Two notable events occurred last week in jarring juxtaposition. The seven Colorado River basin states failed to reach agreement on how to manage the river’s ever-diminishing flows, while simultaneously the Trump Administration boasted about rescinding the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called “endangerment finding” that provided the underpinning for regulating greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels.
The cause and effect is hard to overlook. Climatologists and hydrologists attribute the Colorado River Basin’s dismal snowpack to the “hot” drought the region has experienced for the past 20 years, a drought exacerbated by higher overall temperatures that are the predicted hallmark of climate change induced by burning fossil fuels. Without enough water to go around, and various states each rigidly insisting on reductions by others, the end result could be Lake Powell dropping to deadpool – the level at which the lake falls below the intakes for the dam’s hydroelectric turbines.
Which makes celebrating the demise of rules governing greenhouse gas pollution all the more incongruous, while watching climate change-induced drought evaporate our water supply.
The EPA’s endangerment finding was adopted in 2009, and relied upon the worldwide scientific consensus around the climate impacts from burning coal, oil and natural gas, and other greenhouse gas sources. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Research Council and others concurred on the causes and effects of greenhouse gas pollution, and EPA implemented the accepted science by laying the groundwork for regulating those pollutants.
A new report from the Colorado Fiscal Institute calculates the economic costs of climate change to Coloradans as at least $33 billion over the next 25 years. Shrinking winters have cut ski seasons by a month since 1980, homeowners in Durango and elsewhere are now routinely installing and paying for air conditioning, and Colorado’s largest wildfires have all occurred since 2002.
Other departments of the Trump Administration have similarly ramped up their full-throated embrace of coal. The Energy Department at the end of December mandated that a 45-year-old coal plant in Craig, long planned for retirement by Tri-State Generation and Transmission, be repaired and brought back on the line to the tune of tens of millions of dollars – unanticipated new expenses that will be passed along to Tri-State’s rural electric cooperatives including La Plata Electric Association and Empire Electric. Fortunately for LPEA members, as of April 1, they will be freed from the financial consequences of these whimsical decisions.
Meanwhile, the Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement is pursuing an expanded coal lease covering 20-square miles south of Shiprock. The mine is intended to produce more than 500 million tons of coal over the next 110 years, until the year 2136. The Four Corners Power Plant is the mine’s only customer, and Arizona Public Service doesn’t plan to operate it longer than the year 2038, which means someone is apparently counting on new coal plants to take up the slack. In order to fast-track the decision, the century’s worth of coal-mining will be analyzed in an environmental-impact statement prepared in just six short months, over the objections of the local Navajo community whose lands will be strip-mined.
Perhaps nothing better sums up the Alice in Wonderland nature of these decisions than the Interior Department’s new mascot, “Coalie” – a smiling, googly-eyed lump of coal wearing a hard hat, boots and vest. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum introduced Coalie with the phrase “Mine, Baby, Mine,” and announced Coalie was the new spokesperson for the Trump Administration’s energy dominance agenda. Through the looking glass indeed.
Mark Pearson is Executive Director at San Juan Citizens Alliance. Reach him at mark@sanjuancitizens.org.
