Colorado River Basin Suffers from a Warm and Dry Spring
Officials, farmers, and others who depend on the Colorado River received a grim prediction last week that Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the basin, will receive less than half of the yearly median amount of water over the next three months, which could mean cutbacks in the future.
The Colorado River carves through the Grand Canyon | Credit: Grand Canyon NPS
The snowpack at the beginning of April was less than normal, and the spring has been very warm and dry in the Rocky Mountains, which has led to low runoff.
Currently, Lake Powell is at 31 percent capacity, and Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, is at 32 percent after about 25 years of severe drought. A study done three years ago showed that the drought in the Western U.S. was the driest two decades in the last 1,200 years.
Officials in the seven states of the Colorado River Basin, including Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California, met last week and have yet to come to an agreement on how they will share water in the coming years after the existing guidelines expire at the end of 2026. If no agreement is reached, the federal government will likely impose its own plan, which could lead to much litigation.
Meanwhile, a new study is showing that ground and surface water in the Colorado River Basin have been depleted during the last 20 years by an amount that is equivalent to the total capacity of Lake Mead. NASA satellite imagery shows the severity of the region’s crisis. Jay Famiglietti, the senior author of the study and a professor at Arizona State University, toldthe Guardian that groundwater is disappearing nearly 2.5 times faster than surface water. He added that everyone in the U.S. should be worried about the crisis in the Southwest, because much of the country’s food is grown there. In addition, the river provides drinking water to 40 million people in the U.S. and Mexico.
The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
High Court Decision Could Allow Oil Trains along the Colorado River
A controversial plan to transport crude oil by rail along portions of the Colorado River is much closer to becoming a reality after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision blocking it.
Amtrak’s California Zephyr train travels along the Colorado River near McCoy, Colorado. | Credit: Tony Webster/Creative Commons
Environmental groups and Eagle County, Colorado, home of Vail Ski Resort, had challenged an agency decision that permitted the two-mile-long trains to ship crude oil from Utah’s Uintah Basin to the Gulf Coast. They argued that the Surface Transportation Board did not weigh the downstream effects should a tanker derail and pollute the Colorado River, threatening the environment and communities. Additionally, they said the agency had not considered how refining five billion gallons of additional oil per year would exacerbate global warming.
An appellate court agreed, but the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, with Justice Gorsuch recusing himself, decided that some judges have incorrectly reviewed an agency decision under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and used it to block or slow down many projects. All three of the Court’s liberal justices agreed with the decision, which has a much broader effect than just the potential of endangering people and the environment by oil tankers that could derail.
Justice Kavanaugh, writing for the Court, said that overly intrusive judicial review has led to delay upon delay and higher costs. NEPA, he continued, is to inform decision-making, not paralyze it. NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of proposed major actions prior to making decisions. However, this case narrows the scope of all environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects like highways and pipelines.
Earlier, the Supreme Court severely reduced environmental regulation by limiting rules on water pollution and runoff and allowing long-standing agency actions to be challenged in court, according to the Washington Post. The Court has also cut away at the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.
Darkening Oceans Raises Concerns about Food Webs and Fisheries
The world’s oceans are getting darker. That’s the conclusion of a new study out last week that says there’s cause for concern.
According to researchers from the University of Plymouth, 21 percent of the global ocean—an area spanning more than 75 million sq km—has darkened over the past two decades. | Credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen / Unsplash
“Ocean darkening” occurs when sunlight and moonlight can’t penetrate the upper layers of the ocean called the “photic zone,” which is home to 90 percent of all marine life and one of the most productive habitats on Earth. According to researchers from the University of Plymouth in the UK, over one-fifth (21 percent) of the global ocean—around 75 million square kilometers—has darkened over the past two decades.
Typically, darkening can occur near coastlines because of agricultural runoff and increased rainfall making the waters murkier. However, this new research shows that it’s happening in the open ocean, which they suggest could be from hotter temperatures causing increased algal blooms that reduce light penetration below the surface. It could also be the result of changes in ocean circulation patterns driven by global warming.
The researchers used data from NASA’s Ocean Color Web, which breaks the global ocean down into a series of 9km pixels, to assess the changes and found that the most prominent shifts in photic zone depth in the open ocean were at the top of the Gulf Stream and around both the Arctic and Antarctic—areas of the planet experiencing the most pronounced shifts as a result of climate change. Conversely, the team also found around ten percent of the ocean had become lighter during the same study period.
The authors suggest that a shrinking photic zone in the upper ocean where marine organisms grow, hunt, reproduce, and photosynthesize, would create intense competition for resources and negatively affect food webs and global fisheries.
The study was published in Global Change Biology.
A New Tax in Hawai’i That You Can Feel Good About
The word kuleana in the Hawai‘an language means a responsibility, right, or privilege to take care of one another—and to take care of the ‘āina—the land. Those terms were invoked when, on May 27, Governor Josh Green, MD, signed into law Act 96 (Senate Bill 1396) that establishes a “Green Fee” that will add a tax on hotel stays to protect the environment in the face of climate change. It’s a first for the state—and for the country.
On May 27, Hawai‘i Governor Josh Green signed into law Act 96 (Senate Bill 1396) that establishes a “Green Fee” that will add a tax on hotel stays to protect the environment in the face of climate change. | Credit: Hawai‘i Governor Josh Green, M.D./Flickr
The new “climate impact fee” is a response to the increased risk of natural disasters driven by global warming, like the wildfires on Maui in 2023. The revenue will provide a stable source of funding for environmental stewardship, hazard mitigation, and sustainable tourism, which together will enhance the islands’ resiliency.
The new law raises the amount of the current transient accommodations tax or TAT by 0.75 percent, or roughly $3 on a $400 hotel room per night. It will also apply to short-term rentals as well as to cruise ships—a sector that has long gone untaxed. The Green Fee is projected to generate $100 million annually, when it goes into effect in January 2026.
As the online publication Travel And Tour World reports, Hawai‘i joins a list of places around the globe like Greece, Bali, and the Galápagos Islands, where fees are being implemented in recognition that tourism, while economically vital, must be managed responsibly to protect the fragile ecosystems—that many people come to see—from the growing impacts of climate change.
GET WET! 