On the Water Front: Shortage, Accelerated

Since our last check-in on the Colorado River’s water shortage, our water forecast has only worsened. Meanwhile, the political forecast for federal climate action remains as bleak as ever. As we face a worsening water shortage, and as we contend with the apparent shortage in political will to properly address climate change, let’s examine why this pair of shortages is such a huge problem for us.

First, an update on the Colorado River’s water levels

Late last week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released their new forecast for the Colorado River Basin. Spoiler alert: It’s even worse. At Lake Powell, Reclamation’s worse-case projection shows Lake Powell falling below the 3,490 foot “deadpool” level (where the Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate electric power) within a year, and the “most probable inflow” projection shows Lake Powell falling below the 3,525 “lower elevation balancing tier” next February. 

At Lake Mead, Reclamation shows our end of the Colorado River approaching Tier Two shortage levels late next year, then a stronger likelihood of Lake Mead breaching the 1,045 level (that will require another round of allocation cuts) in 2023. In addition, the worse-case projection shows Lake Mead sliding into Tier Three shortage levels by September 2023. Zooming further out, Reclamation’s latest projection shows a 62% chance of Lake Mead falling into Tier Three shortage by 2026.

In their press release announcing the new forecast, Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin Regional Director Jacklynn Gould stated, “We have had to make difficult choices this year, and we will all have to make more difficult decisions if it continues to remain dry next year to protect Lake Mead and Lake Powell.” Indeed, we have even more evidence showing that we must “make more difficult decisions” and do so quickly in order to solve this crisis and prevent existential environmental catastrophe.

The Vice President may have come to Nevada, but she was really addressing a specific audience in Washington, D.C. 

Last week, we took notice of Vice President Kamala Harris’ trip to Southern Nevada and stop at Lake Mead to pitch President Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda. At Lake Mead, Harris declared, “Just look out at this lake. Look at where the water has receded over just the last 20 years. That space is larger than the height of the Statue of Liberty, in just the last 20 years. This is where we’re headed.” She continued, “So let’s take on a sense of responsibility with a sense of urgency and do something about this in a way that is about satisfying basic needs, which in this case, right here, is 25 million people who are served by what happens at Lake Mead, not to mention what we can do that is about future generations.”

At the time, we noted how the much larger and more climate oriented Build Back Better reconciliation proposal hit the skids all over again. Since then, U.S. Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have made it even harder for the rest of their party to figure out what to do. Sinema allegedly wants climate action and allegedly supports some type of carbon tax, but she’s currently refusing to support the $350 billion over 10 years that’s needed to make Build Back Better’s climate plan work. Manchin, on the other hand, has flat-out refused any carbon tax, has rejected the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP) that would function as a national clean power standard, and has even claimed that Congress’ passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (or, “the bipartisan bill”) would demonstrate America’s commitment to climate action despite “the bipartisan bill” primarily directing funding to fossil fuel supporting infrastructure.

 The “bipartisan bill” does include some climate resiliency funding, including $8.3 billion for Western water storage and conservation programs. However, this merely functions as treatment of some symptoms while ignoring the disease that’s causing the symptoms. That’s the problem here. Unless we confront the disease of fossil fuel addiction at the heart of this climate crisis, what are we even doing with any of this?

What if Democratic leaders fully cave into Manchin’s and Sinema’s respective demands? Are we doomed? (Spoiler alert: It’s complicated, but we’re not yet locked into any one fate.)

In their most recent edition of their “Boiling Point” newsletter, the Los Angeles Times’ Sammy Roth noted that the CEPP is the heart of Build Back Better’s climate action plan, yet he also expressed hope that even without CEPP, America can still act on climate. Is he right? Well, it’s complicated. After all, Roth himself noted Energy Innovation’s analysis showing that without Build Back Better’s CEPP, the rest of Biden’s climate agenda will result in a 33% drop in carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2030 – better than what we have now, but a far cry from the 50% cut that Biden will promise again to world leaders at the Glasgow COP26 Summit next week. A robust chorus of climate scientists and environmental activists are even more dour, as the political climate on Capitol Hill seems more divorced from the reality of climate science than ever.

While Senator Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) – the Senator who first came up with CEPP as a way to attain a clean energy standard that also complies with Congress’ reconciliation rules – and some progressive Democrats who are in the thick of the Build Back Better negotiations are floating potential alternatives, such as expanded clean energy tax credits and some sort of voluntary cap-and-trade program, it appears that they won’t come up with any replacement that will be as effective as CEPP unless they can somehow find a carbon tax that Sinema and Manchin can agree upon. Unless this happens, then it all comes down to President Joe Biden himself and what he’s willing to do on his own.

The good news here is that Biden has options for executive action, as The American Prospect and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) have expertly detailed, and it’s particularly noteworthy that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan has promised that the Biden administration will act on climate regardless of what Congress does and doesn’t do with Build Back Better. Regan has already signaled his intent to announce a new greenhouse gas rule on power plants, new methane restrictions for oil and gas infrastructure, and stronger vehicle emissions standards. CEPR’s Dorothy Slater and Zena Wolf have detailed how Biden can ban any new fossil fuel extraction leases on federal public lands, cancel major fossil fuel transport pipeline projects, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy by declaring climate change a national emergency.

The bad news here is that the Biden administration has already been greenlighting new fossil fuel extraction leases on public lands and fossil fuel pipeline construction. Some more bad news is that it’s unclear at best how the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed supermajority will react to Biden trying a climate emergency declaration to do so many policy end-runs around Congress. And ultimately that may be a moot point, as it’s unclear at best whether Biden’s even interested in declaring a national emergency on climate change. Regardless of how much or how little Congressional Democrats agree to do with Build Back Better, the Biden administration may ultimately have to step up their own executive actions in order to meet Biden’s own stated climate action goals. 

Now, we’re really deep into the weeds of environmental policy. Why does any of this matter?

Occasionally, Manchin has suggested that renewable energy standards are not necessary because a growing number of companies and retail consumers are becoming more climate conscious. But as we noticed here in Nevada and across the nation earlier this month, just “leaving it to the free market” and throwing some clean energy tax credits here and there leave in place the fundamental imbalance in our energy market between growing demand for renewable energy and the severe over-supply of fossil fuels.

Because we’ve already subsidized fossil fuels to the point where they give the illusion of “cheap energy”, we need some form of carbon pricing in order to correct the market failure of that illusory (and highly subsidized) “cheap energy” passing along the most brutally ugly costs of our fossil fuel addiction to future generations. There are multiple ways to price carbon: some prefer a straightforward carbon tax on fossil fuel; others prefer a “market oriented” cap-and-trade system where companies can trade emissions credits under an overall cap on fossil fuel emissions; others prefer a more social and economic justice oriented Green New Deal that proposes a universal shift in subsidies and investment from fossil fuels to renewable energy and conservation. The big point here is that there are multiple paths to price carbon, and we ultimately have to choose a path and embark on it very soon in order to actually have a decent chance at meeting our climate goals.

We may yet see the federal government finally take action on carbon pricing. Before Congressional Democrats sank into these heated negotiations over Build Back Better, U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen (D) introduced the Fair Returns for Public Lands Act, and more recently she signed on as a co-sponsor for Senator John Hickenlooper’s (D-Colorado) COMPETES Act to curb the federal government’s practice of awarding no-bid and/or low-lease contracts to fossil fuel companies seeking to extract oil and gas from federal public lands. If you’ve ever wondered why Rep. Sean Casten (D-Illinois) decided to go viral earlier this year with “Hot FERC Summer“, he’s made clear that he’s not only promoting his own Energy PRICE Act, but also the overall need for the Biden administration to fully empower the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in order for them to conduct effective carbon pricing by way of incorporating the costs of climate change into their decision making and rate setting process. 

As we can see above, federal policymakers actually have several tools and potential pathways to initiate the fairer and more comprehensive carbon pricing that’s sorely needed to make any overall climate action plan work. They just need to decide how and where they’ll do the pricing, and then – as the Nike ads famously proclaimed – “Just do it.”

We may have a shortage of political will to act on climate change. If we don’t fix this soon, our Colorado River water shortage may just scratch the surface of climate catastrophes to come. Please keep in mind that WE CAN FIX THIS.

As we noted back in August, the IPCC’s most recent climate change report offers the most severe warning yet of the dangers of further inaction on climate change. As we also sought to clearly explain, there’s a huge difference between “We have a finite window of opportunity to prevent the worst-case scenario” and “We’re doomed!!!” The former is where we really are now, while proclamations of the latter feel like the ultimate excuse for inaction.

We know what’s fueling the water shortage at the Colorado River. We know what’s fueling our increasingly horrific wildfire seasons. We know what’s fueling the escalating array of environmental disasters that pose an increasingly severe global security threat. While $8.3 billion for additional water storage and conservation can help with our immediate water needs, it’s only treating a symptom of the greater disease. It does not solve either problem at the root of this crisis: the historic over-appropriation of Colorado River water, and climate change.

We face a shortage of water at our one largest source of water, and federal policymakers face a shortage of will to act. We need to fix both shortages. And once we fix the shortage of motivation on Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C., we’ll have an easier time solving the crisis at the center of our water shortage.