to take a snow sample, weigh it, and record the measurement. Captured on 16mm film in the mid-twentieth century, the men demonstrate the most advanced snow survey techniques of their time, providing us a fascinating glimpse into the past.
Three such films—one of which is undated, with the others being from about 1941 and 1952 (narrated and in color!)—held by the Colorado State University Water Resources Archive, when considered with related photographs, reports, data, and letters, reveal an important part of the story of the development of snow surveying and water supply forecasting in the western United States.
Federal coordination of snow surveying began in the 1930s, after several decades of individual states and institutions independently taking measurements. Though Nevada and Utah are recognized as the pioneering states, in 1902 Colorado’s state engineer hired Enos Mills as the state’s first snow surveyor. Several of his 1903 and 1904 letters in CSU’s Agricultural and Natural Resources Archive provide insight into how monitoring snowpack started here.
By the mid-1930s, following the drought of the early part of the decade, interest grew in having water supply predictions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture took on snow surveying and water forecasting not only to benefit irrigators who relied on the forthcoming snowmelt, but also to support the economic interests of industry and hydropower as well as predict stream flooding.
In Colorado, Ralph Parshall, as senior irrigation engineer at the USDA branch in Fort Collins (and best known for the Parshall flume), contributed to the emerging Federal-State Cooperative Snow Surveys in a number of ways. Parshall’s materials in both his archival collection and his team’s files document his active participation over more than a decade. These include letters and drafts related to several Colorado River Water Forecast Committee meetings, including the first, held in 1945 and at which Parshall presided. A published draft of those proceedings can be found in the Water Resources Archive’s Groundwater Data Collection.
Also among Parshall’s materials, a few dozen photographs of snow courses and related images also exist, some of which remain to be digitized. Additional photographic materials in other collections include slides showing Parshall and others conducting snow surveys at Cameron Pass and in Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as a set of about 100 images (not digitized) taken during winter and spring months at McNey Hill in northern Colorado. This set reveals a decade-long photography project involving both Ralph Parshall and his son Max.
A collection from the Colorado Snow Survey Program of the Natural Resources Conservation Service contains two boxes of photographic materials. These images show snow survey sites and equipment, agency employees, and public outreach events. Two of the films referenced above also are in this collection. The NRCS, having evolved from the USDA division that Ralph Parshall was part of, began operating the first SNOTEL (SNOpack TELemetry) site in 1977. This automated system of collecting snow and weather data greatly furthered the field, especially for remote sites where access is difficult.
The science, methods, and equipment related to measuring snowpack and estimating water content have continued to evolve. In the Water Resources Archive, documentation of snow hydrology studies as well as aerial snowpack measurement is also available for research.
Additional collections in the Water Resources Archive also touch in part on snow surveying and can be found through browsing our research guide. All of our materials are available for use by the public, and assistance can be provided in person at CSU’s Morgan Library or remotely.
Patty Rettig is the archivist for the Water Resources Archive at the Colorado State University Libraries. Over more than 20 years, Rettig has built the archive to hold over 130 distinct collections documenting Colorado’s water heritage by engaging with the water community across the state. She is happy to help anyone dive in to archival research!
2024 #COleg: Roberts, Dems Strike Deal on Regulating Critical Wetlands as Kirkmeyer ‘Lets Water Bill Go’ — #Colorado Times-Recorder
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Times-Recorder website (David O. Williams):
May 7, 2024
For state Sen. Dylan Roberts (D-Frisco) “protecting and securing our water future is the most important issue and biggest challenge facing our state for the next several decades.”
So as the current legislative session circles the proverbial drain, he’s been pushing hard to secure funding for water projects, enact the recommendations of the Colorado River Drought Task Force, and, perhaps most critically, replace wetlands protections stripped away by the Trump-stacked U.S. Supreme Court in last year’s highly controversial Sackett v. EPA decision.
That ruling, which backed an Idaho couple who didn’t want to get a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wetlands dredging permit, gutted decades of federal Clean Water Act protections for fully two-thirds of Colorado’s vital wetlands and streams, according to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s brief filed in support of those protections.
Colorado lawmakers this session stepped into that regulatory void with two competing bills – a rarity in the Colorado Legislature, according to Roberts. The Regulate Dredge and Fill Activities in State Waters bill (HB24-1379), sponsored in the House by Speaker Julie McCluskie (D-Dillon) requires a rulemaking by the Colorado Department of Health and Environment’s Water Quality and Control Division to permit dredge and fill activities on both public and private land.
The competing bill (SB24-127) from Republican state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer (R-Brighton) known as the Regulate Dredged & Fill Material State Waters bill, was backed by the Colorado Association of Homebuilders. Environmental groups and some Democrats said the Kirkmeyer bill fell short of replacing longstanding federal protections for wetlands for several reasons.
“We reached an agreement with Sen. Kirkmeyer and some of the folks that she was working with on her bill,” Roberts said in a phone interview. “She is going to join me as the co-prime sponsor on the bill with the Speaker and let her Senate bill go. So, we’ve gotten to a really good place … We just made a few final amendments that got Kirkmeyer on board, but the environmental advocates are very pleased with where we stand.”
On Monday, the full Senate passed the new version of HB24-1379 and sent it back to the House, which then repassed it after considering amendments.
“We could not be more proud of the fact that Colorado is the first state in the nation to pass legislation that restores protections to our wetlands and streams that were overturned by Trump’s Supreme Court,” Conservation Colorado’s Senior Water Campaign Manager Josh Kuhn wrote in an email. “Our coalition and the bill sponsors worked to negotiate several significant compromises that led to the legislation we see today, and it remains a win for the environment.” Proponents hope the Colorado bill will become a national model.
Two of Kuhn’s biggest criticisms of the original Kirkmeyer bill was its “political line” saying waters outside of 1,500 feet from the historical floodplain would be unprotected, and its regulatory structure requiring a new agency in the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
“That’s not in our House bill,” Roberts said. “Our House bill is much more based on the actual wetland and the connection to Colorado waters and basically what the Army Corps was doing. So, the arbitrary line in the Kirkmeyer bill was a huge problem, and that is certainly not in the House bill. And it’ll stay with CDPHE, the Water Quality Control Commission.”
Asked if there was a concerted development industry effort to muddy the waters with the competing bill filed before the Speaker’s House bill, Roberts had this to say:
“It was an interesting tactic,” he said. “A lot of state legislatures, and obviously Congress does this, where there are similar bills that start in opposite chambers and they kind of compete with each other. That doesn’t normally happen here, but it was kind of interesting to have it play out that way this year.”
Roberts is also a bipartisan co-prime Senate sponsor with Sen. Cleave Simpson 9R-Alamosa) of a bill (HB24-1436) –Sports Betting Tax Revenue Voter Approval – that refers to a ballot measure asking voters in November if the state can spend additional sports betting tax revenue (above the current $29 million annual cap) on water-conservation projects. The bill passed out of both chambers and now heads to the desk of Gov. Jared Polis for his signature.
First established by voter approval of Proposition DD in 2019, the Water Plan Implementation Cash Fund goes toward water storage and supply, agricultural projects, and watershed health and recreation projects.“If we don’t [pass HB24-1436], we’ll have to refund the excess to the casinos,” Roberts said. “So I hope it’s a really easy question for voters, and that they would prefer the money go to water rather than back to the casinos.”
Roberts was also the sponsor of the annual water projects bill, which allocates $56 million to the Colorado Water Plan and various water infrastructure projects. More than half of that money currently comes from sports betting, and this year $20 million of it will go toward acquiring the Shoshone power plant water right from Xcel Energy to keep that non-consumptive right on the Western Slope for farmers, boaters, and aquatic life along the endangered Colorado River.
Finally, Roberts was co-prime Senate sponsor, along with Sen. Perry Will, R-New Castle, of SB24-197 (Water Conservation Measures) that implements several key recommendations of the Colorado River Drought Task Force, including the ability to loan water to an instream flow loan program for stream health and restoration, as well as protections for agricultural water.
The bill, which has cleared both the Senate and the House, will also allow power companies near the Yampa River in Northwest Colorado to temporarily loan their water to the river while they explore different types of energy development in a post-coal world, as well as enhance the ability of Colorado’s native tribes to get more funding for water projects using historic water rights.
Middle school students raise, release trout — #PagosaSprings Sun
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Randi Pierce). Here’s an excerpt:
Ons Thursday, May 2, 2024 sixth- graders in Terri Lindstrom’s Pirate Time advisory class rolled a cooler down to Town Park, then carried it to the edge of the river. There, the students used river water to acclimate the temperature of the water in the cooler — the transport for 75 rainbow trout fin- gerlings who were being taken to be released in the San Juan River.
As they waited for the fish to acclimate, the students read messages they wrote after spending the school year helping and watching the fish grow.
Lindstrom’s class raised and released the fingerlings through a partnership with the Trout in the Classroom program and Trout Unlimited…
“The purpose of the program is to give students the opportunity to ex- plore water quality,” Lindstrom wrote, explaining the students kept track of the water temperature, count and weight of the fish.
Four to five fish were pulled from the tank each week and weighed be- fore being returned, she notes. That allowed students to calculate the average weight per fish, which then allowed them to calculate 2 percent body weight of all the fish in order to know how much to feed them.
Utah pols continue anti-public land buffoonery: And a new study predicts bigger future flows for the #ColoradoRiver — Jonathan P. Thompson (landdesk.org) #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
May 7, 2024
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
INANE ACT: Utah State Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman and Lynn Jackson, a candidate for Lyman’s seat in the legislature, turn a protest of the proposed closure of Arch Canyon to motorized vehicles and ban on target shooting within Bear’s Ears National Monument into a grievance and victimhood campaign rally and a lot of whining about “federal overreach.”
CONTEXT: Bears Ears National Monument is rightly named after the two Wingate-sandstone capped buttes that rise up from the middle of the 1.3-million-acre swath of public land in southeastern Utah. Yet if I were to pick a heart of the monument, I’d be more likely to lean toward Arch Canyon, which starts on Elk Ridge near the buttes and slices a deep, 12-mile-long gorge through Cedar Mesa before joining up with Comb Wash under a grove of tall cottonwoods. My family and I used to camp under those trees when I was a kid, and we’d hike up the canyon, following the perennial stream that was alive with flannelmouth suckers, tadpoles, and water striders, gazing up at cliff dwellings nestled in tiny alcoves high up on the sheer, desert varnish-streaked cliffs.
Back then cattle were allowed to graze in the canyon, trampling the stream banks and taking refuge in — and pooping on — an Ancestral Puebloan site near the canyon’s mouth. Thankfully, a hard fought legal battle eventually got the cattle removed from Arch Canyon and a few other nearby canyons. But there is also a road up the canyon bottom, and on those long-ago hikes we’d occasionally encounter a jeep or Land Cruiser. The road remains, allowing OHVs to roar eight miles up the canyon, crossing the creek multiple times in the process.
The draft Bears Ears National Monument management plan proposes closing Arch Canyon to motorized vehicles to protect the riparian corridor and the natural and cultural sites there, and because it just makes sense to do so. It’s the only significant motorized closure under the plan’s preferred alternative, meaning about 800,000 acres would remain open to motorized travel on designated routes. The plan would also ban target shooting throughout the monument. There would be almost no changes to the existing grazing regime.
Basically, land managers and the Bears Ears Commission are looking to close an eight-mile dead-end road to protect a spectacular canyon, one of the area’s only perennial streams, and imperiled native fish, while leaving hundreds of miles of other roads and trails open to OHVs. And they want to nix recreational shooting to prevent people from shooting up landforms and petroglyphs — hunting will still be allowed.
It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. Yet for this, the likes of Lyman and Jackson are skewering these land protectors as “overlords,” and are urging their followers to band together because they are “going up against a monster. … You have to fight back, you have to have the stomach to fight back.” Jackson added: “You can’t compromise.”
Not only is this Trump-esque rhetoric dangerous, but it’s also inaccurate. It willfully ignores the fact that the proposed management plan is itself a deep compromise, leaving out many of the protections Indigenous and environmental advocates want. In fact, the preferred alternative is remarkably unrestrictive and, some would say, miserably fails in its mission to protect this special landscape.
But admitting that land managers are far from overlords, and instead are bending over backwards to appease even the uncompromising likes of Lyman and Jackson, wouldn’t fit with Lyman’s preferred narrative of grievance and victimhood. Nor would it rile up his similarly minded base. And in the end this new breed of Republicans is far more interested in riling than in governing; in inciting anger and obstruction rather than in seeking solutions.
The arrogance of the off-road vehicle lobby — Jonathan P. Thompson January 2, 2024
In a rather predictable — but still maddening — move, the off-road-vehicle lobby is suing the Bureau of Land Management over the agency’s Labyrinth Canyon and Gemini Bridges travel plan for off-highway vehicle use. The BlueRibbon Coaltion, Colorado Off-Road Trail Defenders, and Patrick McKay are challenging…
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Could global heating actually increase precipitation in the Colorado River Basin? Perhaps, according to a new study out of the University of Colorado, and a forecasted uptick in snow and rain should partially offset the effects of warming temperatures on river flows. The researchers say that’s because “precipitation has, and will likely continue to be, the main driver of the river flow at Lee Ferry.”
“We find it is more likely than not that Lee Ferry flows will be greater during 2026-2050 than since 2000 as a consequence of a more favorable precipitation cycle,” said Martin Hoerling, the paper’s lead author, in a press release. “This will compensate the negative effects of more warming in the near term.”
This relatively rosy finding is based on a suite of climate models, including ones from the International Panel on Climate Change, that forecast a 70% chance of increased precipitation in the Upper Colorado Basin in coming decades. But water managers probably shouldn’t abandon efforts to cut consumption on the River just yet: 70% isn’t exactly a sure thing; the researchers acknowledge that there’s also a chance that precipitation could stay as miserably low as it has been for the past two decades, or even decline.
And Brad Udall, a CU climate scientist who was not involved in the study, told KUNC’s Alex Hager that he has a bit of “unease” regarding the projections, adding that modeling future precipitation is filled with uncertainty. Temperature modeling, meanwhile, uses different methods and is therefore more reliable: It’s going to keep getting warmer.
And those higher temperatures can erase some of the gains from higher precipitation levels, as this winter and spring demonstrated. Even though there was a normal amount of snowfall in many places, this spring’s runoff is expected to be below normal thanks to a rapid snowmelt.
Yes, we’re still too dry in many spots — @NWSOmaha
But – holy buckets – we’ve seen some significant improvement in pasture conditions vs. where we were one year ago.
Navajo Dam operations update: Bumping releases down to 350 cfs May 13, 2024
From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):
As the forecast weather warms up again and tributary flows are forecast to increase, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled a decrease in the release from Navajo Dam from 500 cubic feet per second (cfs) back down to 350 cfs for Monday, May 13th, 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.
The latest #climate briefing is hot off the presses from Western Water Assessment
Click the link to read the briefing on the Western Water Assessment website:
May 9, 2024 – CO, UT, WY
The region experienced generally below normal precipitation and above normal temperatures in April. May 1st snow-water equivalent (SWE) was near-normal in Colorado (92%) and Utah (103%) and slightly below normal in Wyoming (88%). Seasonal streamflow volume forecasts are mostly below to near-normal in the region with above normal forecasts in northern Utah. Regional drought conditions improved and cover 10% of the region. El Niño conditions are transitioning to neutral-ENSO conditions and there is an 83% chance of neutral-ENSO conditions for May-July. The NOAA seasonal temperature outlook for May-July suggests an increased probability of above normal temperatures for the majority of the region.
April precipitation was generally below normal across the region with large swathes of above normal precipitation in northern Utah around the Great Salt Lake, north and south-central Wyoming, and from the Front Range to northeastern Colorado. Areas of less than 25% of normal precipitation occurred in southeastern Utah and southeastern Colorado with small pockets of less than 2% of normal precipitation in Emery and Wayne Counties in Utah as well as the northern Lake Powell region, and Baca and Prowers Counties in Colorado. Small pockets of more than 150% of normal precipitation occurred west of the Great Salt Lake and in Wayne County in Utah, east of the Denver Metro in Adams and Elbert Counties in Colorado, and in Sweetwater County in Wyoming. A large area of more than 150% of normal precipitation occurred in northeastern Colorado. Large areas of much-above (top 10%) and small areas of much-below (bottom 10%) normal precipitation for the month of April were observed in Colorado.
Regional temperatures were slightly above (0 – 2°F) to above (2 – 4°F) normal in April. Small pockets of slightly below (-2 – 0°F) normal temperatures occurred mostly in central Utah and southern Colorado. Small pockets of above (4 – 6°F) normal temperatures occurred in Laramie and Sheridan Counties in Wyoming, with a pocket of 6 – 8°F above normal temperatures in Sheridan County. Small areas of much-above (top 10%) normal temperatures for the month of April were observed in Colorado.
Regional snowpack ranged from much-below (<50%) normal conditions in northeastern Wyoming to above (110-129%) normal conditions in northern and southern Utah. Below normal conditions occurred in northern and western Wyoming and southern Colorado. Near-normal conditions occurred throughout most of Utah, southeastern Wyoming, and northern Colorado. As of May 1st, statewide percent median snow-water equivalent (SWE) was 92% in Colorado, 103% in Utah, and 88% in Wyoming. The Escalante Basin in Utah had the highest percent median SWE at 222% by end of day on April 30. The basins with the lowest percent median SWE were the Belle Fourche and Cheyenne Basins at 0% since they melted out. Peak SWE was observed on April 9 for Colorado (16.7 in), April 2 for Utah (18.8 in), and April 11 for Wyoming (16.2 in).
Regional April-July streamflow volume forecasts are mostly below (70-89%) normal to near-normal, with forecasts of 50-69% of normal streamflow in northeastern Wyoming including the Powder and Cheyenne Basins, according to the NRCS, and at many sites in southwestern Colorado including the San Juan, Gunnison, and Upper Colorado-Dolores Basins, according to the CBRFC. There are above (110-129%) normal streamflow forecasts for the basins surrounding the Great Salt Lake, with CBRFC sites forecasting 130-150% of normal streamflow in the Lower Bear, Weber, and Jordan Basins, as well as one site in the Lower Green Basin with a forecast of 150-200% of normal streamflow. The forecast for the inflow to Lake Powell is 80% of average, which is down 9% from the April 1st forecast.
Regional drought conditions improved in April and now cover 10% of the region, a 2% decrease in drought coverage since the end of March. Severe (D2) drought improved in northeastern Wyoming and moderate (D1) drought improved in south-central Colorado, while D1 drought developed in southeastern Colorado.
As of mid-April, El Niño conditions are transitioning to neutral-ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) conditions in the Pacific Ocean. There is an 83% chance of neutral-ENSO conditions by May and a 49% chance of La Niña conditions developing by July. The NOAA precipitation and temperature outlooks for May suggest an increased probability of below (33-40%) normal precipitation for southern Colorado and above (33-40%) normal temperatures for southeastern Colorado. The NOAA seasonal precipitation and temperature outlooks for May-July suggest an increased probability of below normal precipitation for southeastern Utah and a majority of western and southern Colorado, and above normal temperatures for almost the entirety of the region with 40-50% above normal conditions for all of Utah, western and southern Wyoming, and western, central, and southern Colorado.
Significant April weather event: Northern Colorado windstorm. An exceptionally strong storm moved through northern Colorado from April 6-7. During this period, strong and destructive winds affected the mountains, foothills, and northeastern plains. Wind speeds in the Front Range mountains and near the foothills peaked between 70 to 95 mph, with the highest recorded gust reaching 97 mph at the NCAR Mesa Lab in Boulder and a close second of 96 mph in Coal Creek Canyon in Jefferson County. Across the northeastern plains, the most intense winds occurred along and north of a line extending from Denver to Fort Morgan to Akron, with wind gusts of 60 to 80 mph. Numerous instances of downed trees, power poles, and minor damage were reported in areas with the strongest winds. Xcel Energy said over 155,000 customers experienced power outages at the height of the storm from a combination of proactive public safety shutoffs and power outages caused by damage from the high winds, with most of these occurring in and around the Denver Metro.
Here are the locations that saw the highest wind gusts from April 6-7, according to NWS:
- NCAR Mesa Lab, Boulder, 97 mph
- Coal Creek Canyon, Jefferson, 96 mph
- 3 NW Marshall, Boulder, 95 mph
- Buckeye, Larimer, 93 mph
- 3 ESE Buckeye, Larimer, 91 mph
- 2 ENE Copper Mountain, Summit, 91 mph
- Rocky Flats Hwy 93 and 72, Jefferson, 90 mph
Academics and Lawmakers Slam an Industry-Funded Report by a Former Energy Secretary Promoting Natural Gas and LNG: “One has to distinguish between reality and wishful thinking” — Inside #Climate News #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround
Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Phil McKenna):
May 5, 2024
With a pair of fossil-fuel friendly senators at his side, former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Tuesday released a favorable report on U.S. natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG), funded by the natural gas industry.
The report, “The Future of Natural Gas in a Low-Carbon World,” was written by the EFI Foundation, a nonprofit Moniz founded, and released at the U.S. Capitol. The report examined the role of natural gas in advancing energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability in the United States, Europe and Asia.
The EFI report comes at a pivotal moment for the U.S natural gas and LNG export industry. The Biden Administration paused the approval of new LNG export capacity in January while the Energy Department considers the climate and financial impacts to U.S. gas consumers of additional LNG exports. The document seeks to broaden the discussion on U.S. LNG exports.
“The study, as you’ll be hearing, examines the role of natural gas in addressing what is sometimes referred to as the ‘energy trilemma’: energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability,” said Moniz, president of the EFI Foundation and chair of the advisory committee that oversaw the report. “Unfortunately, too often, the discussion around those three priorities tends to devolve into stovepipes, as opposed to recognizing that progress on all of them requires treating it as one conversation.”
One of the report’s specific recommendations was to include an “energy security determination” in evaluating future permits for additional U.S. LNG export capacity.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), the largest recipient of oil and gas money in Congress, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), representing a state that derives a significant share of its revenue from oil and gas, joined Moniz as “keynote” speakers at the event.
Murkowski spoke of the need for an “all of the above” energy policy, which was the U.S. energy policy during the Obama administration when Moniz was Secretary of Energy.
Manchin called for lifting the pause on approvals for new LNG export capacity.
The report referred repeatedly to the “essential” role of natural gas.
The same day as the report’s release, Democrats in Congress released a report of their own, the culmination of a three-year investigation, concluding the oil and gas industry has misled Americans for decades about climate change.
“The fossil fuel industry engaged in an elaborate campaign of deception and doublespeak … as well as disinformation about the climate safety of natural gas and its role as a bridge fuel to a fossil-free future,” the Democrats’ report concluded.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who released the report as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the oil and gas industry seeks academic partnerships to legitimize its reports.
“Documents explicitly discuss leveraging ‘third party endorsements’ and partnerships with academic institutions to bolster Big Oil’s disinformation campaign,” Whitehouse said in a written statement to Inside Climate News.
Referring explicitly to the new Moniz report on natural gas, Whitehouse said “this report is yet another example of the industry deceiving the public about the compatibility of continued—or even expanded—production of natural gas with the scientific emission reduction targets we must achieve in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the very worst effects of climate change.”
A spokeswoman for Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability added that industry’s disinformation campaign “continues to this day, including, as [Moniz’s] recent report shows, their portrayal of natural gas as a green and climate friendly fuel even though they have failed to address methane emissions associated with natural gas. We know that Big Oil is intent on entrenching natural gas into both the U.S. and global energy economies for the foreseeable future by any means necessary.”
Some climate researchers echoed her conclusion that the new report may be a continuation of industry-funded misinformation.
“My concern is that Moniz is—and perhaps has been since his time in the administration—an advocate for polluters over people and the planet,” said Michael Mann, an earth and environmental science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.
“It strains credulity to believe this is a coincidence,” Mann said of the report’s favorable view of natural gas, given its gas-industry funding. “Unfortunately, the old adage ‘follow the money’ seems quite relevant here.”
In addition to his role at EFI, Moniz is an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a “special advisor” to MIT president Sally Kornbluth.
The EFI Foundation declined to respond publicly to criticisms of the report, and MIT did not respond to a request for comment.
The United States is the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Additional projects already approved by the Energy Department and not subject to the ongoing pause would triple existing U.S. export capacity.
The pause followed the pre-release of a study that is still undergoing peer review by Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University. Howarth’s study concluded the climate impact of LNG fuel is worse than burning coal.
When burned, natural gas emits roughly half as much carbon dioxide as coal. However, methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a highly potent greenhouse gas, more than 80 times more effective at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. If even a small amount of methane is leaked, vented, or otherwise emitted into the atmosphere before the gas is burned—as it commonly is—the climate impact of natural gas can be worse than that of other fossil fuels.
Whitehouse challenged the energy security claims in the Moniz report.
“There is no energy security for American families and businesses when the price of energy is determined by geopolitical events outside our control and by an industry that frequently engages in cartel-pricing,” he said. “True energy security will be achieved when we fully transition to renewable energy sources, the ‘fuels’ for which—wind, sunlight, flowing water, the earth’s heat—are free and not controlled by any one country or cartel.”
Nonetheless, the European Commission’s executive vice president for the European Green Deal, Maroš Šefčovič, whose responsibilities include leading the European Commission’s work on becoming climate-neutral by 2050, praised the Moniz report in a video address shown at the release event.
“Natural gas has a role to play as a transitional fuel, something reflected in the COP28 conclusions,” Šefčovič said, referring to the 2023 U.N. climate conference in Dubai. “It will help ensure our energy security and energy equity as our economies decarbonize.”
“So with Europe, having taken decisive action to reach net zero by 2050 including by accelerating the clean energy transition, we also recognize the importance of natural gas, notably in the medium term, and LNG in particular will continue to represent a significant source of gas for the EU,” Šefčovič added.
Funders or “sponsors” of the report, which was not peer-reviewed, included Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest independent gas producers in the U.S, and U.S. LNG export companies Venture Global LNG and Tellurian. The American Petroleum Institute and three other gas industry organizations or industry PR groups also provided funding.
Additional money came from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, named after the late George P. Mitchell, who is often referred to as the “father of fracking” for his role in developing the drilling technology known as hydraulic fracturing. The Institute of Energy Economics, a think tank in Japan, the world’s largest importer of LNG, also provided support.
The report states that the “EFI Foundation maintains editorial independence from its public and private sponsors.” However, more than half of the report’s “advisory committee” was comprised of individuals representing the report’s funders.
“EFI’s report reinforces more than a decade’s worth of independent and government-led research that has consistently shown the long-term role of natural gas in the global energy mix and its ability to accelerate global climate progress while strengthening global energy security,” API spokesperson Scott Lauermann said.
Joseph Romm, a researcher also at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, said the report’s “energy trilemma” framing that looks at energy security, equity and environmental sustainability downplays the importance of climate change.
“Climate is the overriding issue,” Romm said. “Not that the others aren’t important, but if you don’t do climate, the others don’t matter.”
Romm noted that in 2018, the International Energy Agency, a global energy watchdog, concluded that the world could not afford to build any new carbon dioxide emitting projects if the planet were to stay within 2 degrees Celsius of warming, when compared to pre-industrial times.
Six years later, there is even less room for new fossil fuel developments, Romm said.
The EFI report states that carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is an effective option for reducing CO2 emissions across the natural gas supply chain, even though to date such technology has never been successfully deployed at a commercial level. As the report notes, “there is no natural gas-fired power plant with CCUS in operation worldwide as of July 2023.”
The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided tax incentives and billions of dollars for large-scale carbon sequestration projects.
“You shouldn’t go around telling people that, ‘Oh, you’re going to solve whatever your natural gas problem is with carbon capture, utilization and storage’ when there isn’t a single one in operation,” Romm said. “One has to distinguish between reality and wishful thinking.” [ed. emphasis mine]
The Moniz report also says that LNG shippers have started to offer their customers “carbon-neutral LNG cargo,” in which emissions from LNG production are offset through the purchasing of carbon credits.
Carbon offsets have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as offset projects have failed to live up to their emission reduction claims. Even if the projects offset the emissions of LNG production, there would still be significant emissions when the fuel is burned.
The report acknowledges the climate impact of methane emissions associated with natural gas and says “methane emissions reductions are also critical.” The report also notes that “the carbon footprint of natural gas, while lower than some alternatives, must be dramatically reduced further” and “overcoming these challenges will ultimately determine whether natural gas is indeed a transitional fuel or an integral part of the long-term global energy mix.”
In releasing the report, Moniz said the gas industry “can do a lot more in terms of having the pause be a pause by taking care of some of the homework that needs to be done,” such as on methane emissions reductions.
However, the report focuses less on methane emissions and more on the carbon dioxide emissions reductions that can be achieved by switching from coal to gas.
Whitehouse said the focus on carbon dioxide emissions over methane emissions is misleading, intentional and not new.
“Internal documents obtained in our recent investigation demonstrate that fossil fuel companies knew methane leaks made natural gas just as harmful to the climate as coal but sought to discredit the scientific evidence and paint natural gas as a clean fuel and a crucial part of the energy mix,” Whitehouse said.
One such document obtained through the Congressional investigation was an August 2016 email from Amory Lovins, the cofounder and, at the time, chief scientist for the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy and sustainability research organization now known as RMI. The email was addressed to Rex Tillerson, then the chief executive of ExxonMobil.
Tillerson had just been appointed the chair of the National Petroleum Council, a federal advisory committee to the Secretary of Energy, a position then held by Moniz.
Lovins, who served as an environmental representative on the council, warned Tillerson of increasing methane emissions monitoring by “citizen activists.” He urged Tillerson, the country’s leading oil and gas executive, and his industry to “get ahead of that emerging movement” and “fix the leaks” before the “sloppy operators further damage the good firms’ reputation.”
Another record obtained through the Congressional investigation is a document from Chevron marked “classified,” which includes a presentation Lovins gave to the oil and gas company’s board of directors at a meeting in Pebble Beach, California, in 2018.
In the presentation, Lovins notes that the “#1 threat to gas” is “methane ‘slip,’” or emissions. Lovins added that “2.3% of US gas output is now lost” as emissions, making gas “little/no” better for the climate than burning coal. Lovins added that LNG is “worse” for the climate than coal.
LNG has higher greenhouse gas emissions than natural gas due to the energy it takes to liquify and then regasify natural gas, not counting the additional methane emissions that occur during the transport of LNG in ships.
“RMI experts routinely share their independent analysis and research with a variety of stakeholders, and in this case, we presented our understanding of the climate risks of methane to the oil and gas industry, in the hopes that the facts would lead to solutions,” Lovins said in an email. “The facts presented then and subsequent research from RMI and peers have confirmed that leaks of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, even at small amounts, make it as bad as or worse than coal for the climate and not necessarily the cleaner alternative it was once thought to be.”
Peer-reviewed studies published since 2018 suggest the climate impact of natural gas is worse than previously thought. A study published last month in Nature found that 2.95 percent of U.S. gas output is emitted rather than the 2.3 percent figure Lovins used in 2018. For the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where much of the natural gas that is exported from the U.S. as LNG originates, emissions are far higher—9.6 percent—according to the Nature study.
Other factors, such as the use of a 20-year rather than 100-year timeframe for measuring the climate impact of methane, can result in an even smaller leak rate, making natural gas worse than coal. A study published last year in Environmental Research Letters by RMI researchers found a “methane leakage rate as low as 0.2 percent brings a gas system’s climate risk on par with coal.”
For Howarth, the Cornell professor, recent events elicit a sense of déjà vu. In 2011, Howarth published one of the first studies suggesting the climate impact of natural gas may be worse than coal.
The same year, Moniz, then the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, was co-chair of a non-peer-reviewed Energy Initiative report funded largely by industry, “The Future of Natural Gas,” a title nearly identical to the EFI report Moniz and colleagues published this week.
The 2011 report led by Moniz downplayed Howarth’s findings and called for federal policies that “encourage the development of a [global liquid natural gas] market.”
“It feels familiar,” Howarth said of the new “Future of Natural Gas” report. “Shale gas is clearly as bad or worse than coal, no matter what industry funded people want to spin.”
“And even if I were wrong,” Howarth added, “It’s just not the time to be promoting any fossil fuels.”
How healthy is the #SouthPlatteRiver Basin #snowpack? — The #FortCollins Coloradoan
Click the link to read the article on the Fort Collins Coloradoan website (Ignacio Calderon). Here’s an excerpt:
May 7, 2024
Statewide, Colorado is at around 90% of its median snowpack, as of May 3, with some variation across basins.
The South Platte, which covers Fort Collins, is at 103% of its median snowpack this season, according to USDA data. Two notable bumps on this year’s snowpack came from the heavy storms in January and March, which dumped feet of snow across the state…
According to CSU’s climate report, “Colorado’s snowpack serves as a huge seasonal reservoir that stores about 15 million acre-feet of water on average at the spring peak and then makes that water available later in the year when water demands for agricultural uses and outdoor watering are higher.”
Studies have shown that SWE has decreased in most places across the state, “though the percentage declines in SWE in Colorado were generally smaller than in most other regions of the West due to Colorado’s relatively high elevations and colder winter climate,” the report says.
Report on microplastics published by USGS — NGWA
Click the link to read the release on the NGWA website:
May 6, 2024
The U.S. Geological Survey published a report on May 2 on the critical topic of microplastics in the environment.
The report titled “Integrated Science for the Study of Microplastics in the Environment — A Strategic Science Vision for the U.S. Geological Survey” is available on the USGS website.
The report which covers microplastics and nanoplastics states “a myriad of environmental exposure pathways to humans including ingestion, inhalation, and bodily absorption, are likely to exist.” It adds there is growing evidence that bioaccumulation of microplastics in tissues and organs of humans can potentially lead to nutritional and reproductive effects.
Current science gaps are mentioned. The report says that “understanding if or when environmental exposures pose a health risk is complicated by the diversity of microplastic sizes, morphologies, polymer types, and chemicals added during manufacturing or sorbed from the environment; ongoing challenges in analytical methods used to detect, quantify, and characterize microplastics and associated chemicals in our ecosystems; and the fact that ecotoxicological studies regarding microplastics are still in their infancy.”
It also adds that a better understanding of the sources, pathways, fate, and biological effects of microplastics has become a priority of the federal government as well as some state governments.
One of the most cited Groundwater® papers in recent years is “Microplastic Contamination in Karst Groundwater Systems” by Samuel V. Panno et. al. NGWA members can view the complete paper on Wiley Online Library.
‘If you are not at the table, you are on the menu:’ Tribes submit ideas to manage #ColoradoRiver — KUNC #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
May 2, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Tribes that use the Colorado River want a say in negotiations that will reshape how the river’s water is shared. Eighteen of those tribes signed on to a letter sent to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that will finalize new rules for managing the river after 2026, when the current guidelines expire.
In the memo, tribal leaders urge the federal government to protect their access to water and uphold long-standing legal responsibilities.
The letter comes as other groups have also been sending the feds their ideas for managing a river that supplies 40 million people across the Southwest but is shrinking due to climate change. Reclamation is considering input from different Colorado River users, including competing proposals from two camps within the seven states that use its water.
The river’s Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico banded together to send a proposal, and the Lower Basin states – California, Arizona and Nevada – did the same. A coalition of environmental nonprofits sent their own, and a group of high-profile water researchers published another.
The tribes’ letter aims to make sure that Indigenous people, who used the Colorado River before white settlers ever occupied the Western U.S., are not left behind as Reclamation considers those proposals.
“If you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” Jay Weiner, a water lawyer for the Quechan Indian Tribe, said.
Weiner, who helped craft the letter, said it aims to answer the complicated question: What do tribes want?
Each tribe in the Colorado River basin is unique and has interests that make it hard to land on one clear answer to that question, Weiner said, but this memo aims to coalesce a “critical mass” of tribes around broader ideas that are important to tribes.
“This is very much part of the effort of trying to be at the table and engaged so that there are meaningful opportunities for input, for engagement, for dialogue and, frankly, for fighting, when it comes to it,” Weiner said.
Three key principles
In the memo, the co-signing tribes address three main principles.
First, they ask the government to uphold its “trust responsibility” to the tribes.
This goes back to the very foundation of laws that guide relationships between the United States and tribes. When the federal government took property and assets from tribes, it also created a special designation for the tribes, calling them “domestic dependent nations.”
That designation also comes with the “responsibility to do right by those tribes forever,” explained Jenny Dumas, legal counsel on water for the Jicarilla Apache Nation and another architect of the tribal principles letter.
“The tribes gave up a lot of things when they entered into treaties with the federal government,” she said, “But what they did not give up was their right to a sufficient supply of water to provide for their people forever and ever in perpetuity.”
The letter urges federal water managers to fulfill that responsibility by rejecting any new water rules that would encroach on the government’s obligation to make sure tribes have access to water, and to adequately compensate any tribes that are forced to take water cuts in times of shortage.
The letter also asks the feds for better ways to financially benefit off of the water they own.
Tribes hold rights to about a quarter of the river’s flow, but many lack the funding and infrastructure to use their full allocations and instead leave it in the river. The letter lays out a few specific ways the U.S. government could help change that.
One of those ways is to “maximize” tribes’ ability to participate in conservation programs. Armed with a $4 billion pool of money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government has been funding programs to pay water users – often farmers and ranchers – to pause water use and leave some extra water in reservoirs. Some tribes are already receiving conservation payouts, but the letter advocates to expand tribal participation.
In addition, the memo asks feds to make it easier for tribes to market or lease their water rights to water users that reside outside of tribal land. That could open the door to new revenue streams, participation in conservation programs or the construction of new water infrastructure.
Finally, the letter asks the U.S. government to establish a permanent, formalized way for tribes to participate in talks about water use during ongoing negotiations and any other time Colorado River policy is discussed in the future.
Tribes have long been pushing for better representation in negotiations about the Colorado River. Indigenous people were excluded from talks that set the foundation for how water is shared in the Southwest over a century ago, and tribes say they’re still being left out now.
In the letter to Reclamation, tribal leaders wrote that river negotiations in 2007 had a “lack of formal tribal inclusion,” and reminded federal water managers that in 2023, federal officials made it a stated goal to enhance engagement and inclusion of tribes going forward.
The tribes are asking for something specific. Certain steps in negotiations about Colorado River water trigger the federal government to talk to states that use its water. The tribes want to make sure they are also consulted any time that trigger is hit.
Ultimately, the letter’s authors say tribes—and the legal infrastructure that governs tribal water use—are unique in a way that has to be considered when drawing up new rules that could have a big impact on the cities and farms of the Southwest.
“Tribal water rights are different,” Dumas said. “They’re not the same as non-Indian water rights. And for that reason, they deserve different protections and special treatment. And that’s what we’re asking for in this letter.”
‘Tribes have survived a whole lot worse’
While exclusion of tribes has been an undercurrent of Colorado River negotiations for at least a century, tribal leaders say times are changing.
Jason Hauter, legal counsel on water issues for the Gila River Indian Community who helped craft the letter, said the U.S. government faces “billions of dollars of potential liability” without the buy-in of Gila River and other tribes and that having unwilling water users could slow down the authorization and implementation of new water rules.
“Tribes are a key stakeholder,” said Hauter, who is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. “The days of being able to politically roll tribes and them not being sophisticated enough to put up strong challenges to federal rulemaking are over.”
Even after the letter’s submission, the number of tribes adding their support has grown. An early version of the memo was co-signed by 16 tribes. That number now stands at nineteen.
One of the late additions was the Gila River Indian Community, which holds lands in the Phoenix area. The tribe has been among the most prominent in Colorado River negotiations, and has become a high-profile partner to Arizona and the federal government in recent conservation programs.
In March, Gila River’s governor, Stephen Roe Lewis, announced the tribe did not support the Lower Basin proposal that Arizona signed on to, and that it planned to file its own. Instead, the community joined as a co-signer of the tribal principles letter in late April.
Indigenous leaders are quick to point out that each tribe is unique, and common ground can be hard to find amid the geographical, political and financial differences between them. This letter, however, is designed to focus on ideas so broad that they can find consensus among nearly two-thirds of all tribes that use Colorado River water.
“The goal should be having a stable system, not necessarily picking winners and losers,” Hauter said. “There’s a lot of posturing between the Upper and Lower Basin, and without really focusing on the ultimate goal: How do we make a better system? Given what the basin is facing, a recognition that there has to be shared pain among the basin states and among tribes. Finding ways to do that in a fair way, in a way that can make sense, that’s the challenge we all face.”
Conversations about Colorado River management have, for the past couple years, largely focused on the re-negotiation deadline in 2026. While it has been framed as a momentous juncture in the timeline of Western water management, tribes and their representatives say they’re focused on a longer view.
Jay Weiner, water lawyer for the Quechan Indian Tribe, said even if climate change makes the Southwest unpalatable for white people and other settlers, tribes plan to stay in their historic homelands.
“None of these things are single, one-off immutable events,” he said, “Because tribes have survived a whole lot worse than anything we’re gonna see coming out of post-2026 guidelines.”
The May 1, 2024 #Colorado Water Supply Outlook Report is hot off the presses from the NRCS
Assessing the U.S. #Climate in April 2024 — NOAA
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
Key Points:
- A severe weather outbreak generated more than one hundred tornadoes, including one EF-4, across the Midwest and Great Plains on April 25–28, causing significant damage and loss of life and becoming the worst tornado outbreak to date for the year.
- During early April, a spring snowstorm brought heavy snow and powerful winds to much of New England, downing trees and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands in the region.
- January to April 2024 was the fifth-warmest such four-month period on record for the nation and precipitation ranked in the wettest third of the historical record for the month of April 2024.
Other Highlights:
Temperature
The average temperature of the contiguous U.S. in April was 53.8°F, 2.7°F above average, ranking 12th warmest in the 130-year record. April temperatures were above average across much of the contiguous U.S., while near- to below-average temperatures were observed in parts of the West, northern Plains, Upper Midwest, Southeast and in small pockets of the Northeast. Virginia and West Virginia each had their fifth-warmest April on record.
The Alaska statewide April temperature was 27.2°F, 3.9°F above the long-term average, ranking in the warmest third of the 100-year period of record for the state. Above-average temperatures were observed across most of the state with near- to below-normal temperatures in parts of the Southwest and in parts of the Panhandle.
For January–April, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 43.0°F, 3.8°F above average, ranking fifth 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 and Great Lakes. Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine each ranked second warmest for the January–April period.
The Alaska January–April temperature was 13.9°F, 3.6°F above the long-term average, ranking in the warmest third of the historical record for the state. Much of the state was above normal for this four-month period while temperatures were near average across parts of the East, Southeast and parts of the Panhandle.
Precipitation
April precipitation for the contiguous U.S. was 2.77 inches, 0.25 inch above average, ranking in the wettest third of the historical record. Precipitation was below average across much of the West, Southeast, and parts of the central and southern Plains. Conversely, precipitation was above normal from portions of the Plains to the Northeast, and in parts of the Southwest. Indiana and Pennsylvania each had their fifth-wettest April on record.
Alaska’s average monthly precipitation ranked in the driest third of the historical record. Precipitation was above average in parts of the North Slope and West Coast, while below-normal precipitation was observed in parts of the Southeast Interior and Panhandle during the month.
The January–April precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 10.95 inches, 1.48 inches above average, ranking 11th wettest in the 130-year record. Precipitation was above average across much of the contiguous U.S., with Pennsylvania having its second-wettest year-to-date period on record. Conversely, precipitation was below average across parts of the Northern Tier and western and southern Plains, and in a small portion of the Southeast during the January–April period.
The January–April precipitation for Alaska ranked in the middle third of the 100-year record, with above-average precipitation observed across much of the state, while near-normal precipitation was observed in parts of the northeast Interior and along parts of the Gulf of Alaska coast. Below-average precipitation were observed in portions of Interior and south-central Alaska and parts of the southern Panhandle during this period.
Billion-Dollar Disasters
Five new billion-dollar weather and climate disasters were confirmed in April 2024, including three severe storm events that impacted the central, southern and eastern U.S. in mid-February and early April. There were also two winter storms that impacted the northwest and central U.S. in mid-January.
There have been seven confirmed weather and climate disaster events this year, each with losses exceeding $1 billion. These disasters consisted of five severe storm events and two winter storms.
The U.S. has sustained 383 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 383 events exceeds $2.720 trillion.Other Notable Events
A spring storm brought rain, heavy snow, damaging winds and thunderstorms across much of the Great Lakes on April 2, knocking out power to over 100,000 people across the region during the height of the storm.
Severe weather across the Southeast produced a hailstorm that caused over $5 million in damages in Rock Hill, SC on April 20.
On April 26, severe weather across the central Plains resulted in the National Weather Service in Omaha, Nebraska issuing 48 tornado warnings—the most the office has ever issued in a single day.
Drought
According to the April 30 U.S. Drought Monitor report, about 17% of the contiguous U.S. was in drought, down about 1% from the beginning of April. Drought conditions expanded or intensified in much of the central and southern Plains, and parts of the Northwest and Southeast this month. Drought contracted or was reduced in intensity across much of the central Mississippi Valley and Upper Midwest, and in parts of the Southwest, northern Plains, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Monthly Outlook
Above-average temperatures are favored to impact areas from the southern Plains to the East Coast in May while above-average precipitation is likely to occur from much of the central Plains to the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Upper Midwest. Drought is likely to persist along portions of the Northern Tier, the Southwest and Hawaii. Visit the Climate Prediction Center’s Official 30-Day Forecasts and U.S. Monthly Drought Outlook website for more details.
Significant wildland fire potential for May is above normal across the Hawaiian Islands and in portions of the Southwest and Florida Peninsula. For additional information on wildland fire potential, visit the National Interagency Fire Center’s One-Month Wildland Fire Outlook
The latest #ElNiño/Southern Oscillation #ENSO diagnostic discussion is hot off the presses from the #Climate Prediction Center
Click the link to read the discussion on the CPC website:
May 9, 2024
ENSO Alert System Status: El Niño Advisory / La Niña Watch
Synopsis: A transition from El Niño to ENSO-neutral is likely in the next month. La Niña may develop in June-August (49% chance) or July-September (69% chance).
During April 2024, below-average equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) emerged in small regions of the eastern Pacific Ocean. However, above-average SSTs prevailed across the rest of the equatorial Pacific. The latest weekly Niño index values remained between +0.5°C and +0.8°C in all regions, except for Niño-3 which was +0.3°C. Below-average subsurface temperatures held steady during the month with negative anomalies extending from the Date Line to the eastern Pacific Ocean. Low-level wind anomalies were easterly over the western equatorial Pacific, while upper-level winds were near average. Convection was near average overall across the equatorial Pacific Ocean and Indonesia. Collectively, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system reflected the continued weakening of El Niño and transition toward ENSO-neutral.
The most recent IRI plume favors an imminent transition to ENSO-neutral, with La Niña developing during July-September 2024 and then persisting through the Northern Hemisphere winter. The forecast team continues to favor the dynamical model guidance, which suggests La Niña could form as early as June-August 2024, with higher confidence of La Niña during the following seasons. La Niña generally tends to follow strong El Niño events, which also provides added confidence in the model guidance favoring La Niña. In summary, a transition from El Niño to ENSO-neutral is likely in the next month. La Niña may develop in June-August (49% chance) or July-September.
#Wyoming Files Two Lawsuits Challenging Biden Administration’s EPA Rules that Target Wyoming’s #Coal Industry #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround
Click the link to read the release on Governor Gordon’s website:
May 9, 2024
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Governor Mark Gordon announced that Wyoming has filed two lawsuits challenging new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that target Wyoming’s coal and natural-gas fired power plants.
Today, Wyoming joined a coalition of 24 states challenging the Biden Administration’s recently released power plant regulations. The states argue that the new rule exceeds EPA’s authority and ignores the United States Supreme Court’s 2022 decision vacating Obama-era greenhouse gas limits for power plants. The suit asks the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review and declare the regulations unlawful.
On May 8, Wyoming and 22 other states filed a lawsuit challenging another EPA rule that would require certain air emissions from coal-fired plants to be reduced drastically, with no corresponding health benefits and with great costs to Wyoming and its industries.
“The Biden Administration’s EPA seems determined to use unlawful rulemaking to continue its attacks on Wyoming’s core industries,” Governor Gordon said. “The only goal appears to be destroying Wyoming’s fossil fuel industry by further burdening our power plants, increasing costs to consumers, and threatening the stability of our nation’s electrical grid.”
The Environmental Protection Agency rejects plan to pump Moneta oilfield waste into potential drinking water — @WyoFile #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
April 24, 2024
Federal environmental officials have rejected a request by Aethon Energy to pump Moneta Divide oilfield wastewater into the Madison aquifer, saying the deep reservoir could be used for drinking water, especially by tribal nations on the Wind River Indian Reservation.
The Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in November 2020 approved wastewater disposal into the 15,000-foot deep well, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last week the state’s decision did not align with federal rules.
Aethon’s plan does not support a finding “that the aquifer cannot now and will not in the future serve as a source of drinking water,” the EPA wrote in a 20-page record of decision. Aethon argued, and the Wyoming commission agreed 4-1, that the underground Madison formation was too deep and remote to be used for drinking water.
The EPA relied on the Safe Drinking Water Act as the authority under which to protect the aquifer. It also cited climate, environmental justice and tribal interests in its decision, pointing to the nearby Wind River Indian Reservation as a community that could use the water.
“The significance of that is the EPA finally didn’t wimp out on us,” said Wes Martel, a member of the Wind River Water Resources Control Board. “We’re just glad they now have some people in place following up on their Indian policy.”
The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes “foresee increased reliance on groundwater for drinking water purposes and anticipate needing to access deeper aquifers, such as the Madison aquifer, as the climate changes and water resources grow scarcer,” the EPA wrote in a 94-page analysis of tribal interests. The agency cited historic cultural and spiritual ties to the land and water and tribes’ status as sovereign nations in its decision.
“We have to make sure our future generations have a reliable source of clean water,” Martel said. “Our reservation, this is all we have left. We’ve got to do our best to protect it.”
The Powder River Basin Resource Council, along with the Wyoming Outdoor Council and others, has spent years monitoring discharge reports and industry permits and was vital in challenging pollution threats, Martel said.
The EPA understood that science, and the law did not support Aethon’s request, said Shannon Anderson, organizing director and staff attorney with the resource council. “They recognized the value of our groundwater resources and the need to protect those into the future,” she said, hailing the decision.
Vast quantities of water
Aethon must find a way to dispose of produced water — a brine pumped from energy wells to release gas and oil — as it expands the Moneta Divide field by 4,500 wells. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management authorized that expansion in 2020, leaving the question of water disposal to Wyoming, which has authority over surface and underground water quality under overarching federal standards.
Aethon must find a way to dispose of the equivalent of 120 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of produced water a day to expand the field. Aethon and Burlington Resources, a co-producer at Moneta, could generate $182 million a year in federal royalties, $87.5 million a year in Wyoming severance taxes and $106 million annually in County Ad Valorem taxes from the expansion.
But Aethon has violated state permits that allow it to pump some produced water into Alkali and Badwater creeks that flow into Boysen Reservoir, a drinking water source for the town of Thermopolis. Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality has notified the Dallas-based investment company of its infraction and has required Aethon to reduce the salinity of surface discharges this year.
The DEQ this year listed the two creeks as “impaired” and unable to sustain aquatic life. Underground injection of wastewater into the Madison was to be a new component of the disposal program.
The EPA cited climate change, drought, increasing temperatures and use of reservation surface water by others as some of the reasons to preserve the Madison aquifer.
“Removing the existing statutory and regulatory protections for a potential source of high-quality drinking water for the rural and overburdened communities in Fremont County and on the WRIR would further exacerbate existing inequities particularly with respect to historic and ongoing adverse and cumulative impacts to water resources and community health,” the EPA wrote.
“Thus, equity and environmental justice considerations, which include Tribal interest considerations, support maintaining the existing [Safe Drinking Water Act] protections that apply to the aquifers consistent with Congressional intent to protect both current and potential future sources of drinking water,” EPA documents state.
Neither Aethon nor a representative of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission responded immediately to a request for comment Wednesday. But WyoFile received this response from Tom Kropatsch, oil and gas supervisor for the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, shortly after publication:
“We do not agree with EPA’s decision on this application. We are still reviewing their decision and the information utilized by EPA in support of their decision. Much of this information was not part of the original application or a part of the record. EPA did not follow the standard procedure of allowing the WOGCC and the applicant to review and respond to the additional information they had available prior to making their final decision. EPA evaluated data that differs in its geographic, geologic, engineering, and other technical information. EPA also inappropriately related the proposed injection location to other areas of the state. Since the data EPA reviewed does not accurately reflect the conditions at the location of the proposed disposal well it is not appropriate to rely on it for a decision on this application. The WOGCC is reviewing EPA’s decision and weighing its options for further action.”
#Thornton gets green light from Larimer County for long-sought water pipeline segment: City’s proposal faced widespread pushback from county residents who urged Thornton to keep its water in the #PoudreRiver — The #Denver Post #SouthPlatteRiver
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (John Aguilar). Here’s an excerpt:
May 9, 2023
Thornton will be able to build a critical segment of a 70-mile pipe to bring water from the Cache la Poudre River to the fast-growing suburb north of Denver, after elected leaders in Larimer County unanimously — if begrudgingly — approved a permit for the northern segment of the pipe on Wednesday night…But a procession of county residents has spoken out against the proposed project at a series of public hearings held over the past couple of weeks, insisting that Thornton simply could allow its shares in the Poudre River — equaling 14,700 acre-feet a year — to flow through Fort Collins before taking the water out for municipal use. Doing so, they say, would increase flows and improve the river’s health. But just hours before Wednesday’s meeting, one of the opposition groups to the project — No Pipe Dream — said it sensed momentum had turned the city’s way, issuing a public statement that said “we’ll skip the torture of tonight’s hearing on our ‘good neighbor’ Thornton’s plans to win the water tap lottery and appease hungry developers.”
[…]
Before casting her yes vote Wednesday, Larimer County Commissioner Kristin Stephens said she wished Thornton would send its water down the Poudre “because that’s what the community wants.”
[…]
“We can’t do that,” she said, referring to a 2022 Court of Appeals decision that ruled that Larimer County cannot force Thornton to use the river as a conveyance…
The fight over Thornton’s water pipe has been going on for years, and a denial of a permit for the project by Larimer County’s commissioners more than five years ago set off a flurry of unsuccessful court challenges that ultimately prompted the city this year to resubmit its application — this time with a different route and 17 fewer miles of pipe within the county’s boundaries. The city also relocated a pump house from the original plan to a site that is not near any houses, and it agreed to 83 county land use conditions to move the project forward.
Click the link to read “Larimer County commissioners approve city of Thornton’s water pipeline application” on the Fort Collins Coloradoan website (Rebecca Powell). Here’s an excerpt:
May 9, 2024
Commissioners Kristin Stephens, Jody Shadduck-McNally and John Kefalas all said they believed the permit application, now with 83 conditions, met the criteria set by the county’s 1041 regulations that govern the permit process…[John Kefalas] said while advocates have suggested that Thornton’s 2023 application is no different than the one submitted a few years ago, “I must respectfully disagree, as the pipeline proposal and process have been different.”
[…]
Kefalas said the county legal counsel’s “prudent” interpretation of a 2002 Colorado Court of Appeals ruling, which sided with commissioners in their decision to reject but also said the county couldn’t require the water to be run through the Poudre, indicates what could be decided if the matter returns to the courts…
Thornton representatives have said that the water they are conveying is already being taken out of the river at a diversion point to the Larimer County canal. No additional diversions will be made after the project is complete, they’ve said. Shadduck-McNally said she looked thoroughly and critically at the 3,000-page application to make sure it complied with the criteria and believes the county’s higher standards did lead to a stronger application from Thornton.
“This is the system that we have in Colorado — the Colorado water system and the Colorado water court system — and I wish it was different, but it’s the system that I can’t change today. Water court and water decrees are serious business.”
2024 #COleg: Colorado Bill Protects Wetlands & Streams — Getches-Wilkinson Center
Click the link to read the article on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Andrew Teegarden):
May 8, 2024
On May 6th, 2024 the Colorado Legislature passed HB24-1379 – a bill designed to protect the wetlands and streams at risk after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett v. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). The passage of the house bill saw overwhelming support from the regulated community, environmentalists, and concerned citizens.
HB24-1379 would not have been passed if not for the hard work and dedication of the bill sponsors; Speaker Julie McCluskie, Senator Dylan Roberts, Representative Karen McCormick, and Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer. These sponsors worked tirelessly to advocate for our state waters by compromising with and listening to stakeholders throughout the session.
Colorado is one of the first states in the country to pass legislation to restore protections to wetlands and streams from development activities. Other states will be able to model the stakeholder engagement process utilized by the bill sponsors to provide protections from unmitigated development.
The Protect Colorado Waters Coalition was the primary driver behind the campaign which helped HB24-1379 cross the finish line. Both Kristine Oblock, Campaign Manager with Clean Water for All and Josh Kuhn, Senior Water Campaign Manager with Conservation Colorado, upheld the coalition and worked behind the scenes to have foundational elements included in the legislation. For example, the coalition was successful in keeping the current definition of state waters. The bill sponsor went a step further to directly include wetlands within that definition to permanently expand the scope of covered waters. As we detailed in previous posts, the more comprehensive definition of state waters removes the need to quibble over jurisdiction and streamlines the permit process for applicants. Additionally, the coalition advocated for the federal 404(b)(1) guidelines to act as the floor rather than the ceiling for environmental review of permit decisions.
We, here at the Getches-Wilkinson Center, are ecstatic to see the coalition’s efforts result in meaningful legislation designed to protect our aquatic ecosystems for generations to come. Our mission is to promote the sustainability of the lands, air, and water in the Western United States and HB24-1379 aligns with that mission. We look forward to the rulemaking process where the Water Quality Control Commission within the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment will promulgate rules to establish how permits are issued, and the requirements applicants must follow.
#Drought news May 9, 2024: In S.W. #Kansas and adjacent E. #Colorado #FlashDrought conditions continued and severe and moderate drought expanded in coverage
Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.
Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
This Week’s Drought Summary
Heavy precipitation fell in western Oregon and adjacent southwest Washington and northwest California this week, and across large portions of the central U.S., as a series of storm systems caused continued bouts of severe thunderstorms and unfortunately included more significant tornadoes. The wet weather across portions of the Great Plains and Midwest led to either scattered or widespread improvements to ongoing drought or abnormal dryness, dependent on precipitation amounts, improvements to soil moisture and streamflow, and the degree of long-term dryness remaining in different locations. In Virginia, the Carolinas, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, heavy rains or lack thereof this week led to localized improvements or degradations in areas of short-term moderate drought or abnormal dryness. Very dry weather for the past few months led to increased fire danger in parts of the Florida Peninsula, and short-term moderate drought and abnormal dryness expanded in coverage. In southwest Kansas and adjacent eastern Colorado, mostly to the west of where this week’s showers and thunderstorms occurred, flash drought conditions continued and severe and moderate drought expanded in coverage. In Hawaii, wet weather continued on the windward sides of the islands, and some improvement to conditions occurred in Lanai and western Maui. Another wet week in Puerto Rico allowed for the removal of abnormal dryness from the northwest corner of the island…
High Plains
Moderate to heavy rain amounts fell in eastern portions of the High Plains region, especially in central and eastern Nebraska, northern and eastern Kansas and eastern North Dakota. Temperature anomalies varied across the region, with temperatures coming in 3-6 degrees above normal in southern Kansas, while northwest Colorado and Wyoming finished the week at 3-9 degrees colder than normal. In eastern Kansas and Nebraska and in eastern North Dakota, heavy rains continued the recent wet pattern, leading to improvements in ongoing drought and abnormal dryness. In parts of eastern Nebraska, improvements were somewhat tempered by remaining long-term precipitation deficits and hydrologic impacts from those deficits. In southwest Kansas and adjacent southeast Colorado, many areas mostly or completely missed out on recent rains, continuing the very dry weather from the last few months, during which Dodge City tied its record for the driest April on record there (with just 0.02 inches of precipitation). In these areas, flash drought conditions continued, and severe and moderate short-term drought expanded. Given the time of year during which this drought began, severe impacts to the wheat crop in portions of Kansas have occurred. Recent dryness led to some expansion of drought and abnormal dryness in portions of eastern Wyoming as well…
West
The West region this week saw heavy precipitation (locally exceeding 2 inches) fall in eastern Montana, while portions of northern California, northeast Oregon, and western Oregon and southwest Washington also saw heavy precipitation amounts (locally exceeding 5 inches in northwest California and western Oregon). Streamflows improved amid the wet weather in northwest Oregon. Farther north in Washington, short-term dryness continued, especially in parts of the Cascade and Olympic ranges, where snow-water content and streamflow remained low, and moderate drought and abnormal dryness expanded. The heavy rains in eastern Montana ended a recent stretch of dry weather there, preventing any degradation to ongoing drought. The effects of these rains across the eastern plains will be evaluated further next week. Except for eastern New Mexico and parts of Arizona, most of the West region was colder than normal this week. Parts of Oregon, southern Idaho, northern Utah and northern Nevada saw temperature readings 6-12 degrees below normal…
South
Widespread heavy rains fell across portions of the South region, especially in western Arkansas, central and eastern Oklahoma, and central and eastern Texas. Heavier rain also occurred in a few spots in northern Mississippi and Tennessee. Most of the region had warmer-than-normal temperatures this week, with departures of 6-9 degrees above normal being common in northern Mississippi and Tennessee, while 3-6 degrees above normal was common elsewhere. In areas of improvements to drought and abnormal dryness in central and eastern Oklahoma and Arkansas, recent showers and thunderstorms continued to improve precipitation deficits, streamflow and soil moisture. In central Texas, a tight gradient in long-term drought conditions has developed, as heavier rains have recently fallen along the northern edge of moderate to extreme long-term drought conditions. Some reservoirs have seen some recent improvement in levels in the area, though significant deficits remain. In deep south Texas, dry weather over the last month or two has led to significant short-term precipitation deficits, and a small area of short-term moderate drought developed. Heavier rains (or lack thereof) in Tennessee led to small-scale improvements and degradations in areas of moderate drought and abnormal dryness…
Looking Ahead
As of time of writing (the afternoon of May 8), precipitation forecasts from the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center show mostly dry weather west of the Continental Divide within the contiguous U.S. through the evening of Monday, May 13. East of the Continental Divide, 0.5-1 inch of rain, with locally higher amounts, is forecast for portions of central and eastern Colorado, western Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, western Oklahoma and northeast New Mexico. Heavier rain amounts (locally exceeding 2 inches) are forecast from eastern Texas eastward across Louisiana, southern portions of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and in Tennessee. Separate areas of forecasted rainfall above an inch are in north-central Iowa and from south-central New York to south-central Pennsylvania.
For May 14-18, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecast favors warmer-than-normal temperatures across most of the contiguous U.S., with the exceptions of portions of the south-central U.S. from Oklahoma to Tennessee and in the northwest half of Washington. Except for far northeast Alaska, the forecast favors colder-than-normal weather in most of Alaska, especially southwest, south-central and southeast Alaska. Near-normal temperatures are most likely in Hawaii. Precipitation forecasts in the contiguous U.S. favor near- or above-normal precipitation across most areas, except for the Pacific Northwest and a small part of southwest Texas. The highest confidence for wetter-than-normal weather is in the Southeast region. Wetter-than-normal weather is favored in most of Hawaii, with the highest confidence for above-normal precipitation in Niihau and Kauai. Above-normal precipitation is also favored in Alaska.
#Vermont passes bill to charge #FossilFuel companies for damage from #ClimateChange
Click the link to read the article on the NBC News website (Maura Barrett and Lucas Thompson). Here’s an excerpt:
May 7, 2024
Vermont lawmakers passed a bill this week that is designed to make big fossil fuel companies pay for damage from weather disasters fueled by climate change. The legislation is modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s superfund program, which requires the companies responsible for environmental contamination to either clean sites up themselves or reimburse the government for the costs of work to do so. Vermont’s bill, referred to as its Climate Superfund Act, would similarly mandate that big oil companies and others with high emissions pay for damage caused by global warming.
The amounts owed would be determined based on calculations of the degree to which climate change contributed to extreme weather in Vermont, and how much money those weather disasters cost the state. From there, companies’ shares of the total would depend on how many metric tons of carbon dioxide each released into the atmosphere from 1995 to 2024. The law passed with just three no votes in Vermont’s state Senate in early April, followed by approval in the state House on Monday. The Senate will deliver a final vote later this week before the bill heads to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk. State Sen. Anne Watson, a co-sponsor of the bill, said she hopes that if the law goes into effect, it pushes big oil companies “to become purveyors of renewable energy sources and keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
New #ColoradoRiver Guidelines are Only the Beginning: “What we advocate for in the paper is that the other issues not be lost in our rush to solve the mass balance problem” — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (John Fleck):
May 9, 2024
Much attention is focused right now on rewriting Colorado River operating rules, to replace the soon-to-expire 2007 reservoir operating guidelines. But there is a growing frustration that the struggle to solve that relatively narrow problem “mass balance” problem (how much water, and where?) leaves out a range of incredibly important issues:
That’s from a new policy brief from my friends and colleagues at the Colorado River Research Group, a collaborative of researchers across the basin whose mission is to provide “an independent, scientific voice for the future of the Colorado River.” The brief grew out of conversations among the group’s members about both the strengths, as well as the shortcomings, of the current process.
We are mindful that much of what CRRG has been advocating for is directly on the table in the various proposals now being considered for post-2026 river management:
But there are so many other important issues left untouched by the P26 process (sorry, yes, some of us have started shortening it to “P26”) that the list we came up with among CRRG members is too long to blockquote here in a blog post – click through to read the white paper, it’s not too long.
What we advocate for in the paper is that the other issues not be lost in our rush to solve the mass balance problem.
Audubon getting into West’s transmission: Organization believes new transmission will be crucial to address #ClimateChange but wants science foundation to do it right — Allen Best (@BigPivots)
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
April 30, 2024
Audubon is hiring. The conservation organization wants to bring the science for which it is noted among conservation organizations to the selection of electrical transmission in Colorado and other intermountain states of the West.
“We don’t want to be an organization that stops something, because climate change is literally the existential threat to birds. And the renewable energy and storage that is needed require more transmission lines. So how do we work together to make this happen?” says Alice Madden, a former state legislator from Louisville who joined the National Audubon Society in March as senior director of climate strategy.Loui
Audubon already has a person working with developers on five proposed transmission lines in the Midwest. There an organized market called a regional transmission organization, or RTO, exists.
Western states remain fragmented in integration of electricity into an organized market. Colorado is akin to an island. The person that Madden hires will be responsible for working with developers to put new lines along highways, railroads, and other areas of disrupted habitat. If that is impossible, then the goal will be to route the transmission in the ways that cause least impact to birds.
“Routing is important, and Audubon has incredible mapping tools … so we can provide a wealth of information,” she says.
The organization already has had success in the West, though. Madden cites the organization’s work with developers of SunZia, a 550-mile high-voltage direct-current transmission line between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona.
Like most transmission lines, this one had a long history. It was proposed in 2006 and had a 17-year journey to final permitting. Audubon credits Pattern Energy, which joined the project in 2018 and partnered with Audubon to initiate early and active engagement with project developers.
“We literally guided them to best practices for routing, best practices for tower design, ways to avoid interruption of flight patterns,” says Madden.
Plus, the company committed to using an ultraviolet light-based system that was developed at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary. At the sanctuary, located along the Platte River in Nebraska, the technology has dramatically reduced mortality among sandhill cranes because of collisions. The technology makes the transmission lines that birds collide with most frequently more visible to them.
A 2023 Audubon report, “Birds and Transmission: Building the Grid Birds Need,” cites the work in New Mexico and Arizona as an approach that is “essential to optimize mitigation for birds, ensure the best data and science are used, and make projects into long-term successes worth of Audubon’s support.”
In the report’s preface, Marshall Johnson, the chief conservation officer for Audubon, speaks to the urgency of replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables. “The window to slow the rate of global temperature rise is narrowing, but the window still exists. If we are to make the most of this waning opportunity, we need to act quickly.”
Johnson goes on to lay out the need to develop renewable generation and then transmit it to population centers. Experts say the United States needs to add effectively double or triple transmission capacity. “How and where new transmission is constructed will have a tremendous impact on birds and our communities,” he wrote.
Audubon also issued the 2019 report, “Survival by Degrees: 389 Species on the Brink,” which warned that two-thirds of bird species in North America were vulnerable to extinction unless emissions are lowered.
That same report examined Colorado with greater granularity: 125 out of 241 species are climate vulnerable in summer if temperatures rise 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F). If temperature rise can be kept to 1.5 degrees C — which appears unlikely — the number of vulnerable species declines to 84.
Colorado in recent years has adopted two laws. One requires the state’s electrical utilities to join a regional transmission organization so that they can better share low-cost renewables over a broad hunk of real estate and in more than one time zone. Another law created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority, or CETA, which heard the latest report from Audubon representatives in January. The organization has broad powers to build transmission that will help Colorado deeply decarbonize its electricity sources even as electricity expands into sectors now dominated by combustion of fossil fuels.
State Sen. Chris Hansen, a Democrat from Denver, the author of these and many other key pieces of energy transition legislation, says he believes Colorado and other states need to accelerate development of transmission.
Some have argued that the National Environmental Policy Act needs to be tweaked. Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis, in their 2022 book, “The Big Fix,” make the case for revisions.
“In the book, we call for carefully thought-out reform, not just in NEPA,” said Gillis, a former reporter for the New York Times, in an interview with Big Pivots. “There’s a whole suite of land-use policies where, if we just leave them as is, it will take us 30 to 40 years to do that which really needs to be done over the next 10 years.”
Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, in a meeting with Pitkin County commissioners on April 9, mentioned the difficulty of transmission when crossing federal lands and the perceived need for streamlining regulation. Idaho is about 66% federal lands, Nevada is 85% federal lands, Colorado is 35%. NEPA, he said, is part of a broader conversation about whether regulatory review can be streamlined without losing the environmental scrutiny that is needed.
That conversation, Ritter added, is not just a Colorado one, but a national one.
“I just had a conversation with U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, and I think there’s ambition inside the United States Senate to try and streamline the reform and try and not lose anything in the process. It’s a federal statute that would have to be passed in order to modify NEPA and they’re trying to understand how to do that with bipartisan support as we speak.”
Madden is wary about reform of NEPA. Those things that motivated the creation of NEPA in 1969 remain. “But there are many, many ways it can be done faster,” she said. “This administration in particular has been trying to do that by employing more people to review these projects.”
“There are a lot of red-herrings about why this takes so long. I think the worst problem is not the permitting. It is the interconnection queue.”
She says 12,000 renewable energy projects across the United States are waiting to be connected to the grid. She identifies utilities as being the challenge.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently reported nearly 2,600 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are actively seeking grid interconnections. That is an eight-fold increase since 2014.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently released the Transmission Interconnection Roadmap that offers possible solutions to speeding up the interconnection of clean energy.
In her new position at Audubon, Madden has responsibility for implementing the organization’s climate strategy at the state and local levels. She previously was policy and political director for Greenpeace USA. She had also directed the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy & the Environmental at the University of Colorado School of Law.
Along the way she had also worked at the Department of Energy, was a climate change advisor to Ritter during the last two years of his term, and before that had been a member of the Colorado House of Representatives.
April is the cruelest month (to the #snowpack): Mining Monitor: Lithium operation gets water permit; some hype comes to fruition — Jonathan P. Thompson (SubStack)
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
May 3, 2024
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
What a difference a warm, dusty month can make.
In early April, the Land Desk reported that the snowpack in most of the Southwest was at or above normal, and appeared to be peaking right on schedule, presaging a normal spring runoff. But April turned out to be the cruelest month, after all, sending snowpack levels into a free-fall and dashing hopes for a strong spring runoff on most of the region’s streams.
Take the Gunnison River watershed: Snow water equivalent levels peaked on April 9 at a slightly higher than median level — or about 107% of normal. Within a week, the levels had dropped below normal; and by May 1 were at about 75% of the median level for that date, putting it just about even with 2021, which was a horribly dry year. (More charts and graphs below the text).
A similar pattern is seen throughout Colorado, with northern areas (such as the Yampa) generally faring better than those in the southern part of the state (e.g. the Animas and Dolores). There are exceptions: Snowpack in the high La Plata Mountains in southwestern Colorado is still at about 90% of the median and isn’t falling as quickly as in other areas, which is good news for the La Plata River and the “Dryside” farmers who rely on it for irrigation.
Part of the problem was that the spigot from the sky, after spewing generously for much of March, seemed to shut off in mid-April, with the exception of a single good storm near the end of the month. But a bigger factor was the combination of unusually high temperatures throughout the winter along with relentless spring winds and a series of dust events.
Overall, the United States experienced its warmest meteorological winter(Dec 1 – Feb. 29) on record, and Western states had unusually high temperatures. A sampling of average daily temperature data from individual and river-basin SNOTEL sites reveal that in most cases they were above median for the period of record (which usually reaches back to the late 1980s).
Hastening the snowmelt have been a series of dust events in the late winter and early spring. The Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, in its April 22 statewide report, observed dust layers across the Colorado mountains, with severe dust in the McClure Pass and Roaring Fork region, and with Wolf Creek Pass having the heaviest dust in the San Juan Mountains. “Perhaps, besides the Roaring Fork region, overall dust severity is in the ‘average’ category,” wrote CSAS director Jeff Derry, “but don’t believe, combined with the weather, it can’t have drastic affects on snowpack ablation. Without some meaningful precipitation snowmelt season could be over quickly.”
In early April, the Dolores Water Conservancy District noted that it was unlikely they’d release enough water from McPhee Reservoir to enable boating in the Lower Dolores River — even for a short period of time. The deteriorating snow situation makes the prospect of raftable flows above the confluence with the San Miguel River highly implausible. As I write this, the river’s flow below the dam is barely more than a trickle at 50 cubic feet per second (and around 500 cfs above the reservoir).
At the beginning of April, the Bureau of Reclamation predicted Lake Powell’s surface level would increase by about 30 feet from late March levels during spring runoff in June, before subsiding back to about 3,563 feet by the end of the year (It was at 3,560 feet on May 1). The agency hasn’t released it’s end of April projections yet, but they’re likely to be less optimistic now.
The Animas River in Durango, where the water runs free and flows are influenced entirely by snowmelt, hit 1,600 cfs on April 25 before cooler temperatures brought it back down to 736 cfs. We can get a sense of when and how big peak runoff will be by considering that on May 1 of last year, the snow levels in the basin were about twice what they are now, and the river peaked at 4,500 cfs at the end of May.
My guess: The Animas River will peak on May 18 at 2,400 cfs. What do you think? Leave your guess in the comments below.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
NEWS: Utah’s state engineer approves Blackstone Minerals’ (aka A1/Anson) proposal to withdraw about 13,755 acre-feet of water from groundwater wells near Green River, Utah, clearing the way for what would be the Four Corners region’s first direct lithium extraction project.
CONTEXT: Australia-based Anson Resources and its subsidiaries — A1 Lithium, Blackstone Minerals, and Blackstone Resources — have staked more than 1,000 federal mining claims, acquired private land, and secured Utah state land leases in and around southeastern Utah’s Paradox Formation over the last several years. They appear to be working on several projects, with their Paradox direct lithium extraction project the furthest along.
Anson plans to drill 8,000- to 9,000-foot-deep wells just north of the town of Green River, pump brine to the surface, and use resin beads to extract the lithium from the water, without evaporation ponds. After the lithium is extracted, Anson claims they’ll inject the same amount of water back underground, which if true would mean their consumptive water use — or the amount withdrawn minus the amount returned to the aquifer — will be zero. Last year Anson applied for the right to withdraw water year-round at a rate of 19 cubic feet per second — or about 12 million gallons per day — for non-consumptive use.
But concerned residents, advocates, and even federal and state regulators have expressed skepticism and concern. Not only is the zero-consumptive use claim somewhat dubious, but pumping that much groundwater could have an adverse effect on the Green River or freshwater aquifers. Plus, the wells will be drilled adjacent to a former uranium mill and current disposal site for radioactive and otherwise contaminated materials, and within the Department of Energy’s “area of concern” surrounding the site. And they will drill through an aquifer contaminated by those activities.
The state, however, felt that Anson adequately addressed these concerns, and granted the water right. It did, however, indicate that if Anson’s water use was not 100% non-consumptive, the company would be subject to enforcement and fines. The Great Basin Water Network and local residents have called for public meetings with regulators to address their concerns.
Also…
- Congress has passed legislation banning low-enriched uranium importsfrom Russia, sending it to President Biden’s desk for signing. While the U.S. does not import large amounts of the reactor fuel from Russia, the ban likely will cause uranium prices to rise and bolster efforts to reopen uranium mines in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. (World Nuclear News)
- Navajo Nation leaders urge the Biden administration to block a mining company from shipping uranium across tribal land from the Pinyon Plain mine near the Grand Canyon to the White Mesa mill in southeastern Utah. (KNAU)
- Anfield Energy applies for state and federal permits to reopen its Velvet-Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah. (news release)
- Anson Resources (yes, the lithium folks) is launching a uranium exploration project at its Yellow Cat claims just north of Arches National Park in a historically mined area. (proactive)
- Don’t forget to the visit the Land Desk Mining Monitor Map for more info on mining activity in the Four Corners Country.
Investigating for Ourselves: Dam Proposals on Black Mesa and Beyond — Advocate Magazine The Grand Canyon Trust #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on The Grand Canyon Trust website (Daryn Akei Melvin):
Spring/Summer 2024
Hydropower proposals raise major questions about tribal consent and consultation.
In the spring of 2018, I was invited to visit my partner’s family’s “sheep camp” in Nastł’a, a sprawling box canyon along the eastern edge of Black Mesa, west of the community of Chilchinbito, on the Navajo Nation.
That spring, my partner’s relatives had begun renovating their family home, a modest white stone house, where generations of the family had been raised, and which stood only a few hundred yards from the homes of other extended family members. The multi-generational connection to this place was palpable, for despite only having solar power and no running water, relatives both young and old were eager to lend a hand in the renovations that day.
Later, I was invited by my partner’s father to walk up the escarpment of Black Mesa, following trails used by generations of my partner’s family to reach their grazing lands along the mesa top. After an hour-and-a-half trek, we stood at the end of the trail, which was transected by a weathered barbed-wire fence that served as the boundary line between the Navajo and Hopi partitioned lands.
I turned around to look out over the valley below. Little did I know then that much of the dynamic and vibrant landscape I beheld, including the very ground on which I stood, would years later be at the center of three massive pumped storage hydroelectric projects proposed by a company organized by a French entrepreneur under the name Nature and People First Arizona.
In 2022, Nature and People First Arizona applied for preliminary permits to assess the feasibility of building three hydropower projects on Black Mesa, a large plateau that extends across both Navajo and Hopi lands.
Per the project proposals filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the three projects simply named Black Mesa South, Black Mesa East, and Black Mesa North would span roughly 40 miles of the Navajo Reservation, occupying the entire northeastern ridge of the mesa, from the community of Chilchinbito to the town of Kayenta.
What is pumped storage hydropower?
Pumped storage hydropower facilities are essentially low-tech batteries that store energy in the form of water and usually consist of two reservoirs, one above the other. In the case of Black Mesa, the upper reservoirs for the three projects would be placed atop the mesa, while the lower reservoirs would rest at the base of the mesa’s steep face.
Using surplus power from the grid, usually generated by solar or wind during the day, water from the lower reservoirs would be pumped to the upper reservoirs, and then when demand for power rose, water would be released from the upper reservoirs and propelled by gravity through a turbine, generating electricity before again emptying into the lower reservoirs.
Many Hopi footprints
As we stood at the boundary line overlooking Nastł’a, my partner’s father noted the footprints of a coyote.
“How do you say ‘coyote tracks’ in Hopi?” he asked, to which I responded, “iskukveni.”
The fact that this word found its way into our conversation that day was particularly apropos given that the Black Mesa area holds great historical and cultural significance for Hopi people, especially for those of the Isngyam (Coyote Clan). Furthermore, the word kukveni (footprints) serves as a powerful metaphor for Hopi people to comprehend our tangible heritage, whether it be the archaeological remains of former settlements like pottery sherds, stone tools, or petroglyphs, or other physical reminders of our past use and occupation of the land. In every sense, throughout Black Mesa there are indeed many Hopi footprints.
It was then I noticed that the footprints to which my partner’s father was referring went along the trail ahead of us and crossed under the barbed-wire fence of the boundary line. This brought a smile to my face as coyotes or their signs are often encountered on the road, for to be on the road is to be between situations, to be in transition.
It is perhaps not surprising then that this area, as an ancestral home of the Isngyam, would play a role in the push to transition the United States away from fossil fuels toward renewable “green energy.” This push, however, resulted in an explosion of dam proposals on tribal lands, and these numbers are likely to only increase given federal tax credits to support pumped storage hydropower projects under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Yet, despite being considered a renewable “green energy” option and touted as a means to replace some of the revenue, jobs, and power generation lost with the closure of Navajo Generating Station in 2019, pumped storage hydropower is not without its own issues, including how to fill the reservoirs.
Astonishing amounts of water
Filling the nine proposed reservoirs on Black Mesa would require an astonishing 147 billion gallons (450,000 acre-feet) of water, but in the applications for preliminary permits the developer was vague on the details of where that water would come from. The applications cited the Colorado River, the San Juan River, and two local aquifers as possible sources but did not indicate the current availability of or legal rights to these sources.
That means that, potentially, the projects could pump groundwater that has fed the springs and streams of Navajo and Hopi lands for millennia. Over the last century, groundwater has been drawn down by coal mining, power plants, growing populations, and, up until 2005, a slurry line that pumped billions of gallons of water to move coal from the mine in Kayenta to the Mohave Generating Station approximately 273 miles west.
The prospect of adverse cultural, ecological, and environmental impacts has consequently drawn much more opposition than support when it comes to Black Mesa and other pumped storage dam projects proposed on tribal lands.
The Navajo Nation’s Department of Justice, 19 Navajo Nation chapters (local governments), members of the Hopi public, and various grassroots and conservation groups filed comments, concerns, and questions regarding the Black Mesa projects and urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny Nature and People First Arizona’s requested preliminary permits due to the wildly unrealistic nature of the proposals in the arid Southwest, as well as their compounding effects after decades of harm to the people, land, and aquifers of Black Mesa from coal mining.
Investigating for ourselves
My own personal experience of the Black Mesa area is colored by the contentious Peabody Coal mining operations of the past, for as a child I would occasionally accompany itàapa’pa (our grandfather), a Coyote Clan member, on his visits to the Black Mesa area. During these outings he often lamented the harms the mining operations caused to the land, and the depletion of the most significant water source in the region. He recounted the controversial means by which the Hopi tribal government entered into its lease agreements with Peabody Western Coal Company in the 1960s and how such agreements were negotiated by prominent natural resources attorney John Boyden, who claimed to be representing the Hopi Tribe while actually on the payroll of Peabody. This subterfuge ultimately resulted in unusually advantageous terms for Peabody and gross misrepresentations to the Hopi people of the mine’s impacts on their land.
“Okiwa, kur paàsat itam nu’an una’i’istu — Regrettably, then we were oh so gullible,” our grandfather said.
I recall being particularly amused by his use of the term una’i’ist as it references those who share in the gullible nature of his wu’ya (clan totem), Coyote, who is prone to believe anything he is told and is therefore easily duped. Yet, as the motifs of Hopi coyote tales are in fact meant to demonstrate the ways in which one should not live, his comment also serves as an admonition that people would do well to question things. For as our grandfather often also said when speaking about his wu’ya, “Pu’ Iisaw piw pas hìita aw poòte’ningwu — It is also Coyote’s nature always to investigate things for himself.”
Unfortunately, the ability of tribal communities and governments to holistically investigate and assess the positive and negative implications of large-scale projects on their lands, particularly as they endeavor to balance humanitarian and economic needs with cultural preservation and environmental protection, is something that has been historically lacking.
Case in point, historically the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has not been required to consult with or obtain the consent of the tribe on whose land a project was being proposed before issuing a preliminary permit. In fact, the commission wasn’t even required to notify a tribe when a project had been proposed on its tribal lands.
The need to remedy this oversight became even more apparent in 2020, after preliminary permits were issued for two pumped storage hydropower projects on the lower Little Colorado River not far from its confluence with the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and within the sovereign borders of the Navajo Nation despite objections by the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, and the Hualapai Tribe. A third proposal to dam nearby Big Canyon for hydropower has been pending since 2020.
Update: On April 25, 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission struck down the proposed Big Canyon Dam. Read more ›
Following several years of community conversations on the Navajo Nation and in Hopi villages, and informed by the concerns community members voiced, on February 6, 2024, the Hopi Tribe passed Resolution 010-2024 in which the Hopi Tribal Council resolved to petition the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to update its rules to require tribal consultation and consent for granting preliminary permits for hydroelectric projects on tribal lands.
Less than a week after Hopi’s decision, in a historic reversal of past precedent, the commission denied seven preliminary permits for pumped storage hydropower projects across the Navajo Nation, including all three of the Black Mesa storage projects, citing opposition from the Navajo Nation.
In these orders, the commission announced a new policy: “the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects… if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit.”
The commission didn’t immediately strike down the Big Canyon project, but instead opened an additional 30-day comment period, likely intended to provide the Navajo Nation an opportunity to make a clear statement about whether or not it opposes the project.
The Hopi Tribe is currently reviewing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s new policy on tribal consent and speaking with other tribes as potential cosigners on a formal petition urging the commission to establish additional requirements governing tribal consultation and consent before preliminary permits can be issued on tribal lands. Regardless, this recent reversal in policy, at the very least, stands in recognition of tribal sovereignty, grants tribes a legal means of determining the kinds of hydropower projects that happen on their lands, and is a positive, proactive step toward true self-determination and governance for Native people.
Daryn Akei Melvin works as a Grand Canyon manager for the Grand Canyon Trust with a focus on addressing issues related to the Little Colorado River.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
Critical Effects of Precipitation on Future #ColoradoRiver Flow — American Meteorological Society Journal of #Climate #COriver #aridification
Click the link to access the article on the AMS website (Martin P. Hoerling, Jon K. Eischeid, Henry F. Diaz, Balaji Rajagopolan, and Eric Kuhn). Here’s the abstract:
April 19, 2024
Of concern to Colorado River management, as operating guidelines post-2026 are being considered, is whether water resource recovery from low flows during 2000–2020 is possible. Here we analyze new simulations from the sixth generation of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to determine plausible climate impacts on Colorado River flows for 2026–2050 when revised guidelines would operate. We constrain projected flows for Lee Ferry, the gauge through which 85% of the river flow passes, using its estimated sensitivity to meteorological variability together with CMIP6 projected precipitation and temperature changes. The critical importance of precipitation, especially its natural variability, is emphasized. Model projections indicate increased precipitation in the Upper Colorado River basin due to climate change, which alone increases river flows 5%–7% (relative to a 2000–2020 climatology). Depending on the river’s temperature sensitivity, this wet signal compensates some, if not all, of the depleting effects from basin warming. Considerable internal decadal precipitation variability (~5% of the climatological mean) is demonstrated, driving a greater range of plausible Colorado River flow changes for 2026–2050 than previously surmised from treatment of temperature impacts alone: the overall precipitation-induced Lee Ferry flow changes span −25% to +40% contrasting with a −30% to −5% range from expected warming effects only. Consequently, extreme low and high flows are more likely. Lee Ferry flow projections, conditioned on initial drought states akin to 2000–2020, reveal substantial recovery odds for water resources, albeit with elevated risks of even further flow declines than in recent decades.
© 2024 American Meteorological Society. This is an Author Accepted Manuscript distributed under the terms of the default AMS reuse license. For information regarding reuse and general copyright information, consult the AMS Copyright Policy (www.ametsoc.org/PUBSReuseLicenses).Corresponding author: Balaji Rajagopalan, balajir@colorado.edu.
A rare dose of hope for the #ColoradoRiver as new study says future may be wetter — KUNC #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
May 5, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Good news on the Colorado River is rare. Its reservoirs, the two largest in the country, have shrunk to record lows. The policymakers who will decide its future are stuck at an impasse. Climate change has driven more than two decades of megadrought and strained the water supply for 40 million people across the Southwest.
But a new study is delivering a potential dose of optimism for the next 25 years of the Colorado River. The findings, published in the Journal of Climate, forecast a 70% chance the next quarter century will be wetter than the last.
Projections for Colorado River water supply have largely focused on the impact of temperature. Climate change means the region is getting hotter, which in turn drives a raft of environmental factors that mean less water ends up in rivers and reservoirs. For example, snow melts quicker and is more likely to evaporate. Dry, thirsty soil soaks up snow melt before it has a chance to flow into the nearest stream.
This new study, though, takes a closer look at the impact of precipitation.
Eighty five percent of the Colorado River starts as snow in the region’s headwaters – the high-altitude mountains of Colorado and Wyoming. The scientists behind the new paper predict an increase in precipitation over the next 25 years that could be big enough to offset the drying caused by rising temperatures, at least in the short term.
Researchers with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder used data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to run forecasting models and form their conclusions.
Those scientists stressed the importance of variability in their findings. While the high end of their forecasts paint a positive picture, their models also showed a small chance that precipitation could go down in the next two decades. There’s a 4% chance that river flows could drop by 20% in the next 25 years.
“All of our thinking, our acting, our management should be humble and recognize the nature in which we live, which is, yeah, you have water, but it is very highly variable,” Balaji Rajagopalan, a water engineering professor who co-authored the study, said.
Good science about the region’s climate future is particularly important right now, as Colorado River policy makers renegotiate the rules for sharing its water. The region’s water crisis is driven by two big themes – climate change is shrinking supply, and the people in charge have struggled to rein in demand in response.
Right now, they’re hashing out a new set of rules for managing the river to replace the guidelines that expire in 2026. Rajagopalan said the findings from the new study underscore the need to build flexible rules that can adapt along with climate conditions.
“We want to emphasize that it’s not like, ‘Oh, there’s going to be water around, so let’s go party – we don’t have to do the hard work that needs to be done in terms of conservation and thoughtful management,’” he said. “If anything, it speaks to even more reason that you have to.”
Another climate scientist, Brad Udall, who was not involved in the study, cast a bit of skepticism on its findings and message. Udall, a climate researcher at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute, said he holds the paper’s authors in high regard, but some aspects of the study’s approach gave him some “unease.”
“We just can’t rely on these models for precipitation,” he said. “We can rely on them for temperature, but we can’t rely on them for precipitation. There are just too many issues with them.”
He said climate models can’t always dependably predict precipitation because they are based on statistics, as opposed to the physics-based methods used to build long-term temperature forecasts.
Udall, who has referred to himself as “the skunk in the room” after years of sharing tough-to-stomach forecasts about the dire future of Western water, pointed to this year’s runoff as an example of temperature’s ability to chip away at the benefits of a wet winter.
While snow totals in the Colorado River headwaters region peaked at around 100% of normal, warm temperatures mean flows in the Colorado River are expected to reach about 80% of normal levels.
2024 Secretarial #Drought Designations cover 570 counties and 345 contiguous counties through May 1, 2024 — @DroughtDenise
Declaration Process Fact Sheet at https://fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/FactSheets/emergency_disaster_designation_declaration_process-factsheet.pdf
#Snowpack news May 6, 2024
$500 million for #solar energy for tribal families — Source #NewMexico #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the SourceNM website (Joaqlin Estus):
April 29, 2024
Look for solar panels to blossom atop low-income homes in Indian Country over the next five years. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $500 million for tribes as part of $7 billion in grants for residential solar energy. Some $5.5 billion will go to states, and $1 billion to multi-state awards.
The $7 billion will benefit 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities, said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan in a prepared statement. “The selectees will advance solar energy initiatives across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, saving $8 billion in energy costs for families, delivering cleaner air, and combating climate change.”
“Solar is the cheapest form of electricity—and one of the best ways to lower energy costs for American families,” stated John Podesta, Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy. “Today’s announcement of EPA’s Solar for All awards will mean that low-income communities, and not just well-off communities, will feel the cost-saving benefits of solar thanks to this investment.”
“Residential solar electricity leads to reduced monthly utility bills, reduced levels of air pollution in neighborhoods, and ultimately healthier communities, but too often low-income and disadvantaged communities have been left out,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Acting Secretary Adrianne Todman said in the statement.
“Sunlight is powering millions of homes across the nation, and we’re working hard to ensure Americans everywhere can benefit from this affordable clean energy resource,” stated U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.
EPA awarded $62 million to a nonprofit Native-led organization that brings solar energy to underserved communities, the National Tribal Program of GRID Alternatives.
GRID, in a prepared statement, said “the National Tribal Program, in coalition with The Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, Native CDFI Network, and Native Renewables, is poised to revolutionize solar energy access within Native American communities nationwide.”
Co-Executive Director of the National Tribal Program Talia Martin, a citizen of the Shoshone-Bannock tribes, said in a statement, “This funding will enable us to make significant strides in bridging the clean energy gap in Native American communities, supporting their capacity to harness the abundant potential of solar power while fostering tribal economic development and self-sufficiency.”
”This initiative serves as a vital step towards alleviating poverty, combating climate change, and fostering the creation of sustainable, well-paying green jobs for thousands of tribal members,” said Cheri Smith, Mi’kmaq tribal descendant, president & CEO, Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, in a statement. The money for tribes will support their self-determined efforts to deploy clean energy on tribal lands she said.
“We believe that everyone deserves access to affordable, and reliable energy solutions,” said Suzanne Singer, Co-Founder and executive director of Native Renewables and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, in a statement. “Through collaborative efforts like the National Tribal Program, we can support Indigenous communities in their transition to a renewable energy future.”
In addition to GRID, the EPA announced three other tribal recipients:
Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association Inc., Tribal Consortium $62,330,000
“The Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association, Inc. and coalition partners GRID Alternatives, the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, and the Native Community Development Financial Institute (CDFI) Network will deploy Tribally-owned residential solar, along with storage and necessary upgrades, for the benefit of the 35 Tribes located in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The coalition, headquartered in Wisconsin, will leverage the deep expertise and experience of its members to build a program that empowers Tribes and Tribal energy champions, provides project-deployment technical assistance necessary to plan and build residentially benefiting solar projects on Tribal Lands in the Midwest, and includes workforce development to enhance tribal self-determination and self-sufficiency,” reads the statement.
Oweesta Corporation, Tribal nonprofit $156,120,000
“The Tribal nonprofit Oweesta Corporation will address adoption barriers to Native residential and community solar deployment by acting as the intermediary between professional services partners, developers, Tribal governments and Tribal organizations. Oweesta’s program will support an equitable spread of solar deployment across all Tribal census tracts nationwide. It will employ a systems-building approach to centralize regulatory compliance information, technical deployment, commercial solar standards, and Tribal housing expertise all within the framework of experienced Tribal Community Development Financial Institutions. Based in Colorado, Oweesta Corporation’s program will operate in Tribal lands across the nation.”
Tanana Chiefs Conference, tribal consortium $62,450,000
“Alaska Tribal Solar For All is a partnership between three organizations to provide comprehensive access to the benefits of Tribal residents of Alaska. Tanana Chiefs Conference, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and Alaska Housing Finance Corporation each have developed programs that will provide Tribal residents throughout Alaska the opportunity to benefit from solar. Alaska maintains over 40% of the nation’s federally recognized Tribes and is the state with the highest proportion of Alaska Native and American Indian residents (19.6%) in the nation. Whether a Tribal member owns a house with sufficient capacity to manage distributed generation, or a Tribal member lives in a community that operates a tiny isolated microgrid where rooftop solar isn’t feasible—all Tribal residents of Alaska will have the opportunity to benefit from this project,” reads the statement.
Reclamation Releases Draft Environmental Assessment for Upper Thompson Sanitation District Water Reclamation Facility and Lift Station Improvement Project #BigThompsonRiver #SouthPlatteRiver
Click the link to read the release on the Reclamation website (Anna Perea):
May 3, 2024
LOVELAND, Colo. — The Bureau of Reclamation released a draft environmental assessment for the Upper Thompson Sanitation District Water Reclamation Facility and Lift Station Improvement Project. The project, located in the Estes Valley of Larimer County, Colorado, consists of construction, operation, and maintenance of a new wastewater treatment facility, two lift stations and connecting pipelines.
The project will allow the Upper Thompson Sanitation District to meet future wastewater flow estimates and applicable water quality standards and regulations. The replacement of aging and deficient infrastructure will also reduce long-term operation and maintenance costs for the district while allowing for future facility expansion.
“This project provides opportunities and partnerships to help meet the future wastewater treatment demands of Estes Park residents and visitors within the Upper Thompson Sanitation District,” said Reclamation’s Eastern Colorado Area Manager, Jeff Rieker.
The 2024 Upper Thompson Sanitation District Water Reclamation Facility and Lift Station Improvement Project Environmental Assessment has been prepared in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act and is available for public review and comment at the Eastern Colorado Area Office Schedule of NEPA Actions. Please direct any questions to Matt Schultz at 970-461-5469 or mjschultz@usbr.gov. Please submit comments on the draft environmental assessment to Matt Schultz, Environmental Specialist at mjschultz@usbr.gov by June 3, 2024.
Historic Agreement with the Federal Government and #Arizona Gives #ColoradoRiver Indian Tribes Control Over Use of Their Water off Tribal Land — Inside #Climate News #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Noel Lyn Smith):
May 2, 2024
The deal will help the tribe raise money for infrastructure and services for its members while the water could ease the drought in the Southwest.
PARKER, Ariz. — Against a backdrop of the Colorado River, members of the Colorado River Indian Tribes watched Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and Amelia Flores, the tribe’s chairwoman, sign a historic agreement on April 26 that asserts the tribe’s right to lease portions of their allocation of the river’s water to users away from the tribal land.
The agreement between the tribe, the Interior Department and Arizona gives the tribe the ability to lease, exchange or store a portion of its Colorado River water entitlement. As one leader expressed, the tribe is stepping away from the “outdated framework” of federal restrictions that constrained their means to supply water to areas off the tribal land.
The financial gain for the tribe will allow them to invest in services that help tribal members, to build needed infrastructure and update systems for agricultural purposes.
“This is a significant event in the history of CRIT,” Flores said. “These agreements clear the path for CRIT to finally be recognized as a central party in all future decisions regarding the Colorado River. … Today, we celebrate the empowerment of our rights to make our own decisions with who, when and how our water sources may be used.”
The tribe’s membership consists of the Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi and Navajo. The Colorado River flows through the tribe’s land in Arizona and California. The reservation was established in March 1865 for the Mohave and Chemehuevi, both of whom inhabited the region. In later years, Hopi and Navajo relocated to the area.
“This river flows through us,” said Flores, who is a member of the Arizona Governor’s Water Policy Council, a group established last year and tasked with modernizing the state’s management of groundwater.
The agreement comes as Arizona deals with ongoing drought and discussions to address climate change.
“Today may mark the end of the work to complete these agreements but it marks the beginning of the next chapter for water conservation in Arizona,” Hobbs said.
“The implementation of these agreements and the new fundability for the Colorado River Indian Tribes to use their water resources in new and creative ways presents an enormous opportunity for additional conservation and water management solutions as we confront climate change and the stress it is placing on our water supplies,” she added.
The governor said the tribe has been a longtime partner in protecting the Colorado River. This includes a vital role in preventing Lake Mead from dropping levels so low that the reservoir might not have been able to generate power or supply downriver communities in 2019 as part of the drought contingency plan developed by states that receive river water in the lower basin.
A day before the event, Haaland visited the river and toured the Parker Dam, where she heard about how the ongoing drought is impacting communities. She is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, a state that is part of the Upper Colorado River Basin.
“The agreement will enable CRIT to continue leading with collaborative strategies in support of the resilience of the Colorado River,” Haaland said. “This agreement reflects years of cooperation between the federal government, the state of Arizona and the tribes.”
She added that it demonstrates the Biden administration’s commitment to tribal self-determination and sovereignty.
Margaret Vick, the tribe’s water attorney, said the CRIT has always farmed their land, which generates revenue for them.
Welcome signs on Arizona State Route 95 greeting motorists arriving in Parker feature the word, “agriculture.”
Although the tribe holds the largest and most senior right to Colorado River water in Arizona, they were blocked from deciding alternatives for its use outside of their land. According to Vick, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 confirmed the tribe’s reserved water rights—an allocation with priority dates ranging from 1865 to 1876.
“These early priority dates are the most senior in the lower basin and it is this seniority that makes them such a valuable asset,” she said.
About 40 years ago, tribal leaders started examining the possibility of leasing river water to users outside their reservation. The effort became viable in the last decade because of the looming shortages in the Central Arizona Project, a system of canals that deliver Colorado River water from northern Arizona to the central and southern parts of the state.
“The council established a singular goal, to obtain and confirm their sovereign authority to enter agreements to lease or conserve water off reservation in exchange for secure revenue,” Vick said.
As part of that effort, tribal members passed a referendum in 2018 that supported leasing river water, she explained.
“The previous councils have laid the foundation for this legislation, but this council brought it across the finish line,” the tribe’s Vice Chairman Dwight Lomayesva said.
U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., introduced the Colorado River Indian Tribes Water Resiliency Act of 2022, which cleared the way for the agreement. President Joe Biden signed the bill into law in January 2023.
This was the first legislation of its kind, and was not easy to get across the finish line, the senator said.
“This is a big deal for the tribe’s sovereignty, for the tribe’s economy, our collective efforts to protect our water resources and for partners who want to work with the tribe,” Kelly said.
Reclamation announced $21 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for endangered species recovery and conservation in the #ColoradoRiver Basin #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Bureau of Reclamation website:
May 3, 2024
WASHINGTON – The Bureau of Reclamation today announced a $21 million investment from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for endangered species recovery and conservation in the Colorado River Basin. Project funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will support the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program, the San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program and the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program.
“This funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will aid us in fulfilling our mission of safeguarding and responsibly managing water resources,” said Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “With this investment, each of our programs will have the opportunity to advance initiatives aimed at protecting species affected by drought, contributing to environmental sustainability.”
The Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program work to recover endangered and threatened fish in the Upper Colorado River Basin while water development proceeds in accordance with Federal and state laws and interstate compacts. The Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program was created to balance the use of the Colorado River water resources in Arizona, California and Nevada with the conservation of native species and their habitats.
The selected projects are:
- Colorado: $1.2 million for the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program to design a fish exclusion feature at Lake Catamount, roughly 8.5 miles south of Steamboat Springs. The feature will prevent nonnative Northern pike from escaping downstream to critical habitat for threatened and endangered fish in the Yampa River.
- Utah and Colorado: $2.6 million for the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program to address needed repairs that will improve performance and efficiency at the Ouray National Fish Hatchery’s Grand Valley and Randlett units in Colorado and Utah, respectively, and enhance production of threatened and endangered fish for stocking purposes at Wahweap State Hatchery in Utah. Utah: $1 million for the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program to replace the water control structure at Old Charley Wash, a floodplain wetland near the Green River that provides habitat for rearing threatened and endangered fish.
- New Mexico: $5.2 million for the San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program to design and construct a fish passage structure on the San Juan River roughly 17 miles west of Farmington, New Mexico. The structure would allow threatened and endangered fish to migrate upstream beyond an Arizona Public Service Company diversion weir that currently limits fish passage.
- Arizona, California: $10 million for the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Program to build rearing ponds for native fishes at the Yuma Meadows Conservation Area.
- Arizona: $1 million for the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program to study fish entrainment at Glen Canyon Dam.
This funding builds on a previous $20 million investment announced in 2022 for environmental projects.
Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Reclamation is investing $8.3 billion over five years for water infrastructure projects, including rural water, water storage, conservation and conveyance, nature-based solutions, dam safety, water purification and reuse, and desalination. Since Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was signed, Reclamation has announced more than $3 billion for more than 440 projects.
Palisade High School Fish Hatchery releases 1,000th razorback sucker into #ColoradoRiver — The #GrandJunction Daily Sentinel #COriver
Click the link to read the article and for the photos on The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website (Nathan Deal). Here’s an excerpt:
May 4, 2024
The Palisade High School Endangered Fish Hatchery program hosted its fourth annual razorback sucker release Friday at Riverbend Park. Students in the program, partnering with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, released 370 razorback suckers into the Colorado River — a single-year record for the program — to surpass 1,000 fish released in the past four years. Many of the fish released, as always, received smooches before being released into the river, as is PHS Endangered Fish Hatchery tradition.
“Our fish release days are always kind of bittersweet. We definitely grow attached to our fish like our pets, so we’re excited to release them, but at the same time, we’re going to miss seeing them every day,” said Palisade Fish Hatchery Teacher Patrick Steele. “We know this is what we’ve been working all year for. The whole purpose of this is to help to recover this population of endangered razorback suckers. When you get to this point, it’s exciting.”