Colorado River Crisis Shows the Need to Tackle Climate Change

How serious a threat to our well-being is climate change? And how important is it, therefore, that our nation do more to counter it? 

Ask the more than 35 million people in seven western states (plus a number of tribes and Mexico) who depend on the Colorado River. One out of every 10 people living in the United States relies on the Colorado River for drinking water. The river also irrigates five million acres of farmland, which contribute to 15 percent of U.S. agricultural production. Two dams along the Colorado generate electricity vital to the region. 

But, due in part to climate change, the river–and the millions who depend on it–face a crisis. Lake Powell, a massive reservoir that straddles the border of Arizona and Utah, is more than 20 feet lower than it was at the start of the year, as noted by The Associated Press. It is at risk of falling below levels needed to generate hydropower, The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Ulick reported. 

The second giant reservoir, Lake Mead, 24 miles southeast of Las Vegas, is only 27 percent full. Seventeen giant turbines at the adjacent Hoover Dam provide power vital to California, Arizona, and Nevada.

Last month marked a grim milestone: the combined volume of both reservoirs hit their lowest level since 1957, when Glen Canyon Dam was still under construction. 

Record-low snowpack in many parts of the Rockies last winter deprived the Colorado River of needed replenishment. The dry conditions follow a “megadrought” that has gripped the region since 2000.  Scientists have determined that this has been the worst dry spell for the Southwest in at least 1,200 years.

“In the 21st century, the average natural flow of the Colorado River is 16 percent less than was the natural stream flow between 1930 and 2000,” Jack Schmidt, senior research scientist at the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, told NPR’s Ailsa Chang. “So we can call that the long-term decline in runoff associated with a warming climate.” 

The seven states that rely on the river couldn’t agree on a plan of their own, so on August 21, the Interior Department produced one, at least for the short term. Arizona, California and Nevada will take about 20 percent less water from the river over the next two years. Arizona will shoulder the largest portion of those cuts.

The plan does not force cuts for the upstream states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico because the federal government doesn't think it has the authority to do that. 

“We expected to be in a very unpleasant place, and that’s where we find ourselves,” said Kathryn Sorensen, the director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “Mother Nature is in charge of this system,” she told Scott Dance of The New York Times.

Agriculture uses more than two-thirds of the Colorado River’s water, with alfalfa and other sources of livestock feed accounting for nearly half of the water consumed. Options for reducing those numbers include “more efficient irrigation, less water-intensive crops and short-term fallowing of fields,” according to Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute.

While such steps have potential, it is clear that our government needs to tackle the climate change that is a major cause of this problem. How? We need to shift more quickly from burning fossil fuels to building solar and wind power facilities. That transition will occur more rapidly if we make fossil fuels pay for their external costs (by pricing their emissions) and stop subsidizing them. It’s time for Congress to get serious.

A Prominent Republican Wants GOP to Tackle Climate Change

During his four years as the U.S. Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, like most of his fellow Republicans, did not take climate change seriously.  At his retirement from the Senate in 2007, the League of Conservation Voters gave Frist a lifetime rating of 7 percent for his legislative environmental record.

Since then, the former heart and lung transplant surgeon has looked closely at the science of climate change, and he now sees the connections between human well-being and planetary health. “Our national leadership too often, and I was probably a part of that at the time, has failed to connect those dots with what the urgency of today requires,” he told Cara Buckley of The New York Times. 

“In earnest writings, folksy videos recorded on his front porch in Tennessee, podcasts, speeches and congressional testimony,” Buckley reported, “Mr. Frist has been highlighting the inseparability of planetary and human health.”

“A healthier planet means healthier people,” said Frist, who now chairs The Nature Conservancy’s global board of directors. “The science shows it. Our experience shows it. Nobody can really argue against that.” 

“The human impact has been left out of the equation for too long,” he told Simmone Shah of Time magazine. “The best way to appeal to [people] is to start with how the changing climate will impact you and your children and generations to come. It's important now. It'll get increasingly important every day that goes by. I find that’s not disarming, but realistic, because that is why people are concerned.”  

In June, he published a minute-long video detailing how ecosystem collapse and wildlife habitat loss imperil children’s brain development and immune response, by reducing their exposure to beneficial microbes. On Substack, where he has around 31,000 followers, he’s written about the ways air pollution speeds up cognitive decline. In 2023, he presented data to the Senate Budget Committee showing how rising temperatures lead to escalating health care costs. He is also writing a book about how climate and nature shapes human health. He told Buckley that he’s aiming to “depolarize” the climate conversation. 

She wrote that Frist “comes across as straightforward and plain-spoken, like an old-fashioned kindly doctor.” According to his office, he has more than 130,000 followers across his social media platforms and got more than 2.5 million impressions on LinkedIn last year.

His target audience, he said, is the center right. “People who are reasonable, rational, appreciate science, educated not necessarily in college degrees, but educated in the sense of listening to other people, treating them with dignity, always assuming the other person might be right,” he explained.

Republicans such as President Theodore Roosevelt helped establish the GOP as the party most committed to protecting the environment. Unfortunately, that commitment has waned–to put it mildly. “There’s a very small group of us known right-of-center climate advocates, the so-called eco right, who see this really dire forecast,” said Alex Flint, the executive director of Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group that supports carbon taxes. “It’s lonely.”

Yet, Buckley reported, Flint and Frist believe that their party will come around, eventually. “In the long run, there is going to be a political response forced by the reality of the changing climate,” said Flint. “It is inevitable.”

Farewell to the Paul Revere of the climate change movement

Almost a half-century ago, in 1979, when he was a lobbyist with Friends of the Earth, Rafe Pomerance was plowing through an EPA report on coal liquefaction. On page 66, federal scientists were warning that surging emissions of carbon dioxide, caused mostly by burning fossil fuels, could cause a “significant and damaging” increase in Earth’s temperature. 

“This was so much more profound than the issues I’d been working on,” Rafe told The Washington Post in 1989. “I remember thinking: What right does this generation have to warm up the Earth?”

Rafe spent the rest of his life trying to avert catastrophic warming, leading the push for the first congressional hearings on the issue and helping negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark United Nations treaty to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. 

On May 21, this Paul Revere of the effort to raise awareness of climate change–and to combat it–died of lung cancer. He was 79.  

Just a few days after Rafe read the coal report, a colleague showed him a newspaper article about a speech by geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald. In his speech, McDonald highlighted the likely effects of carbon-fueled warming: devastating storms, widespread drought, and enough ice sheet melt to submerge major coastal cities. 

Rafe tracked down MacDonald’s phone number and asked for a meeting, Sarah Kaplan reported in The Post. Over the course of several hours, as MacDonald patiently explained the greenhouse effect, which researchers had been studying since the 19th century, Rafe became increasingly appalled that no one beyond a siloed group of scientists seemed to know about the issue. Rafe began to arrange meetings between MacDonald and an array of government officials. 

Another climate scientist who Rafe introduced to policymakers, James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute, became the most prominent messenger of the impending threat. Rafe saw that Dr. Hansen, an Iowa native, had a knack for translating complex atmospheric science into plain English. “It was really Rafe from the beginning who understood James Hansen would be someone who’d be a trusted authority,” explained Nathaniel Rich, who wrote a whole-issue article in The New York Times Magazine in 2018 headlined “Losing Earth.”  

In June 1988, during a year of record global heat, Dr. Hansen testified to a Senate panel that global warming was no longer theoretical; it could be detected “with 99 percent confidence” and “is changing our climate now.” His testimony was front-page news across the country. 

“Rafe also understood that it was also important to build leadership on Capitol Hill,” said our co-founder and board chair George T. Frampton Jr., a former chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). George noted that Rafe and Tom Lovejoy, a Smithsonian Institution ecologist, began to recruit lawmakers. The early champions were Democratic Congressmen Tim Wirth (CO) and Al Gore (TN), both of whom went on to become senators, and Republican Senator John Heinz (PA). 

Rich’s article, later expanded in a book and now in production as a movie, portrayed the decade from 1979 to 1989 as a lost opportunity, when climate change first became a national issue. Both Republican and Democratic leaders pledged to avert disaster — before the window was slammed shut by the administration of President George H.W. Bush, under the sway of the fossil fuel industries, according to a New York Times obituary by Trip Gabriel.

“I think he’s the central figure in the emergence of climate change as a political issue,” Rich told Gabriel. “He was really the man behind the scenes all through, and he understood at a very early stage intuitively that he shouldn’t himself be the messenger.” 

Rafe proposed that nations reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent. It was a hard target, which found its way into the keynote speech by Wirth at an international climate conference in Toronto in June 1988.

Rafe played a vital role in the 1997 adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first binding treaty requiring industrialized nations to cut planet-warming pollution. “Rafe knew his science very well, and he was not righteous about it,” Wirth said. “His was a very applied kind of advocacy — not just, ‘You ought to do this,’ but, ‘This is how we might do it.’ Not just that it should be done, but this is how we can get it done.” 

Unfortunately, the United States did not ratify this landmark treaty. Before the Kyoto Protocol was even finalized, the U.S. Senate adopted a unanimous resolution of disapproval.

Rafe worked for a number of environmental groups, often in leadership positions. He founded the National Clean Air Coalition in 1973, served as president of Friends of the Earth from 1980 to 1984, and also worked at the World Resources Institute, Arctic 21, Clean Air Cool Planet, American Rivers and the League of Conservation Voters. He founded the Climate Policy Center in 1999 after serving under President Bill Clinton as deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development.

Rafe once told Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, that his family motivated his unrelenting activism. Whenever he felt frustrated by the slow pace of progress or daunted by the enormity of the task ahead, he wore a bracelet that one of his granddaughters made for him. “I use that to remind myself that I have to be outspoken,” he explained. “Unless there’s some strategic reason not to speak out, I don’t hold back, because this is about her.”

Shipping industry is eyeing a carbon tax, despite US objections

Despite efforts by the United States to undermine the initiative, on May 1 the world’s maritime nations preserved a plan to adopt the first global carbon fee on shipping. 

Concluding a week-long meeting at International Maritime Organization (IMO) headquarters in London,  the member nations agreed to keep working on its plan with a goal of adopting global regulations based on what the IMO calls a “Net-zero Framework.” 

However, the organization also agreed to continue discussing alternative proposals and to entertain new ones, which could change the plan substantially. A number of countries submitted alternative proposals and suggested changes, saying that those should still be on the table, for inclusive, constructive negotiations. 

Australia and others expressed concern, The Associated Press reported, that continuing to discuss alternatives would set the process back, when the impacts of climate change are being felt worldwide and the shipping industry is calling for certainty now to make investments in green technologies.

As the meeting closed, IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez said, “We kind of are back on track,” while urging delegates to rebuild trust and continue talking to one another.

Em Fenton, of the U.K.-based climate change nonprofit Opportunity Green, said the framework survived, with a majority of countries supporting it, but asserted, “Survival is not a victory, and we cannot end up in a cycle of open-ended negotiations. We must now look forward to moving toward adoption of the framework later this year in a way that maintains urgency and ambition, and delivers justice and equity for countries on the front lines of climate impacts.” 

The regulations would establish a pricing system that would impose fees for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by ships above allowable limits, in what is effectively the first global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia are among those that strongly oppose a fee.

After the IMO adjourned, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said, “The United States remains strongly opposed to the Net-Zero Framework, a fundamentally flawed proposal that would have imposed a global carbon tax on American consumers and our shipping and energy industries.” 

Experts told Politico that the data that the U.S. distributed at the meeting to stymie the carbon tax is at odds with prevailing analyses and ignores the benefits that would come from implementing the framework. James Stewart, a research fellow in the data analytics of transport at the UCL Energy Institute, said he was able to reverse-engineer the U.S. methodology and had found “fundamental flaws” in how flyers distributed by the U.S. derived the estimates. 

“Whilst there are a number of different issues with the approach taken, the most significant is in its overestimation of the contribution of fuel cost to total trade costs,” Stewart said, adding, “The error over-inflates compliance cost estimates and thereby overstates the NZF’s impact to a large extent.”

“This isn’t credible analysis, it’s a calculated exaggeration designed to scare members,” said Felix Klann, shipping policy officer at Transport & Environment. Klann said the IMO already provides robust data on transition costs and accused Washington of “bad-faith miscalculation and fearmongering to protect fossil fuel interests.”

Under the Net-zero Framework, the fees collected would go into an IMO fund to invest in fuels and technologies needed to transition to green shipping, reward low-emission ships and support developing countries so they aren’t left behind with dirty fuels and old ships.

The IMO set a target for the sector to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by about 2050, and has committed to ensuring that fuels with zero or near-zero emissions are used more widely. Large ships last about 25 years, so the industry would need to make changes and investments now to reach the goal around 2050. The International Chamber of Shipping, which represents more than 80 percent of the world’s merchant fleet, has advocated adoption of the regulations.

IMO nations agreed on the Net-zero Framework last year. Delegates met in October to adopt it, a step that was widely expected to be a formality. The U.S., with trade threats from President Donald Trump, and support from Saudi Arabia and others, derailed the meeting. Delegates decided to postpone the decision by a year and adjourn.

We Need to Learn Better

I’m old enough to remember the 1973 Middle East oil embargo and the long lines at gas stations. So is our current president. The lesson was clear: We needed to end our dependence on the oil from that region. 

The fallout included U.S. automakers’ loss of significant market share to Japanese companies, which were producing cars that could go many more miles on a gallon of gas than most of the ones made by Ford, GM, and Chrysler. 

That oil shock did lead to some progress. "Solar, wind, and nuclear are children of the 1970s oil shocks — with growth driven by security, not environmentalism," the Carlyle Group's Jeff Currie and Admiral James Stavridis, the former NATO commander, wrote recently. And, as Rebecca Elliott noted in a news analysis in The New York Times, our fuel-economy standards are “an enduring legacy” of the embargo.

That progress was bolstered by the developing scientific consensus that fossil fuels were changing our climate and a range of actions taken to address that problem. 

Because of efforts to boost energy efficiency and promote renewable energy sources, Americans are more insulated from oil shocks today than decades ago, Francesca Paris noted in The New York Times. “Petroleum makes up a tiny share of electricity generation (less than 1 percent, down from 11 percent in 1980). Oil prices hit consumers on the road most of all, but even there, less so: The country’s cars are more efficient, on average, and a growing share of Americans are driving electric vehicles.”

Yet it’s discouraging that in the half century since the OPEC embargo, the U.S. and other nations remain so vulnerable to what is transpiring today in and around the Strait of Hormuz. As The Times’ Elliott observed: “With oil front and center, it feels almost like revisiting an earlier time, before countries began embracing renewable energy…”  

And the need to move away more quickly from reliance on fossil fuels became even clearer with the March 6 publication of a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Researchers found that the rate of global warming has nearly doubled over the last decade. As David Gelles reported in The Times, “Many of the consequences of global warming — such as more intense storms, warming oceans and melting glaciers — are arriving faster and more powerfully than many scientists had expected,” David Gelles reported in The Times.

Ben Geman of Axios wrote, “Various analysts and advocates say (the Iran War) could — or at least should — prompt governments and investors to prioritize fuels that don't have to move across oceans.”

But maybe not. "While I agree that oil price spikes could revive interest in renewables, I'll say it again: high prices tend to usher out incumbent politicians faster than they usher in new technologies," ClearView Energy Partner's Kevin Book posted on X.

The politician occupying the Oval Office remains intent on stifling any transition away from fossil fuels, including what he calls “clean, beautiful coal.” With the courts frustrating his efforts to block wind farms off the East Coast, the Trump administration offered to pay nearly $1 billion  to TotalEnergies, the French energy company behind two wind farms off New York State and North Carolina, to not proceed with those projects. Total Energies accepted that deal. Not only that, the company committed to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas. 

Imagine if Congress, back in the mid-1970s, had voted to put a price on carbon. Think how different our sorry history on oil and the Middle East would have been. Wouldn’t it be great if this latest conflict could convince our political leaders that they cannot postpone this sensible step any longer?