Deal Is Reached to Keep Colorado River From Going Dry, for Now – The New York Times

By Christopher Flavelle

Reporting from Washington

May 22, 2023Updated 10:13 a.m. ET

“The Biden administration has negotiated a hard-fought agreement among California, Arizona and Nevada to take less water from the drought-strained Colorado River, a deal that reduces, for now, the risk of the river running dry below the Hoover Dam, which would jeopardize the water supply for Phoenix, Los Angeles and some of America’s most productive agricultural land.

The agreement, to be announced Monday, calls for the federal government to pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states if they temporarily use less water. The states have also agreed to make additional cuts beyond that amount to generate the total reductions needed to protect the collapse of the river.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT  NYT comment:

And why exactly should the rest of us be paying for this profligacy? Are serious and strong measues being put in place now, to cut over consumption and waste of precious water in the West? Are they getting ready for the next 20 years of drought, which is now expected?  Is the money only for developing needed water conservation infrastructure?

InconvenientNews.net

Burning Man Becomes Latest Adversary in Geothermal Feud – The New York Times

By Arielle Paul

• May 17, 2023

“One of the darkest towns in America lies roughly 100 miles north of Reno, where the lights are few and rarely lit until one week each summer when pyrotechnics and LEDs set the sky and mountains aglow.

In tiny Gerlach, just outside the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, residents have watched the Burning Man festival grow over the last 30 years to a spectacle of nearly 80,000 countercultural hippies and tech billionaires, offering an economic lifeline for the unincorporated town. Now, Burning Man and Gerlach are more tightly aligned, joining conservationists and a Native American tribe in an alliance against a powerful adversary: Ormat Technology, the largest geothermal power company in the country.

Both Burning Man and Ormat share a vision for a greener future, yet neither can agree on the road to get there.

The festival promotes self-reliance and leaving no trace of its ephemeral metropolis, yet it contributes an enormous carbon footprint; the power company is vested in the future by battling climate change, but its clean energy facilities pose a threat to local habitats while reaping a sizable profit.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT   NYT Comment: 

Wow, thank you Arielle Paul. This is an excellent introduction to a really complicated face off. I hope there are follow up articles that dive into the arguments on both sides, and what the experts supporting both sides have to say. What is the track record of Ormat. Is this really the best place to put a large geothermal plant? Is this hippie NIMBYism, or another story of insensitive capitalists? What do the big shots, NRDC, and Sierra Club and the Nevada Dept of Environmental Protection think about this battle? The questions go on and on, but this is a worthy topic.

David blogs at InconvenientNews.net

Opinion | The Colorado River Is Running Dry, but Nobody Wants to Talk About the Mud – The New York Times

By Dale Maharidge

Mr. Maharidge is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

• • March 20, 2023

8 MIN READ

“It’s difficult to fathom how the Colorado River could possibly carve the mile-deep chasm that is the Grand Canyon. But if one thinks of the river as a flume of liquid sandpaper rubbing the land over millions of years, it begins to make sense. “The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”

In 1963, humans stopped time, when the brand-new Glen Canyon Dam on the Utah-Arizona border cut off the reddish sediment that naturally eroded the Grand Canyon. Today the river runs vodka clear from the base of the dam.”

Alone in a New World With Vast Open Space, and Sheep – The New York Times

By Miriam Jordan

• Sept. 23, 2022

“ENGINEER PASS, Colo. — The baas, bleats and bells were fading ever so slightly, and the shepherd’s trained ear detected that his flock was veering off the path home, for this was the soundtrack of his life in the Rocky Mountains. “The sheep must be herded,” he said in Spanish, as he quickly ascended a hill overlooking a meadow.

Then the herder, Ricardo Mendoza, whistled loudly, commanding his two dogs to coax his 1,700 sheep closer to his campito, a tiny shed with a single sun-bleached word — “HOME” — over the door. His employer had hauled it up a winding, unpaved road used by 19th-century miners to this 13,000-foot pass shortly before Mr. Mendoza arrived with his horse, pack mule, dogs and sheep, ready to settle into the last outpost of his seasonal nomadic journey, about 65 miles north of Durango in western Colorado.

Mr. Mendoza, 46, has spent most of the past decade living in these rugged, remote mountains, herding sheep raised for wool and meat from spring to fall. “You live in complete solitude, just you, your animals and your thoughts,” he said, gazing at the windswept tundra below the soaring Uncompahgre and Wetterhorn peaks.”

David Lindsay: Good article, and comments. Here is one I liked:

Kevin Ott

Crested Butte, COSept. 23

This is a nice article romanticizing the grazing of domestic sheep high in the subalpine tundras of the American West. Just weeks ago, we backpacked across this exact area of the Uncompahgre Wilderness NE of Engineer Pass. Wilderness is no place for commercial animal grazing for any number of reasons. What the article did not mention are the demonstrable negative impacts of overgrazing and erosion caused by the grazing of large herds (hundreds to thousands) of domestic sheep in this delicate high elevation (12,000’ ) environment. This is Wilderness, or was. Also not mentioned is the very real impact on native Rocky Mountain Bighorns who populate these craggy locales. Domestic sheep transmit an ovine pneumonia (mycoplasma ovipneumonia) to the Bighorn population which is decimating Bighorn herds in the Rocky Mountain West. Keeping domestic sheep long distances away from the Bighorn herds is the only way to protect these dwindling, ever more isolated, majestic wild animal herds.

2 Replies75 Recommended

Daniel Rothberg | The Coming Crisis Along the Colorado River – The New York Times

By Daniel Rothberg

Mr. Rothberg is a reporter for The Nevada Independent, where he covers the environment, water and energy. He is writing a book about water scarcity in Nevada.

“It’s past time to get real about the Southwest’s hardest-working river.

About 40 million people rely on the Colorado River as it flows from Colorado to Mexico. But overuse and climate change have contributed to its reservoirs drying up at such a rapid rate that the probability of disastrous disruptions to the deliveries of water and hydroelectric power across the Southwest have become increasingly likely. Now the seven states that depend on the river must negotiate major cuts in water use by mid-August or have them imposed by the federal government.

Those cuts are merely the beginning as the region struggles to adapt to an increasingly arid West. The rules for operating the river’s shrinking reservoirs expire in 2026, and those seven states must forge a new agreement on water use for farmers, businesses and cities.”

Paul Krugman | What a Dying Lake Says About the Future – The New York Times

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

“A few days ago The Times published a report on the drying up of the Great Salt Lake, a story I’m ashamed to admit had flown under my personal radar. We’re not talking about a hypothetical event in the distant future: The lake has already lost two-thirds of its surface area, and ecological disasters — salinity rising to the point where wildlife dies off, occasional poisonous dust storms sweeping through a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people — seem imminent.

As an aside, I was a bit surprised that the article didn’t mention the obvious parallels with the Aral Sea, a huge lake that the Soviet Union had managed to turn into a toxic desert.

In any case, what’s happening to the Great Salt Lake is pretty bad. But what I found really scary about the report is what the lack of an effective response to the lake’s crisis says about our ability to respond to the larger, indeed existential threat of climate change.”