This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This April, at a steak dinner with oil and gas executives at the Mar-a-Lago Club, in Florida, former President Donald Trump made a request backed by a hefty promise: If the CEOs in attendance raised $1 billion to support his reelection bid, he would lower their taxes and eviscerate environmental and public health protections once he became president, clearing away the “regulatory burdens” that stand in the way of their companies injecting more carbon into the atmosphere—and profiting handsomely from it.

According to reporting by the Washington Post, Trump promised to reverse dozens of Biden administration policies, including a moratorium on approvals for liquefied natural gas exports, new restrictions on Arctic drilling, and many regulations of oil and gas drilling on public land. For good measure, he’d also scrap electric vehicle mandates and bring an immediate end to all offshore wind development.

Judging from Trump’s record, he fully intends to fulfill these promises, and then some. And his mission will be backed by a playbook—alarming for its extreme approach—fashioned by a right-wing coalition intent on dismantling the administrative state.

It’s astounding that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee can solicit a billion-dollar bribe to sell out America’s public lands and not be immediately disqualified or even prosecuted. After all, one-time Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall was disgraced and tossed into jail for doing the same thing, in an incident known as the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s. Even more dumbfounding is that, according to some polls, President Biden and Trump are statistically tied among young voters on the issue of climate change.

The reason for this is simple—and, I might add, simplistic. In March 2020, during a Democratic presidential debate, then-candidate Biden said his climate policy included “no more drilling on federal land.” He made a similar statement during a town hall in 2019. And yet, during the first four months of 2024, the Bureau of Land Management issued 969 permits to drill. So much for “no more drilling.” And that’s not all: In 2023, the administration approved a scaled-back—yet still massive and highly destructive—version of the controversial Willow drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope.

Climate advocates are right to hold Biden’s feet to the fire, and to count these moves as black marks on his record. But it is naive, foolish, and destructive to let these missteps obscure the administration’s more subtle, but ultimately more meaningful, actions to protect the climate and public lands from the fossil fuel industry. To see no difference between Biden and Trump is simply ignorant.

Biden’s public land and climate policies were all over the place during his first two years in office, but more recently he has cemented his legacy as a conservationist. In late April I wrote about a slew of new public lands protections enacted by the administration. In the weeks since, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency has implemented new rules limiting coal power plants’ emissions of greenhouse gasses, mercury, and other toxic air pollutants; tightening regulations on coal ash disposal; and clamping down on wastewater releases by power plants. Additionally, the BLM proposed ending federal coal leasing in America’s largest coal field, Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, which signals a potential death knell for a declining industry. The BLM also canceled 25 oil and gas leases in a 40,000-acre area of southeastern Utah that is rich with cultural resources.

Since a Donald Trump “climate policy” is a contradiction in terms, we’ll look instead at Trump’s energy aims, which consist of little more than “unlock(ing) our country’s God-given abundance of oil, natural gas, and clean coal” by shredding environmental and public health protections at the behest of billionaire petroleum executives. Never mind that those same executives have boasted about achieving record-high domestic oil production and liquefied natural gas exports under the Biden administration. Never mind that ExxonMobil brought in $8.6 billion in after-tax profits during the first three months of the year—not too shabby for an industry purportedly under siege by radical environmentalists.

Since the Trump campaign lacks a concrete platform, a group of right-wing organizations calling themselves Project 2025 have taken it upon themselves to fashion an agenda and even a staff for the next administration to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left.” The coalition has published a document called “Mandate for Leadership,” which lays out a playbook for each government sector, providing an eerie glimpse into a second Trump presidency.

The chapter on the Department of the Interior was penned by none other than William Perry Pendley, a notorious anti-public lands zealot who served as Trump’s acting director of the BLM—illegitimately. In it, Pendley unabashedly advocates for returning to the pre-multiple use days, when the BLM was known as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. He reiterates the absurd claim that wild horses pose an existential threat to public lands and calls for the immediate “rollback of Biden’s orders” and the reinstatement of “the Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda.” Per the playbook, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the rest of the region would be reopened to drilling; the full Willow project (five drill sites rather than the scaled-back three) would be approved; coal leasing would be restored; drilling permits would be expedited; methane emissions rules and other pollution limits would be rescinded; national monuments would be shrunk or eliminated; protections for sage grouse, grizzlies, wolves and other imperiled species would be removed; and the administration would try to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906.

And that’s just the DOI chapter. The Energy Department and EPA sections strike similar notes, calling on Trump to, among other things, “Stop the war on oil and natural gas;” lift the moratorium on liquefied natural gas export approvals (and stop considering climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects); support repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, both of which have created thousands of jobs in the clean energy and climate change mitigation industries; shift the departments’ focus away from climate change and renewable energy; end greenhouse gas emissions reporting for all but a select few facilities; and roll back coal plant pollution regulations.

The damage inflicted during Trump’s first term was somewhat mitigated by the administration’s incompetence. Project 2025’s 920-page playbook looks to remedy that, supplementing Trump’s greed and power-hunger with corporate-backed ideology and expertise. In office, Trump would create an authoritarian regime that cracks down on civil liberties, criminalizes immigrants, and bolsters the police state, while also letting corporate interests run wild at the expense of the planet and its most vulnerable people.

A recent report from Wood Mackenzie, a natural resource analytics firm, predicts that a Trump victory in November would bring an “immediate deceleration in support for decarbonization” and “unabated fossil generation would expand.” The report warns that “These steps would push the US even further away from a net zero emissions pathway.”

Biden may have broken a promise, but when it comes to Trump vs. Biden on the climate, the contrast couldn’t be more stark.

• In Nevada, Rep. Dina Titus, who just recently introduced legislation that would establish the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument on 450,000 acres of public land held sacred by Mojave Desert Indigenous people, beat back her Republican challenger.
• Democratic Reps. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Diana DeGette of Colorado—both tenacious fighters for public-land protection—decimated their opponents.
• And in New Mexico, Democratic Reps. Teresa Fernández and Melanie Stansbury—both with perfect League of Conservation Voter scores—were easily reelected. Gabriel Vasquez, a Las Cruces Democrat who founded the Nuestra Tierra Conservation Project, advocated for new national monuments and was endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters, prevailed over incumbent Rep. Yvette Harrell, who is blatantly hostile to pretty much every environmental cause.

• All of it. The state’s voters elected a slate of candidates who are actively hostile toward public-land conservation, from incumbent MAGA-Republican Sen. Mike Lee to new state Rep. Phil Lyman, who has long battled with federal land-management agencies.
• Wyoming voters elected Trump loyalist Harriet Hageman, a longtime proponent of transferring public lands to private hands, to represent them in Congress. Hageman helped persuade a judge to toss the Clinton administration’s roadless rule in the 1990s, prompting environmentalists to dub her the “Wicked Witch of the West.”
• Ryan Zinke, one of Trump’s scandal-plagued “energy dominance” Interior secretaries, edged out Democrat Monica Tranel to represent Montana’s 1st congressional district.
• Gun-toting Rep. Lauren Boebert (League of Conservation Voters score: 0)—whose husband purportedly earns six figures as an oil and gas industry “consultant”—had been expected to win handily in public-land-rich western Colorado. But in the end, she barely squeezed past Democrat Adam Frisch.

• Vasquez—the aforementioned Democratic conservationist—defeated fossil-fuel-loving, climate-change denying MAGA-acolyte Herrell in the 2nd Congressional District, which includes New Mexico’s share of the Permian Basin, the nation’s busiest and most productive oilfield.
• Incumbent Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham defeated Republican Trump loyalist and fossil-fuel devotee Mark Ronchetti, a TV weatherman.
• Voters returned Democrat Stephanie Garcia Richards to the helm of the New Mexico State Land Office, where she has pushed for clean energy development.

• Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly defeated Trump-endorsed white nationalist Blake Masters, whose campaign ads showcased him cooing to semi-automatic firearms in a serial-killer bedroom voice. That might have gotten him elected Mayor of Crazytown, but it sure as heck didn’t sway Arizona voters.
• Democrat Adrian Fontes defeated Republican election-denier Mark Finchem in the race for Arizona secretary of State.
• In Nevada, incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto held off Republican Adam Laxalt, a Trump loyalist with ties to the fossil fuel industry.
• Michele Fiore, who supported the Bundy clan during their Nevada standoff with federal agents and in the Oregon armed occupation of a wildlife refuge, lost her race for Nevada state treasurer.
• As of Nov. 22, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski was leading Trump-endorsed challenger Kelly Tshibaka and was expected to win.

These are rough times for the world’s wildlife and its habitat. The latest Living Planet Index shows that over the last couple of decades the number of North American vertebrate species and their populations are in decline. And according to State of the Birds 2022, our feathered friends aren’t faring so well, either: Tipping point species such as the once-abundant piñon jay and rufous hummingbird have lost half of their Western populations since the 1970s, mostly thanks to habitat loss.

Of the many troubled species, perhaps one of the most beleaguered in the West is the bighorn sheep. Their numbers have declined substantially over the past century and a half, as they’ve succumbed to disease, hunting, dried-up watering holes, backcountry recreation and…affordable housing?

It’s beginning to look that way.

Vail Resorts wants to build workforce-housing in the upscale Colorado ski town. But there’s one problem: The five-acre parcel happens to be on the edge of the local bighorn herd’s winter range. Concerned residents have teamed up with the town of Vail to block the development in the name of the herd, sparking a years-long battle that is now headed for court. And so it is that two of the Mountain West’s most hard-pressed species—the bighorn, whose habitat has been industrialized, and the service worker who can’t afford a home—are unwittingly pitted against one another.

Rocky Mountain bighorns and their slightly smaller desert cousins once may have numbered in the millions in the Interior West, from the high Tetons to the lowlands of Death Valley to the crinkled landscape that is now Canyonlands National Park. They and their distinctive horns are ubiquitous in Indigenous rock art panels. Archaeologists excavating Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan sites in Utah’s Glen Canyon before it was drowned by Lake Powell found seven times more bighorn bones than those of deer.

But colonization, along with an invasion of rifles, livestock and extractive ways, killed off entire herds, both intentionally, via hunting—the rams’ heads made impressive trophies—and unintentionally, by way of domestic sheep grazing spreading disease to their wild cousins. In the 1930s, geologist Fritiof Fryxell observed huge flocks of domestic sheep in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, where “they leisurely fatten, moving through the flowery alpine meadows like a blight that destroys all in its path,” including the summer range of deer, elk and bighorn. “Better than any other animals, the bighorns typify the Tetons,” Fryxell concluded grimly, “yet they must inevitably soon disappear unless steps are taken to exclude their domestic brethren” from the range.

Then came the barbed-wire fences and highways, housing and energy developments and ski slopes, fragmenting habitat and cutting off migratory routes. More than a century of aggressive fire-suppression has allowed forests to displace forage. As if that weren’t all bad enough, bighorn must also compete with mountain goats—which are not native to Colorado, Utah and Wyoming—and a recent study found that the goats usually win. And finally, the human descendants of the domesticated sheep—outdoor recreationists—encroach further into the backcountry in search of fresh powder, solitude or an adrenalin fix. Even so-called quiet recreation can stress out bighorns, pushing them to avoid places frequented by human hikers, skiers or mountain bikers.

There are just about 20,000 bighorns left in the US. They are separated into genetically isolated herds that are having a tougher and tougher time finding good, quiet breeding and foraging grounds, and unobstructed migratory paths. Wildlife agencies have stepped in to help, removing non-native mountain goats from bighorn habitat, launching reintroduction programs and controversially proposing limits to backcountry recreation in winter ranges.  

In spite of these efforts, Colorado bighorn numbers have been on the decline over the last two decades. The Gore Range herd, which is endemic to the Vail area, had about 100 sheep in 2005, but that number has fallen to around 50 now. While the herd has ample room to roam in the summer, its low-elevation winter range has been invaded by mansions, condos, ski runs and a busy interstate highway, leaving a relatively meagre patch of slopes and cliffs adjacent to Vail.

It’s in this patch of crucial habitat that the resort wants to build affordable housing to help ease a shortage of habitat for workers and non-millionaires in general.

All over the Western US, especially in amenity-rich, public lands gateway towns, already rising housing prices skyrocketed during the pandemic, forcing that other beleaguered species—the community’s workers—to live in cars, commute ungodly distances to relative affordability or set up camp on public lands and in wildlife habitat.

The housing crunch has been especially acute in Vail and other high-end, recreation-oriented communities. The average home in the Vail Valley will run you about $2 million these days. The most affordable property in Vail is a timeshare: two weeks a year in a condo for $295,000. Even a hefty commute won’t get you much for under a half-million bucks, and renting isn’t much better: a minuscule studio fetches about $1,800 a month. Vail Resorts—owner of several ski resorts around the West and one of the largest ski conglomerates in the world—has been having a tough time adequately staffing operations at its flagship ski area, in part because of high housing costs.

So, several years ago the company proposed to put a dent in the valley’s 6,000-unit shortfall by building 61 units, 80 percent of which would be deed restricted, on about five acres of its 23-acre property in the bighorn herd’s winter range. An environmental analysis prepared by an independent contractor found that the “paramount wildlife concern on this project is the potential for inappropriate recreational use” and dogs straying out of the development area into the bighorn’s vital habitat, but that the threat could be allayed with fencing, regulations and other mitigation measures.

But a study by three wildlife biologists commissioned by the town found that mitigation measures might not be enough: “Due to the already limited winter and transitional range for bighorn sheep and the relatively small number of sheep in this herd, our collective view is that finding another location for this development would offer the best mitigation for this sheep herd.” They went on to suggest their own mitigation measures, with this caveat: “…the impacts to this already struggling bighorn sheep herd as a result of this development might not be able to be mitigated.”

Nevertheless, in 2019 the Vail town council narrowly approved the plan with contingencies: The resort would put a conservation easement on 18 acres adjacent to the development in bighorn habitat, spend $100,000 on mitigation measures and alter the structures to have less impact.

But in April of this year, the town council—now with different members than in 2019—set out to block the project due to its potential impact on the bighorn herd, which the town has adopted as its own. They are backed by the new Vail Bighorn Sheep Initiative, which argues the development and associated activity could push the sheep out of their severe-winter foraging ground, starving the herd.

In a May 2022 letter to the town, Colorado Parks and Wildlife official Devin Duval encouraged the parties to find an alternative development site because if the bighorns lose access to “the specific set of biological conditions” of its already “extremely limited” winter range, “they simply won’t exist.”

Project proponents, meanwhile, say the housing is desperately needed and accuse opponents of the same strain of NIMBYism that halted planned prescribed burns intended to improve bighorn habitat in the same area a couple of decades ago. They note that the workforce housing would sit between two other high-end developments that are also in the bighorn’s range and less than 200 feet from Interstate 70, which sees tens of thousands of vehicles daily.

The town offered to buy the property for $12 million or to swap it out for other land on which Vail Resorts could build workforce housing. But the ski area behemoth turned down the offer and said an exchange would force it to scrap its plans and restart the development process from scratch, delaying construction on the project for five years or more.

So, the town pulled out the big gun: condemnation. In mid-October the town petitioned the Eagle County Court to exercise its eminent domain powers to pay a “reasonable amount” to seize the land in order to “preserve the town’s open spaces, wildlife and natural resources for the public welfare.”

That leaves the fate of the development in the hands of the court. Meanwhile, workers still struggle to find housing as another ski season commences, and the Gore Range bighorn continue to cling to existence as humanity closes in.

If you want to cross the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, anytime between October and July, you probably won’t need a boat, a bridge, waders or even waterproof shoes. Most of the year the river is an arroyo, a curvy strip of dry sand that holds no more than the memory of water: braided serpentine patterns in the sand, erosion-smoothed stones, debris wrapped around the trunks of the few hardy deciduous trees.

But when the Rillito springs to life, as it did on multiple occasions this summer, it becomes a river like any other, swelling up to 5,000 cubic feet per second or more, and rivaling the Southwest’s largest, fastest streams. The river carries silt and stones and seeds, chunks of wood and leaves, bugs and animal carcasses, not to mention all the garbage and whatever else has been dumped into the arroyo, tumbling all the way down to the Santa Cruz River. Folks have been known to kayak the Rillito in waters so tempestuous that helicopters are occasionally needed to rescue them. 

On October 3, the Rillito River and thousands of other ephemeral or intermittent rivers, streams, arroyos, gullies, wetlands, marshes and prairie potholes are going to court—the US Supreme Court. The justices will hear Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency, and their decision could yank many of the Southwest’s waterways out from under federal jurisdiction, ripping the guts out of the Clean Water Act just in time for its 50th birthday this year.

The specific case dates back to 2007, when EPA officials ordered Chantell and Michael Sackett to stop backfilling their soggy half-acre lot on the shores of Idaho’s Priest Lake, where they wanted to build a cabin. The EPA had determined the wetlands were “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, and therefore protected by the Clean Water Act. The Sacketts disagreed and took the feds to court. As the case wound its way through the legal system, the Sacketts’ cabin site transformed into the front line of a 50-year ideological battle over the definition of what constitutes legally decreed “waters.” The court’s decision—expected early next year—will have especially weighty implications for the arid West.

For years, the EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers—the agencies charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act—agreed that everything from arroyos to prairie potholes to sloughs to mudflats fell under the heading of WOTUS, as long as their destruction or degradation might ultimately affect the nation’s traditionally navigable waters. It was a broad definition, and it gave the agencies latitude to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,” as Congress mandated when it passed the act in 1972.

But developers, big agriculture, extractive industries and private property-rights ideologues have long pushed back, arguing that the definition is too broad.

SCOTUS has considered WOTUS a handful of times over the decades, tinkering with the definition in ways that have sometimes only further muddied the waters. The EPAs of various presidential administrations made their own adjustments based on their political leanings: Industry-friendly folks tended to exclude as much as they possibly could, while greener ones took a more inclusive tack.

Then, in 2006, the High Court handed down a divided, albeit landmark, decision in the Rapanos v. United States case, which started in 1989, when a Michigan developer drained and backfilled 22 acres of wetlands to build a shopping mall. He never applied for a permit and ignored federal and state officials’ cease-and-desist orders, arguing that the wetlands were immune from the Clean Water Act because they were not traditionally navigable waters.

The court’s 4-1-4 decision remanded the case back to the Appeals Court, so was not in itself definitive. But the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s plurality opinion sent ripples throughout the water world. He wrote that it was “beyond parody” to include “‘ephemeral streams,’ ‘wet meadows’ … and dry arroyos in the middle of the desert” under “waters of the United States.” He argued that WOTUS should only include “geographic features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes.” 

Scalia’s opinion not only confirmed his partiality towards the agriculture industry and real estate developers, many of who would gladly do away with the Clean Water Act altogether, but also his hostility toward what he called the “immense arid wastelands” of the Western United States. His pronouncement was interpreted as meaning that scores of Southwestern rivers, streams, and arroyos were not worthy of protection, even if they were as important to the communities and landscapes through which they ran as the mighty rivers of the Midwest or Northwest.

Justice Anthony Kennedy worried that Scalia’s arroyo-phobic definition would leave even major tributaries of the Los Angeles River without protection. He argued that a body of water needed only a “significant nexus” with a navigable stream to put it under federal jurisdiction. Justice John Paul Stevens noted that Scalia’s interpretation would allow agencies to go after polluters that damaged year-round streams. But any polluter who dumped into such a stream’s tributary—one that flowed only 290 days of the year, say— would get off scot-free, even if the pollution would affect the year-round stream equally. 

Still, the anti-regulation crowd took Scalia’s definition and ran with it. George W. Bush’s EPA issued a rule excluding most ephemeral streams and isolated wetlands. The Obama administration later replaced it with a broader rule, but in 2020, the Trump administration released its own rule, which reverted to Scalia’s reading of WOTUS. Most significantly, it excluded ephemeral features, such as arroyos that “contain water only during or in response to rainfall,” as well as isolated wetlands and groundwater—thereby removing up to 94 percent of Arizona’s and 66 percent of California’s streams and rivers from federal oversight. Now the Biden administration is working on a new rule to replace Trump’s, even as the court decision looms. 

The plaintiffs in Sackett, represented by the far-right Pacific Legal Institute, want Scalia’s definition to be set in stone, leaving it up to the states to decide whether to stop industry and developers like the Sacketts from dredging, filling and polluting arroyos and wetlands. Given the Supreme Court’s recent rulings, there’s a good chance it will follow Scalia’s lead—and maybe even go further. That kind of ruling would make it far easier to build the sprawling housing developments planned for the Arizona desert, such as Superstition Vistas outside of Phoenix or the Villages at Vigneto in the southeastern corner of the state, allowing developers to fill in or pave over arroyos, gullies and washes without even bothering to apply for a permit.

From the air, the arroyo networks of the West resemble circulatory systems, with tiny capillaries leading to veins and arteries, and all of it carrying lifeblood to the great body of the desert, even when they are temporarily dry. After the rains, the Rillito carries water and nutrients and elements through a riverside park in northern Tucson to the Santa Cruz River.

The Santa Cruz, which drains 8,200 square miles in Arizona and Mexico, was once a year-round stream, the land along its banks lush and shaded by towering leafy trees and mesquite forests, the waters sustaining the Hohokam people for millennia. Then the white settlers arrived, drilled groundwater wells and bled the river dry. Now, the often-dusty arroyo no longer makes it to its mother river, the Gila, thanks to all the diversions and development and depleted aquifers.

This story was originally published in High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Thirty-nine years ago, due to record-breaking snowfall in the Upper Colorado River Basin, Lake Powell rose substantially, catching river managers off-guard. By late June, the reservoir was nearly overflowing, forcing operators—for the first time ever—to rely on the spillways. Instead of giving relief, that precipitated a new crisis, as a phenomenon called cavitation sent shockwaves through the spillways’ innards, tearing through the concrete and then the sandstone, putting the colossal Glen Canyon Dam in peril.

The spillways were repaired, and the dam survived. But now it is threatened yet again, only this time for the opposite reason. In March, Lake Powell’s surface-level dropped to within 33 feet of the minimum needed to generate hydropower, for the first time since it was filled in the 1960s. If—or when—it hits that critical point, the Southwest power grid will lose one of its biggest electricity generators, as well as an indispensable backup power source. And, it might even lead to a sort of low-water repeat of the 1983 incident. 

When the reservoir is full, Glen Canyon Dam’s eight giant turbines have 1,300 megawatts of capacity, equivalent to a large coal power plant. The dam serves as a “baseload” power source, cranking out a steady stream of juice, which the federal Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) sells at below-market prices to Southwestern utilities, tribal nations, and municipalities. It is also valuable as a “load-following” resource, meaning operators can ramp output up quickly to meet a spike in demand or a sudden loss of supply, contributing to grid resilience and helping to smooth fluctuations in wind and solar generation. Glen Canyon Dam was originally constructed primarily to store water during wet times and release it during dry periods. It also provides flood control, acts as a silt catchment basin for Lake Mead, and is a watercraft playground, drawing as many as 4.5 million visitors per year. But its role as a power source has risen to the top of its uses over the years. 

Over the last two decades, climate change-induced drought and increasing water demand have depleted Lake Powell substantially: It is now less than one-fourth full. As water levels drop, so, too, does the potential energy of the falling water. That, in turn, lowers the turbines’ generating capacity and power output. In the 1990s, the dam produced as much as 7,000-gigawatt hours per year, enough to power nearly 600,000 homes. Last year, it was down to just 3,000-gigawatt hours. 

This chronic decline in generating capacity is about to become more acute. As the reservoir approaches the 3,490-foot minimum power pool, air could get entrained in the turbine-feeding penstocks, wreaking all kinds of havoc. At that point, operators have no choice but to stop sending water through the turbines, killing power generation and depriving the grid of enough electricity annually to power about a quarter of a million Arizona homes. It would also drain between $100 million and $200 million annually from dam electricity sales, a chunk of which goes to fund endangered species recovery, salinity control, and water studies on the Colorado River. 

That would force WAPA to purchase more expensive power, including electricity generated from natural gas or even coal, to supply its millions of customers. The average utility customer might not even notice the dollar or two this adds to their monthly bill, but it could amount to a substantial price hike for the tribal nations that rely on WAPA for most or all of their power. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority’s yearly power bill could jump by as much as $1.3 million, according to a 2016 consultant’s study, and nine other tribes would also see significant cost increases.

Equally worrisome is how grid operators will fill the generation void left when the dam goes offline. New wind and solar power, paired with batteries or other energy storage, can replace some or all of the baseload power. But any extra generation capacity is going to be in high demand as big coal and nuclear plants retire in the next few years. Meanwhile, solar and wind can’t follow loads like a hydroelectric dam, so utilities are likely to turn to greenhouse gas-emitting natural gas plants instead.

Over the last few months, federal officials have attempted to stave off the power plant’s obsolescence by increasing releases from upstream dams and by sending less water downstream. But that failed to buoy reservoir levels, so now they have embarked on an effort to install turbines river outlet tubes lower on the dam, which would allow hydroelectricity generation to continue below the minimum power pool—for a while. 

That approach brings its own challenges, however, since the tubes have only been used for short stints and were never intended for long-term use. No one knows what will happen if they become the only release valve for the reservoir’s water. Running the dam at such low levels raises a lot of “operational uncertainties,” Tanya Trujillo, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, told attendees at a seminar last year. She even harkened back to the 1983 spillway tunnel deterioration and the resulting near-disaster. “The engineers use words like cavitation,” she said ominously, “and that gets my attention.”

The gradual shift of life away from the three-dimensional space to cyberspace once promised a Jetsons-style efficiency, a tidy transition from physical stuff’s environment-harming ways to a clean and impact-free digital world. We would telecommute through cyberspace rather than along dirty highways in polluting cars, working in paperless offices where no trees were sacrificed to print memos and correspondence. And, instead of using coins made from mined metals, we’d switch to digital currency—no mines, no blasting, no gouging required.

The Jetsons had it right, sort of: The Covid-sparked Zoom Boom has left many physical offices empty and drastically reduced mind-numbing, gas-guzzling commutes. Cash and coins are increasingly passé. And when was the last time you received a paper interoffice memo? The mass migration from physical to digital, however, has yet to take all the pressure off the physical environment. That’s because what happens in cyberspace doesn’t stay in cyberspace.

Every office email, every social media “like,” every credit card transaction and telecommuter call still has to be processed by physical computers—real machines that use real energy and water and have real environmental impacts. Even cryptocurrency, or Bitcoin, which lacks a physical presence of its own, must be “mined” in an energy-intensive way.

Thousands of servers, storage units, and network devices stacked up in sprawling warehouses across the West—on the fringe of Phoenix, Arizona, along the Columbia River, and even in Wyoming’s hinterland—suck juice from the grid to process millions of transactions. The electricity becomes equipment-straining heat, which must be shed using water or more electricity. Instead of seeking veins of gold or silver, cryptocurrency miners chase cheap energy—even setting up shop on oil and gas pads to utilize methane that otherwise would be flared—because more power use equals greater computing capacity, which equals higher profits.

As is the case with any sort of profligate energy use, the impacts depend upon where the electricity comes from. Google, Amazon and Facebook purchase solar and wind power, even build their own renewable energy facilities, to run their data centers. And a few Bitcoin miners have promised to power their operations entirely with excess solar power during times of low grid demand. That would certainly help solar—but so far the promise has yet to be realized on any large scale.   

Power-guzzling and cryptocurrency: an inseparable pair

Cryptocurrency mining is often characterized as an act of solving a set of complex equations, evoking images of a Red Bull-guzzling genius hunched over a calculator searching for the Bitcoin-creation formula. But actually it’s less about calculation than it is about trial and error—making guesses in hopes of landing on a random, 64-digit number. Whoever has the most energy-intensive computing power can make the most guesses in a short time frame, and whoever makes the most guesses likely will solve the puzzle first, and will be rewarded for their “proof of work” with one of a finite number of bitcoins. Or, to put it another way, the more power one uses, the more likely they are to hit the jackpot. As the value of each cryptocurrency increases, so does the number of miners. More miners means more computing power means more electricity consumed. Some cryptocurrencies are considering moving away from “proof of work” to a “proof of stake” system that uses less electricity but is also less secure.

In the early days of Bitcoin’s creation, people could “mine” the coins using a powerful standard desktop computer. But with each bitcoin that is mined, the process of acquiring the next one requires more computing power and therefore more energy. Now that 18.5 million of the 21 million bitcoins in existence have been mined, only huge banks of cryptocurrency mining “rigs” can provide enough computing power to be successful. That, in turn, requires huge amounts of energy.

More miners means more computing power means more electricity consumed.

 Data visualization by Luna Anna Archey/High Country News

Data sources: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Digiconomist, Joule, Google, U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, Carbon Brief, Wyoming Hyperscale White Box, EZ Blockchain, Salt Lake Tribune, Casper Star-Tribune, Data Center Dynamics, Berkeley Lab, City of Mesa, Arizona, Marathon Digital Holdings. 

In early September of 2021, as the Caldor Fire raged toward Lake Tahoe through eastern California’s drought-addled forests, staff at the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort made a desperate bid to fend off the advancing flames: They aimed snowmaking machines at structures and cranked up the water-misting cannons to douse an area that hadn’t seen a lick of rain in months.

At the same time, some 500 miles due east, little more than a trickle of water ran down the broad sandy bed of the Dirty Devil River in eastern Utah. Then a moisture-laden storm dumped its load on the Henry Mountains, filling arroyos to the brim. Over the course of hours, the Dirty Devil’s flow shot up to a churning 14,000 cubic feet per second—more than four times that of the nearby Colorado River—overflowing the normally dry arroyo’s banks. Water flowed six feet deep through streets and parking lots in Hanksville, sweeping away cars and a 500-gallon propane tank and inundating homes and hotels.

This stark contrast epitomizes 2021 in the West, where the devastating effects of drought were juxtaposed with drenching deluges in neighboring states. But amid all the weather whiplash, there was one constant: Temperatures were above “normal” all year long.   

2
Number of days in June the high temperature did not exceed 100 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona.

138
Estimated number of people who died of heat-related causes in Washington between June 26 and Aug. 31, 2021.

7

Number of heat-related fatalities in the state in 2020.

54
Number of heat-related fatalities in Multnomah County, Oregon, during the June “heat dome”; most of the victims were older, lived alone and lacked air conditioning, according to the county health department.

252
Number of confirmed heat-related fatalities in Maricopa County, Arizona, between April 11 and Nov. 1, 2021.

2
Number of weeks climate change has lengthened the growing season in the Greater Yellowstone region since 1950.

1.88 inches
Amount of precipitation received in Denver between June 1 and Nov. 30, the lowest since record-keeping began in 1872.

118 degrees Fahrenheit
Temperature at Dallesport, Washington, on June 28, the highest ever for the state.

111 degrees Fahrenheit
Temperature at Porthill, Idaho, on June 28.

56.77 inches
Amount of rain that fell in Quillayute, Washington, between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30, smashing the old record of 51.81 inches set in 1975.

2,261 to 3,637
Estimated number of sequoias over four feet in diameter killed by the Windy and KNP Complex fires in California in 2021.

1.76 inches
Amount of rain that fell in Cuba, New Mexico, on Sept. 30, a new monthly record for one-day precipitation.

80 cubic feet per second
Flow in the Rio Grande at Albuquerque on Oct. 25; the median flow for that date is 350 cfs.

24
Number of homes destroyed by a central Montana wildfire on Dec. 1.

Long before New Mexico or Wyoming identified any cases of COVID-19, even before residents began hoarding eggs and sacks of flour, state budgets were feeling the impact of the disease.

In mid-January, when the epidemic was still mostly confined to China, officials there put huge cities on lockdown in order to stem the spread. Hundreds of flights into and out of the nation were canceled, and urban streets stood empty of cars. China’s burgeoning thirst for oil diminished, sending global crude prices into a downward spiral.

And when oil prices fall, it hurts states like New Mexico, which relies on oil and gas royalties and taxes for more than one-third of its general fund. “An unexpected drop in oil prices would send the state’s energy revenues into a tailspin,” New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Committee warned last August. Even the committee’s worst-case scenario, however, didn’t look this bad. Now, with COVID-19 spanning the globe, every sector of the economy is feeling the pain—with the exception, perhaps, of toilet paper manufacturers and bean farmers. But energy-dependent states and communities will be among the hardest hit.

At the end of December, the US benchmark price for a barrel of oil was $62. By mid-March, as folks worldwide stopped flying and driving, it had dipped to around $20, before falling into negative territory, and then leveling off around $10 in April. The drilling rigs—and the abundant jobs that once came with them—are disappearing; major oil companies are announcing deep cuts in drilling and capital expenditures for the rest of the year, and smaller, debt-saddled companies will be driven into the ground.

COVID-19 and related shocks to the economy are reverberating through the energy world in other ways. Shelter-in-place orders and the rise in people working from home have changed the way Americans consume electricity: Demand decreased nationwide by 10 percent in March. As airlines ground flights, demand for jet fuel wanes. And people just aren’t driving that much, despite falling gasoline prices, now that they have orders to stay home and few places to go to, anyway.

The slowdown will bring a few temporary benefits: The reduction in drilling will give landscapes and wildlife a rest and result in lower methane emissions. In Los Angeles, the ebb in traffic has already brought significantly cleaner air. And the continued decline in burning coal for electricity has reduced emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

But the long-term environmental implications may not be so rosy. In the wake of recession, governments typically try to jumpstart the economy with stimulus packages to corporations, economic incentives for oil companies, and regulatory rollbacks to spur consumption and production. The low interest rates and other fiscal policies that followed the last global financial crisis helped drive the energy boom of the decade that followed. And the Trump administration has not held back in its giveaways to industry. The Environmental Protection Agency is already using the outbreak as an excuse to ease environmental regulations and enforcement, and even with all the nation’s restrictions, the Interior Department continues to issue new oil and gas leases at rock-bottom prices.

This story was originally published by the High Country News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nuclear power generates electricity without emitting greenhouse gases or other air pollutants. Yet it hasn’t been extensively deployed to fight climate change because of safety fears, the high cost of construction and, perhaps most significantly, the hazardous waste, or spent fuel, reactors produce. Now, as the climate crisis worsens, pro-nuclear groups are speaking out.

One such group, Generation Atomic, argues that nuclear power doesn’t really have a waste problem. All 88,000 tons or so of waste produced by reactors in the US could fit onto a single football field, stacked just 24 feet high, it says, with the waste produced by an individual’s lifetime energy consumption fitting in one soda can. Compare that to the 100 million tons of solid waste—about a 5-mile-high pile on a football field—that US coal-fired power plants kick out each year.

These figures are accurate, but incomplete: They leave out several steps that precede the power generation phase, each of which produces sizable quantities of hazardous and radioactive waste. By omitting these, we risk ignoring the bulk of the nuclear industry’s human and environmental toll.

The following diagram quantifies the waste that is produced, from mining to power generation, from a year of power production—enough for about 2.44 million households—at a plant the size of Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona. It would take about 1.7 billion soda cans, or a football field stacked 580 feet high, to contain just one year’s waste.

NUCLEAR WASTE
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station generates about 31,000 gigawatt-hours of power each year. That requires about 86 tons of uranium oxide, enriched to 3-to-5 percent uranium-235. In order to produce that, you need to:

… AND THEN THERE’S COAL
In order for a coal-burning power plant to produce 31,000 gigawatt-hours per year, or the same amount of electricity generated by Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, you would need to:

After a slew of climate-friendly ballot initiatives went down in flames on Election Day in Arizona, Colorado, and Washington, greens needed something to cheer them up. Days later the good news came in the form of a possibly deal-killing setback to a controversial oil pipeline: A federal judge sent the Keystone XL proposal back to the drawing board because it failed to comply with federal environmental regulations.

First proposed in 2008, the 1,200-mile pipeline would carry as much as 830,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day from Alberta oil sands to Steele City, Nebraska, en route to Gulf Coast refineries. In 2015, President Barack Obama denied a permit for the pipeline, citing climate concerns; but in 2017, President Donald Trump reversed the denial, allowing the project to move forward.

The Indigenous Environment Network then sued the Trump administration, claiming that it erred by relying on an outdated analysis of the pipeline’s environmental impacts. On Nov. 8, US District Court Judge Brian Morris ruled in favor of the plaintiffs on several issues, vacated the 2017 approval decision, and ordered the State Department to supplement the Environmental Impact Statement, completed in 2014. That additional analysis must include a “hard look” at the effects of current oil prices, potential increases in greenhouse gas emissions, possible damage to cultural resources and new data on oil spills.

A major sticking point in the 2014 impact statement is its prediction for how the pipeline would contribute to climate change. In short, the analysis concludes that although burning the oil carried by the pipeline would emit about 168 million tons of carbon each year, constructing the pipeline would result in no new greenhouse gas emissions.

The conclusion assumes that even without the pipeline, the same amount of oil would get to market by some other means. That’s because as long as oil prices remain at or above $100 per barrel, oil producers are willing to spend the extra cash to ship their bitumen—the waxy crude that comes from oil sands—via rail. When the analysis was completed, the price of oil was closing in on $150 per barrel.

But oil prices did not stay high. Just months after the impact statement was published, global prices crashed, falling below $40 per barrel and plunging most oil sands mining operations into the red. That radically altered the climate impact calculus of the pipeline. When oil sinks below $75 per barrel or so, it no longer makes economic sense to pay to move it by train, meaning production will fall. The Keystone XL, however, would decrease shipping costs, helping to keep the oil sands viable. That would lead to an increase in production and concurrent rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Furthermore, independent analyses have found that Keystone XL could also up emissions by displacing other, less carbon-intensive forms of crude, and by adding enough oil to the global market to lower prices, thereby boosting consumption—and emissions. Both scenarios were discounted in the original impact statement.

It was during the price slump that Obama put the kibosh on the pipeline. Today, domestic prices have bounced back up to about $60 per barrel, still far below the level at which the pipeline would result in no net increase of greenhouse gas emissions.

Also missing from the 2014 analysis is a full accounting of potential impacts to cultural resources along the pipeline’s route. The analysis identified hundreds of cultural sites, but also said that over 1,000 acres remained unsurveyed. Apparently the surveys had not been completed when the 2017 approval was made.

And then there are the potential oil spills. The 2014 analysis predicted that the new pipeline would not spill more than once every 10 years. Data from federal pipeline regulators, however, suggest this is a lowball estimate. The Dakota Access Pipeline and its southern counterpart, ETCO, for example, have experienced 11 spills since they went into operation in 2017. Furthermore, the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 published a study finding that spilled bitumen “… starts to turn into a heavy, viscous, sediment-laden residue that cannot easily be recovered using traditional response techniques.”

All of this information must be taken into account and addressed before the project can be permitted, Judge Morris said in his recent ruling. That could take years. The Trump administration has indicated that it will appeal the ruling.

Morris directed his harshest scolding toward the Trump administration for reversing its predecessor’s policy and dismissing the environmental concerns without adequate reasoning. In so doing, he could have been referring to any number of Trump’s regulatory rollbacks. “Even when reversing a policy after an election, an agency may not simply discard prior factual findings without a reasoned explanation,” Morris wrote. “An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts when it writes on a blank slate.”