Clean Up

When you muster the will, you can do big things.

Feb 2015

Nov 2023

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change.

Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.

Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.

Airparif, an independent group that tracks air quality for France’s capital region, said this week that levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) have decreased 55 percent since 2005, while nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen 50 percent. It attributed this to “regulations and public policies,” including steps to limit traffic and ban the most polluting vehicles.

Air pollution heat maps show the levels of 20 years ago as a pulsing red — almost every neighborhood above the European Union’s limit for nitrogen dioxide, which results from the combustion of fossil fuels. By 2023, the red zone had shrunk to only a web of fine lines across and around the city, representing the busiest roads and highways.

The change shows how ambitious policymaking can directly improve health in large cities. Air pollution is often described by health experts as a silent killer. Both PM 2.5 and nitrogen dioxide have been linked to major health problems, including heart attacks, lung cancer, bronchitis and asthma.

Paris has been led since 2014 by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist who has pushed for many of the green policies and has described her wish for a “Paris that breathes, a Paris that is more agreeable to live in.”

Her proposals have faced pushback — from right-leaning politicians, a car owners’ association and suburban commuters, who say that targeting cars makes their lives more difficult.

But last month, Parisians voted in a referendum to turn an additional 500 streets over to pedestrians. A year earlier, Paris had moved to sharply increase parking fees for SUVs, forcing drivers to pay three times more than they would for smaller cars. The city has also turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone and banned most car traffic from the shopping boulevard of Rue de Rivoli.

Carlos Moreno, a professor at Paris’s Sorbonne University and a former adviser to the city, said Paris has developed “an urban policy based on well-being.”

Microplastics

Air Quality

Colorado is trying to move things along in an effort to expand our understanding of air pollution.

It's not just the hydrocarbons like methane and CO2. Those are important - obviously - but we've been neglecting the problems of airborne toxic substances for a very long time.

Colorado identifies its top five toxic air contaminants. Next comes rules to regulate them.

House Bill 1244, passed in 2022, laid out a roadmap to a street-level toxic air pollution program

The Colorado Air Quality Control Commission on Friday named five pollutants as priority air toxics, one of the key steps in a multiyear process to ratchet back neighborhood air pollution.

Those hazardous pollutants, known as air toxics, are formaldehyde, benzene, hexavalent chromium compounds, ethylene oxide and hydrogen sulfide.

(You may remember "hexavalent chromium" from the movie Erin Brockovich - very bad in water, and not particularly better in the air. It's bad shit.)

The contaminants are separate from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas and ozone regulations, though four of the five of them appear on both lists. The new list, known as regulation 30, was created to target street-level toxins with adverse health effects on individuals, and to fill in gaps in the federal framework.

The list is the latest move to comply with Colorado House Bill 1244, passed in 2022, which laid out a roadmap to a more robust toxic contaminants program. One of the bill’s statutes required the Air Quality Control Commission and Air Pollution Control Division to identify “up to five” priority toxins by April 30, which will become the focus of a yearlong regulation-building process.

By April 30, 2026, the commission must create “health-based” standards for each of the toxins, and establish new monitoring and enforcement protocols.

The state-led program is meant to be more stringent than the EPA’s regulations, and will be shielded from any federal changes to the EPA. The new program also gives the commission more flexibility in determining which compounds to target.

The bill allows contaminants to be added at any time, within reason, and requires a review of the list at least once every five years. Advocacy groups like Green Latinos encouraged the division to review the list on a more frequent, rolling basis. While representatives from Weld County’s Board of Commissioners were concerned about the feasibility of constantly creating new regulations.

“All legislation as it pertains to air quality is not just a matter of, you know, meeting ambitious goals around (nitrogen oxide) reduction or greenhouse gas reduction, but rather what are the specific things we’re doing to improve the health of residents in Colorado,” said Michael Ogletree, director of the Air Pollution Control Division.

Those specifics were debated by representatives from the oil and gas industry, environmental justice groups, local governments and county commissioners Thursday and Friday.

Meet your top five toxics

Almost every toxin selected by the Air Pollution Control Division was challenged at some point during the two days of testimony. The biggest headaches for the commission were the inclusion of acrolein — swapped for formaldehyde at the eleventh hour — and hydrogen sulfide, a compound that is not flagged by the EPA as a hazardous air pollutant.

So, what are the first five toxics?

The compound formaldehyde was presented by the Green Latinos advocacy group as a substitute for acrolein, which was originally included on the list. Both are combustion-related compounds emitted from natural gas processing plants. However, formaldehyde is considered a probable cancer-causing compound by the EPA, where acrolein is not. A number of other parties followed Green Latino’s suit and pushed to include formaldehyde instead of acrolein.

The largest emitter by far of formaldehyde in Colorado is wildfires. But looking only at sources that can be directly regulated, the impacts of regulation would mostly be felt in the oil and gas industry.

Benzene, on the other hand, received almost no pushback.

It’s a widely used chemical found in everyday sources like cleaning products, paint and gasoline, and is also emitted from combustion sources, like vehicle exhaust and fires. Most of the stationary benzene emissions in Colorado — about 70% — come from oil and gas activities.

Residents in Commerce City and northeast Denver have criticized the nearby Suncor refinery for exposing them to benzene for years, and the EPA has repeatedly cited and fined the refinery for its out-of-control emissions.

Hexavalent chromium was chosen because of its cancer risk. The vast majority of hexavalent chromium emitted in Colorado comes from coal-fired power plants, which the state is in the process of shutting down by 2031. The division maintained that the greatest risks to individuals’ health comes from smaller manufacturers that work with metals and glass.

Ethylene oxide is a colorless gas used in making a range of everyday products, including antifreeze, textiles, plastics, detergents and adhesives, according to the division. It’s primarily emitted from commercial sterilizers, like Terumo BCT in Lakewood, which is already under ethylene oxide restrictions after pressure from nearby residents and the EPA.

Finally, hydrogen sulfide, the colorless gas that smells like rotten eggs at low levels (the one that signals a nearby hot spring), is emitted from natural sources, like decaying organic matter, and industrial activities like petroleum refining and wastewater processing.

Hydrogen sulfide is not on the EPA’s list of hazardous air pollutants, and has not been shown to cause cancers. According to the division’s report, it was added to the list because of its cumulative effects — its ability to join with other toxic compounds and cause headache, nausea and chronic coughs, among other symptoms. The data showing hydrogen sulfide as a significant risk was primarily taken from monitors by the nonprofit advocacy group Cultivando, which tracks the air quality around Commerce City.

The limited data around hydrogen sulfide raised questions from groups like the Colorado Petroleum Association and Metro Water Recovery. The toxin is emitted from the wastewater treatment center’s massive “digesters,” tanks where the matter is broken down. Metro asked the commission to exempt wastewater facilities from its regulations.

But advocacy groups from Commerce City and northeast Denver provided resident testimony and data that encouraged the commission to include the compound in its priority list. As the commission later reiterated, one of the reasons the air toxics program was created is to fill in gaps in the federal framework, and the lack of widespread data didn’t preclude its inclusion.

Representatives from the City and County of Denver went a step further and insisted that “lived experience” should be considered relevant data for choosing new toxins.

What’s in and what’s out

To narrow it down to the first five targeted toxics, the Air Pollution Control Division started with a list of 477 possible contenders — basically, anything found in Colorado air that has been known to cause cancer or other serious health effects.

They surveyed state-controlled air quality monitors, and EPA measurements and models, to whittle that list down to 142 contaminants with enough data available to analyze, then screened each one for its cancer and noncancer risks.

That process popped out 41 contaminants that exceeded the risk thresholds. For cancer risk, that threshold is anything greater than 100 cancer cases per million people caused by a single compound. For noncancer risk, that threshold is measured as a “hazard quotient.” Anything above a hazard quotient of 1 is expected to cause adverse effects.

Finally, the division ruled out any toxics emitted mainly by vegetation, soils or wildfires, and excluded mobile sources of toxics. The remaining toxics were ranked from highest to lowest in terms of cancer and noncancer risks, and the five compounds were chosen.

Three toxins were chosen because they had the highest risk rankings in each category, two were chosen because of their high risk and wide exposure.

A chicken and a rotten egg situation

One major point of contention at Thursday’s hearing was about the order of operations. The statute requires the commission to pick out their priority toxics before April 30, after which, the regulatory discussions can begin.

The Colorado Chamber of Commerce, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, the American Petroleum Institute and Weld County commissioners all argued that the process was too stripped of context to make informed decisions. Weld County argued for a more “holistic” approach to the decision process, and urged the commission not to get “caught up” in the step-by-step deadlines.

All of the groups emphasized the need to gain the public’s trust with the new program, and argued that prematurely deciding which contaminants to regulate, without assessing feasibility or economic impacts, could ruin the chances of a successful program rollout.

Advocacy groups like Cultivando and Green Latinos, on the other hand, pushed for establishing the priority contaminants. And the Air Pollution Control Division, which will be responsible for implementing the new program, acknowledged that the new program is a “paradigm shift” in how the commission and division manage risks.

“(We) have spent a lot of effort recently before this commission to address global pollution, climate change, and regional pollutants in our areas of non-attainment,” said Amanda Damweber, air toxics regulation supervisor for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “Air toxics are fundamentally different. They require new policies and regulations to better manage risk for Colorado.”

Dirty Fuels

Every piece I read about Jimmy Carter makes me regret how badly I shit-talked that guy. I've been wrong about a lot of things, but that one's as wrong as it gets.

I have to think about where we'd be right now if we'd listened to Carter and followed through on just a few of his policies - like solar power.

But we didn't, and now we're kinda on the brink of leaving our kids and grandkids a world so fucked up, it might take a human die-off big enough to push us into something that looks like the Dark Ages.

Sorry, Jimmy.

Then along comes this piece in ProPublica, about how the Dirty Fuels Cartel is externalizing the costs of cleaning up the mess they're leaving behind, and I think to myself, "Y'know, if I was a prayin' man, I might be on my knees every night asking the lord for a coupla platoons of Luigi Mangiones".

Cuz BTW:

The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public

Oil executive Tom Ragsdale walked away from his old wells, making the pollution left behind the state of New Mexico’s problem. His tactics, however, are ubiquitous in the industry.

In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received a memo with a dire warning: America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)

More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.

Texas lawmakers pushed for new exceptions to the state’s strict abortion ban after we reported on the deaths of pregnant women whose miscarriages went untreated.

More than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged across the country. Many leak contaminants like brine, methane and benzene into waterways, farmland and neighborhoods. The industry has already left hundreds of thousands of old wells as orphans, meaning companies walked away, leaving taxpayers, government agencies or other drillers on the hook for cleanup.

America’s oil fields are increasingly split between a small number of wells producing record profits and everything else. Researchers estimate roughly 90% of wells are already dead or barely producing.

Consider the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oil field, stretching from West Texas across southeastern New Mexico.

“The Permian is the oil patch’s Alamo — that’s where it’s retreating to,” Regan Boychuk, a Canadian oil cleanup researcher, said of the oil industry. “That’s their last stand.”

Even here, many wells sit idle and in disrepair. It’s time to plug them, according to a growing chorus of researchers, environmentalists and industry representatives.

The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”

Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.

As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

Next, start pumping and profiting.

As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.

Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.

Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that the number of environmental violations rises as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.

Pull any remaining profits before regulators hit you with violations and fines for your remaining wells that aren’t pumping and may be leaking.

Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, a study in California found that, after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.

Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining, carbon sequestration or the synthesis of hydrogen fuel — that require the wells to remain open.

When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.

“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”

When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, according to law firm Haynes Boone. (Industry groups estimate there are several thousand oil companies in the country.)

Regulators only require oil and gas companies to set aside tiny bonds that act like a security deposit on an apartment. Because you didn’t clean up your wells, you’ll lose that money, but it’s a fraction of the profits you’ve banked or the cost of the cleanup work. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that bonds typically equal less than 2% of actual cleanup costs.

And as you finalize your exit, the labyrinth of shell corporations you set up should act as corporate law intends, protecting you from future responsibility. Such companies, little more than stacks of paper, will be responsible for your liabilities, not you. Even if regulators know who is behind a company, it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate each layer of a business to go after individual executives.

“It’s the essence of corporate law,” Williams-Derry said.

Now that you’ve offloaded your wells, you’re free to start fresh — launch a new oil company and buy some of your old wells for pennies on the dollar, a proven option. Maybe you leave oil entirely — that’s also tried-and-true. Or become a vintner and open a winery just down the road from the wells you left as orphans — you wouldn’t be the first.

For its part, the oil industry downplays the so-called playbook and the country’s orphan well epidemic. “There’s a general trend, which is there are very few orphan wells,” said Kathleen Sgamma, who has been among oil companies’ most vocal proponents as president of the Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group. Plus, she said, companies’ bonds and states’ orphan well funds help pay for plugging.

But those tasked with addressing the reality of the country’s orphan wells disagree. “We have a welfare system for oil and gas. I hope you understand that,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, who oversees the state’s public lands. New Mexico has already documented more than 1,700 orphan wells across the state. “We have oil and gas welfare queens.”

In New Mexico, Garcia Richard is trying to hold accountable one of the myriad drillers that have followed key steps in the playbook, the oil company known as Siana.

Siana is made up of two related entities — Siana Oil and Gas Co. LLC and Siana Operating LLC — based in Midland and Conroe, Texas. The company operated 11 wells in southeastern New Mexico in the heart of the Permian Basin.

In reality, Siana is the corporate shield for a man named Tom Ragsdale. After he aggregated his few wells, he generated cash through a trickle of oil and gas production and set up a business injecting other companies’ wastewater into his wells to dispose of it. But the state worried that Ragsdale’s operations were polluting the environment and that he was refusing to pay royalties and rental fees he owed the state, according to State Land Office staff.

Ragsdale did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ProPublica and Capital & Main. He also did not appear for a pretrial conference after the state brought legal action against Siana, court records show, and a state court judge ruled against his companies.

Siana was responsible for at least 16 spills, according to New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data, mainly spilling what’s called produced water, a briny wastewater that comes to the surface alongside oil and gas. “Corrosion” and “Equipment Failure” were among the causes.

The State Land Office hired an engineering firm to study the damage. The firm produced a damning 201-page report in 2018, finding oil and salt contamination exceeding state limits at Siana’s most polluted site. At high enough levels, these substances can kill plants, harm wildlife and impact human health.

The State Land Office estimated that cleaning up that site alone would cost about $1 million.

In 2020, New Mexico won a judgment against Ragsdale’s companies that, with interest, is now worth more than $3.5 million. But it won’t cover the cleanup cost. Between a small bond and the judgment, the state has been able to recover a mere $50,000 or so from Siana and related entities.

When the state tried to collect the rest, Ragsdale placed Siana Oil and Gas in bankruptcy protection in June 2023. Although he listed the company as having millions in assets at the time of the bankruptcy, the company had only $20,500 in a bank account. Court records show Siana is responsible for between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities, including money owed to the state of New Mexico, other oil companies, various counties and others.

Stickers plastered around Siana’s drill sites — on which the company’s name is misspelled — provide phone numbers to call in case of leaks or other emergencies. None went to Ragsdale or Siana employees. A man named William Dean answered one number. He owned a local oil field services company called Dean’s Pumping that was contracted to work on Siana’s wells, but Ragsdale stopped paying its bills, ultimately owing his company tens of thousands of dollars, Dean said.

“He was trying to half-ass things,” Dean said of Ragsdale. “I don’t know what happened to Tom.”

Siana’s bankruptcy case is ongoing, but Ragsdale has been largely unresponsive even in those proceedings.

Siana is, Garcia Richard said, “an exemplar of how our system has failed.” Although he was very nearly free of his old wells, Ragsdale flouted the playbook and ignored the bankruptcy judge’s demands that he participate in the case. In an unusual move, the judge in late September issued a warrant for Ragsdale’s arrest to compel him to hand over certain data. The U.S. Marshals Service was investigating Ragsdale’s whereabouts but had not taken him into custody as of mid-December, according to an agency representative.

The day after the judge issued the arrest warrant, the bankruptcy trustee filed a complaint alleging Ragsdale had committed fraud, siphoning about $2.4 million from Siana to purchase real estate in Houston.

That money could have gone toward cleaning up the mess left to New Mexico taxpayers.

ProPublica and Capital & Main visited Siana’s 11 wells in late 2023. At one drill site, methane leaked from a wellhead that had also stained the surrounding land black from spilled oil. The air was sour with the smell of toxic hydrogen sulfide. A nearby tank that held oil for processing was rusted through. Another had leaked an unidentified liquid. There appeared to be hoofprints where cattle had tracked through the polluted mud.

ProPublica and Capital & Main found oil spills at multiple Siana wells. At others, the idle pump jacks stood silent — corroded skeletons at the end of the line, the detritus of another run through the playbook.

Efforts to reform the system that has shielded oil companies from liability have been haphazard. When the federal government rewrote its rule setting bond levels on federal public land earlier this year, a simple math error meant the government would ask oil companies to set aside around $400 million less in bonds than it would’ve otherwise. And when states have tried to pass reforms, they’ve been stymied by state legislators’ and regulators’ chummy relationships with the industry.

As an ever-greater share of wells go offline and the economy transitions to cleaner forms of energy, policymakers face a choice: Do they focus attention on propping up or cleaning up the industry?

Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance gives voice to one path forward. “Any time a well goes into an orphan status, it’s not a good thing,” Sgamma said, yet her group has been instrumental in killing efforts to address the orphan well epidemic and the oil industry’s contributions to climate change. Her organization is suing to halt the federal rule that sought to bring bonding levels closer to true plugging costs.

Sgamma co-authored the energy section of Project 2025, the conservative policy paper with deep ties to the first Trump administration that lays out policy priorities for a conservative White House. The plan would “Stop the war on oil and natural gas,” reopen undeveloped habitat from Alaska to Colorado for drilling, increase the number of sales for oil leases on public lands and shrink federal environmental agencies. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated this closely aligns with his vision for pumping America’s “liquid gold.” He has begun staffing his administration with pro-oil and gas figures.

The future for which Sgamma is fighting sees a resilient American oil and gas industry, able to “take a lot of punches” while continuing to grow unabated.

Or there’s the future Garcia Richard, who oversees New Mexico’s public land, envisions. She has paused the leasing of public land to drillers until the Legislature forces oil companies to pay state taxpayers higher royalties that reflect fair market rates. She directed her staff to aggressively pursue companies like Siana. And her office is preparing to raise required bonding levels. As she talked about this work, she held up the literal rubber stamp that imparts the State Land Office’s seal on documents, suggesting that’s not how business is done anymore. She also held up a small notebook where she tracks the numerous companies her office is pursuing for polluting the state’s land and water.

In her future, Garcia Richard said, oil drillers wouldn’t behave like Siana and Ragsdale. “A good-acting company is a company that understands there’s a cost of doing business that shouldn’t be borne by the landowner, shouldn’t be borne by the taxpayers,” she said. But in the modern American oil industry, she added, the playbook and the still-burning fuse of the cleanup time bomb represent little more than “Wild West behavior.”

Healing The Earth

... is healing ourselves.

The planet is not at risk - we are.

BTW - enjoy the decent coverage of real things on Voice Of America while you still can.

Last I heard, Trump was going to appoint Kari Lake to head it up.

Paying Up

Factor this shit in, and it gets real clear we're paying a lot more for gas than we think.

Colorado oil and gas wells can’t fund their own cleanup. Taxpayers may foot the bill

A Carbon Tracker report shows the cost to safely shut down low-producing wells is $3bn more than what they earn

Thousands of oil and gas wells across Colorado cannot generate enough revenue to cover their own cleanup costs, according to a new report. Unless state officials act “simply and quickly”, it says, Coloradans can expect to be on the hook for a $3bn shortfall.

In its report, the thinktank Carbon Tracker found that 27,000 low-producing oil and gas wells in Colorado – more than half the state’s total – will generate, at most, $1bn in revenue. The state’s oil and gas reserves peaked five years ago, with production volumes declining dramatically in all but one region. It will cost $4bn to $5bn to decommission those sites responsibly, the analysts found – meaning the state can expect a cash crunch of at least $3bn.

Unless properly decommissioned, unplugged wells can leak carcinogens and methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But according to Colorado’s energy and carbon management commission (ECMC), the state’s energy regulator, it can cost $110,000 or more to close a single site. Many companies have avoided paying those costs, either by delaying cleanup indefinitely, selling off ageing wells to smaller competitors or simply going out of business. Today, there are at least 120,000 “orphan” wells across the US that lack financially solvent operators, making them instead a problem for government entities to solve.

“The biggest problem here is just the nature of this activity: You make a lot of cash at the beginning, and then you have a big cost at the end,” said Rob Schuwerk, executive director of Carbon Tracker and a co-author of the report. “The way you cover a cost like that is you make people save along the way, and this is not done now.”

In 2022, Colorado rolled out a much-lauded approach to ensuring fossil fuel companies foot the cleanup bill. The regulations, which Colorado governor, Jared Polis, last year called “an example the nation can follow”, included major changes to the state’s bonding requirements – the system of financial assurance it uses to make it harder for operators to walk away from polluting wells.

Yet a review of public financial documents by DeSmog and the Guardian showed that Colorado’s modest reforms failed to keep pace with the fossil fuel industry’s ballooning liabilities.

“Even under the new rules, the gap between projected cleanup costs and secured bonding is measured in the billions of dollars,” said Margaret Kran-Annexstein, director of the Sierra Club’s Colorado chapter. “It’s frankly dangerous for Colorado to imply this is the best we can do.”

This dynamic is widespread across the US. In the 15 biggest oil- and gas-producing states, funds on hand for cleanup amount to less than 2% of estimated costs, a recent analysis by ProPublica and Capital & Main found. That Colorado, a state that’s been celebrated for an unusually proactive approach to bonding, still faces such a dramatic shortfall suggests that other state governments have much more to do before the trend can be reversed.

“The bonding isn’t enough. It’s never been enough,” said Kelly Mitchell, a senior analyst at Documented, a watchdog group. “And I think the states typically aren’t being very sober in considering the scale of the problem they’re facing.”

In emailed comments, Megan Castle, ECMC’s community relations supervisor, noted that plugged wells outnumber unplugged wells in Colorado.

Colorado’s financial assurance structure is designed to ensure operators – not the State – remain responsible for the entire lifecycle of the well and site,” she wrote, adding that Colorado’s bonding programs are meant to act as “a backstop” only when companies cannot fulfill that obligation themselves.

But the rules, by law, were designed to ensure that all operators have the ability to meet their plugging obligation fully – and that outcome is still very far away.

‘More loopholes than net’

In 2019, Colorado became one of the first states to try to take comprehensive action on the soaring costs of oil and gas cleanup. That year, lawmakers passed sweeping legislation that set the stage for a broad regulatory overhaul, while also giving ECMC a mandate to protect human health and the environment over industry profits. The commission imposed a fee on producers and set restrictions around transferring wells, an effort to stop bigger companies from selling off low-producing assets to smaller, poorer companies without adequate plugging resources. But the centerpiece was the revised financial assurance requirements, which ECMC officials called “by far the highest” in the nation and “truly a paradigm shift”.

ECMC required every operator to develop a unique, company-specific bonding plan based on well count, production levels and other factors. But the rules’ high degree of flexibility and customization allowed some companies to exclude certain poorly performing wells from their totals or to propose their own bespoke plans.

The result, said Dwayne Purvis, a petroleum engineer and consultant who co-authored the Carbon Tracker report, is that companies generally aren’t bonding enough. The rules are so flexible they end up being “more loopholes than net”, he said.

Rich reserves in a single region – the Denver-Julesburg basin – could generate more than enough to one day close down all of the state’s wells, something that will cost between $6.8bn and $8.5bn, according to Carbon Tracker. But most of those longer-term future profits will be concentrated in the hands of just three publicly traded companies: Chevron, Occidental and Civitas.

Schuwerk called it “a case of haves and have-nots” and said existing ECMC policy doesn’t do much to correct that fundamental imbalance: one group is sitting on billions in profits while the other can’t afford to resolve its billions in liabilities.

At least one operator, KP Kauffman, has already said it can’t pay. Reportedly Colorado’s largest owner of low-producing, so-called “marginal” oil wells, the company in 2021 said it could not afford to pay a $2m fine ECMC levied for environmental violations, and in January it sued regulators in protest of the amount ECMC had ordered it to bond.

The commission has struggled to enforce other bonds, according to an analysis of an ECMC database that tracks daily activity. As of 25 June, 66 companies representing 1,075 wells hadn’t even filed initial paperwork to develop bonding plans. And at least two dozen operators have still not filed financial assurance after their bonding plans were approved. Two of those companies are more than a year late, according to a review of public documents.

The non-compliant companies “have been sent some enforcement letters”, then-ECMC commissioner Karin McGowan said in a public webinar on 22 May. “We are trying to close that out and find out what’s going on with those operators.” She added that this group represented a small overall proportion of the total number of unplugged wells in the state, about 2%.

After initially telling the Colorado Sun it planned to have $820m in bonding in hand by 2044, ECMC now plans to have just $613m in financial assurance on hand in 20 years. Even if every dollar of that amount materializes, it’s still $2.4bn less than the state will need to safely shutter its lowest-producing wells.

A separate analysis by Carbon Tracker, shared exclusively with DeSmog and the Guardian, showed that the state’s wells that face near-term risk of being orphaned represent at least $520m in liabilities. In other words, the amount of assurance ECMC plans on for 20 years from now may barely cover what’s already needed today.

“Negotiation and compromise cost six years of delay with no tangible improvement” in covering budget shortfalls, the Carbon Tracker analysts conclude.

‘Socialize the cost of plugging these wells among operators’

Adam Peltz, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund who praised the ECMC’s rules in 2022, said Colorado is still better off than other states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico, which both have more unplugged wells than Colorado and have struggled to pass more rigorous rules.

He said Colorado will need to look outside the bonding system to solve its massive shortfall.

“You can’t solve this problem with bonds alone, because for so many companies it’s too late,” he said. “They’ll never generate enough money to pay to close their own wells.”

He pointed to another aspect of the rules developed in 2022 as a potential revenue source: the fee on producers. Currently, that program only generates $10m a year, which Peltz conceded is not enough to overcome the billions Colorado faces in oil and gas liabilities, even factoring in the availability of matching federal funds. But, he said, raising that fee significantly could help to redistribute funds from resource-rich Denver-Julesburg to depleted areas in the state.

“Colorado’s innovation was saying, here’s this additional fee, you need to pay to socialize the cost of plugging these wells among all operators,” he said. “I wish every state would do that.”

Ultimately, the Carbon Tracker analysts conclude, policymakers must decide between developing new, rigorous alternatives, or sending the bill to taxpayers by default. That will likely involve compelling resource-rich firms to start setting aside savings from their profits now.

Mitchell, the Documented analyst, recalled advice she first heard from a former colleague at the Department of the Interior: “The best time to collect is on payday.”

“In this period of record profits for the oil and gas industry,” she said, “this is kind of it.”

BTW - Trump has already proposed a deal that trades our lands and our air and our water to the Dirty Fuels Cartel in exchange for their "donation" of $1 billion to his "campaign". Let Trump win, and we're guaranteed to lose big on this.

Choking

So when your kid's asthma gets worse - or your own COPD, or Grandma's emphysema - be sure to thank The Dirty Fuels Cartel and their stable of GOP whores.

What it means for the Supreme Court to block enforcement of the EPA's 'good neighbor' pollution rule

The Environmental Protection Agency will not be able to enforce a key rule limiting air pollution in nearly a dozen states while separate legal challenges proceed around the country, under a Supreme Court decision Thursday.

The EPA's "good neighbor" rule is intended to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution.

Three energy-producing states - Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia - challenged the rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective.

The Supreme Court put the rule on hold while legal challenges continue, the conservative-led court's latest blow to federal regulations.

The high court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has increasingly reined in the powers of federal agencies, including the EPA, in recent years. The justices have restricted EPA's authority to fight air and water pollution, including a landmark 2022 ruling that limited EPA's authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming. The court also shot down a vaccine mandate and blocked Democratic President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program.

The court is also weighing whether to overturn its 40-year-old Chevron decision, which has been the basis for upholding a wide range of regulations on public health, workplace safety and consumer protections.

A look at the good neighbor rule and the implications of the court decision.

What is the 'good neighbor' rule?

The EPA adopted the rule as a way to protect downwind states that receive unwanted air pollution from other states. Besides the potential health impacts from out-of-state pollution, many states face their own federal deadlines to ensure clean air.

States such as Wisconsin, New York and Connecticut said they struggle to meet federal standards and reduce harmful levels of ozone because of pollution from out-of-state power plants, cement kilns and natural gas pipelines that drift across their borders. Ground-level ozone, which forms when industrial pollutants chemically react in the presence of sunlight, can cause respiratory problems, including asthma and chronic bronchitis. People with compromised immune systems, the elderly and children playing outdoors are particularly vulnerable.

Judith Vale, New York's deputy solicitor general, told the court that for some states, as much as 65% of smog pollution comes from outside its borders.

States that contribute to ground-level ozone, or smog, must submit plans ensuring that coal-fired power plants and other industrial sites do not add significantly to air pollution in other states. In cases where a state has not submitted a "good neighbor" plan - or where EPA disapproves a state plan - a federal plan is supposed to ensure downwind states are protected.

What's next for the rule?

The Supreme Court decision blocks EPA enforcement of the rule and sends the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is considering a lawsuit challenging the regulation that was brought by 11 mostly Republican-leaning states.

An EPA spokesman said the agency believes the plan is firmly rooted in its authority under the Clean Air Act and "looks forward to defending the merits of this vital public health protection" before that appeals court.

The spokesman, Timothy Carroll, said the Supreme Court's ruling will "postpone the benefits that the Good Neighbor Plan is already achieving in many states and communities.''

While the plan is on pause, "Americans will continue to be exposed to higher levels of ground-level ozone, resulting in costly public health impacts that can be especially harmful to children and older adults,'' Carroll said. Ozone disproportionately affects people of color, families with low incomes, and other vulnerable populations, he said.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said he was pleased that the Supreme Court "recognized the immediate harm to industry and consumers posed by this reckless rule. No agency is permitted to operate outside of the clear bounds of the law and today, once again, the Supreme Court reminded the EPA of that fact.''

With a stay in place, Nolan said the mining industry looks forward to making its case in court that the EPA rule "is unlawful in its excessive overreach and must be struck down to protect American workers, energy independence, the electric grid and the consumers it serves,."

Few states participate

The EPA rule was intended to provide a national solution to the problem of ozone pollution, but challengers said it relied on the assumption that all 23 states targeted by the rule would participate. In fact, only about half that number of states were participating as of early this year.

A lawyer for industry groups that are challenging the rule said it imposes significant and immediate costs that could affect reliability of the electric grid. With fewer states participating, the rule may result in only a small reduction in air pollution, with no guarantee the final rule will be upheld, industry lawyer Catherine Stetson told the Supreme Court in oral arguments earlier this year.

The EPA has said power-plant emissions dropped by 18% in 2023 in the 10 states where it has been allowed to enforce its rule, which was finalized last year. Those states are Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. In California, limits on emissions from industrial sources other than power plants are supposed to take effect in 2026.

The rule is on hold in another dozen states because of separate legal challenges. The states are Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

Administrative overstep or life-saving protection?

Critics, including Republicans and business groups, call the good neighbor rule an example of government overreach.

"Acting well beyond its delegated powers" under the Clean Air Act, the EPA rule "proposes to remake the energy sector in the affected states toward the agency's preferred ends,'' Republican lawmakers said in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The rule and other Biden administration regulations "are designed to hurriedly rid the U.S. power sector of fossil fuels by sharply increasing the operating costs for fossil fuel-fired power plant operators, forcing the plants' premature retirement," the brief by Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Sens. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Roger Wicker of Mississippi asserted. Rodgers chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, while Capito and Wicker are senior members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Supporters disputed that and called the "good neighbor'' rule critical to address interstate air pollution and ensure that all Americans have access to clean air.

"Today's move by far-right Supreme Court justices to stay commonsense clean air rules shows just how radical this court has become,'' said Charles Harper of environmental group Evergreen Action.

"The court is meddling with a rule that would prevent 1,300 Americans from dying prematurely every year from pollution that crosses state borders. We know that low-income and disadvantaged communities with poor air quality will bear the brunt of this delay,'' Harper said.

The rule applies mostly to states in the South and Midwest that contribute to air pollution along the East Coast. Some states, such as Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin, both contribute to downwind pollution and receive it from other states.

Dumbass

Yeah, it's unconfirmed, but is anybody not thinking this is the fault of some fuckup who couldn't figure out that he's not at home with mommy and daddy, so he oughta to be looking after his own shit for once?

Goddammit, I hate these fuckin' people.

The Forest Service said June 12, 2024, that this campfire ring

is likely where the Interlaken wildfire started.

Abandoned campfire suspected cause of 450-acre Interlaken wildfire burning near Leadville

Investigator believes the campfire was left days before being reported Tuesday when the fire started south of Twin Lakes

A circle of rocks surrounds a burnt out campfire in the forest with fallen trees and some lingering smoke in the background.

An abandoned campfire likely ignited the Interlaken fire burning hundreds of acres south of Twin Lakes in Lake County, according to a U.S. Forest Service investigator.

In an update Wednesday night, the Forest Service said an investigator located a campfire ring left 60 yards from the Interlaken trail and 1.5 miles from the trailhead where the fire likely started Tuesday.

“This campfire was not properly extinguished and continued to burn. It is believed that the campfire was abandoned several days prior to its report on June 11,” the Forest Service said in a social media post.

Officials do not have any leads on who might have started the fire. They are asking anyone who may have information about campers who built a fire near the Interlaken resort between Friday and Tuesday to call a tip line at 303-275-5266.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the fire 12 miles south of Leadville had burned about 443 acres in 24 hours with zero containment.

Pre-evacuations have extended into northern Chaffee County.

There are 135 fire personnel on scene along with four helicopters and a fixed-wing aircraft, according to the USFS.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office issued an evacuation order to the Interlaken historic district, which is home to a once popular, now-abandoned mountain hotel, and all of County Road 25 on the south side of Twin Lakes.

A pre-evacuation order was issued “until further notice” for Lost Canyon, as well as Balltown, a small residential area on the east side of Twin Lakes and County Road 30.

On Wednesday, the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office issued a pre-evacuation warning for residents and those recreating between Clear Creek Reservoir to the Chaffee County-Lake County line.

Of Wolves And Men

I don't claim to know jack shit about wildlife management or how to go about keeping the big predators from taking down livestock.

What I do know (I think) - based solely on my casual observations of human behavior - is that it's likely to become quite a battle between the ranchers and the biologists who are trying to get wolves back into the circle-of-life mix here in Colorado.

It's been shown petty dramatically that wolves come in handy when you're trying to get a regional biome back into balance after humans have spent generations fucking it all up.

Anyway, Colorado Parks & Wildlife is re-introducing gray wolves in Northern Colorado.

CPW says it will not kill wolves after attacks on North Park rancher’s cattle

In the latest chapter of Don Gittleson’s fight to protect his livestock from wolves, Colorado Parks and Wildlife says he should continue using mitigation tools the rancher claims haven’t worked

After years of discussion and a formal letter asking for help, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has denied rancher Don Gittleson’s request for the agency to kill two wolves that have been preying on cattle on his Jackson County ranch.

Gittleson on Dec. 13 sent a letter to the agency requesting the lethal removal of the wolves, “so that they do not continue to affect the livelihood and mental well-being of the agriculture members of this state.”

Since December 2021, one of the wolves — No. 2101 — has killed or injured seven of Gittleson’s cows, including a calf last week, six of his neighbor’s cows and four working dogs. The other wolf — No. 2103 — killed three lambs at rancher Philip Anderson’s place. Both ranches are in North Park.

In his letter, Gittleson asserted the agency intentionally chose not to define what a “habitual depredating wolf/wolf pack is” and implored CPW “to stop talking and start managing.”

Under the Colorado Wolf Management Plan, a rancher can kill a wolf if they discover it “chronically depredating” their livestock, or if they are in an act of self defense or defense of human life. But the plan does not clearly define what makes a wolf “chronically depredating,” and says wildlife officials will make that determination on a case-by-case basis.

On Dec. 22, the agency determined it would not lethally remove the wolves chronically depredating on Gittleson’s cattle.

The reasoning in the letter, written by CPW director Jeff Davis, is that after considering the entire history of depredation events in Gittleson’s region, including the most recent ones in November and December, and considering “the change in pack dynamics over the preceding year when most of the pack left the area and did not return,” the “number and frequency of [depredations] has dropped.”

During an interview with The Colorado Sun, Kim Gittleson, who owns the Gittleson ranch with her husband, Don, expressed frustration.

“They tell us to reach out for help with mitigation, but in the year when we had the most problems (2022), we brought in donkeys, we brought horned cattle, we had fladry, we had cracker shells, we had so many things,” she said. “In addition, we spent every night from January through the end of May (physically present with their herd, protecting it). So I’m not sure what else they think we should be doing” to keep the wolves from depredating at their ranch.

In the letter from CPW, Davis said the agency “will continue to monitor the situation and collaborate with other ranchers in Jackson County and across the state to evaluate future actions.” He encouraged the Gittlesons to continue using the tools Kim mentioned and to collaborate with their local CPW staff.

But Kim said, “At every CPW meeting, we hear about how understaffed they are. But my husband runs 11,000 acres (on land leased from the Colorado State Land Board) and 200 cattle pretty much by himself. So I would challenge them to come spend a day in the life of the ranchers who they expect to step up to the plate and do more to protect their cattle from a predator that they’re forcing down our throats”

I'll try not to say anything like, "These people are chowing down - suckling at the government teat - and they have the gall to bitch about stuff the government is doing?"

“I understand it’s not CPW’s fault, it’s the voters,” she added. “But now it’s in their court. And the governor wants these things, so maybe he should step up with more funding.”

In an email to The Sun, CPW spokesperson Travis Duncan said the agency recently entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Colorado Department of Agriculture on expanding assistance to farmers and ranchers to avoid wolf predation, and that a budget request through the governor’s office to provide support to farmers and ranchers for nonlethal deterrence will be submitted Jan 2.

The memorandum directs the general assembly to appropriate or authorize money to CPW through the general fund, the species conservation fund, the nongame conservation and wildlife restoration fund along with the wildlife cash fund — except for money generated through the sales of hunting and fishing licenses or associated federal grants — to pay for this support.

It also says “it is the mutual desire of CDA and CPW to manage and recover gray wolf populations within Colorado while minimizing conflicts with livestock and agriculture producers.”

In a November news release, the Colorado agriculture department said it will work directly with producers to provide technical assistance for nonlethal prevention methods and develop appropriate, nonlethal livestock management strategies that minimize livestock-predator interactions.

It will also “advance the adoption of nonlethal management tools” among ranchers, collaborate and co-branded media responses and educational tools and conduct cross-training at least annually between CDA and CPW staff who work directly with impacted communities. The goal is to “improve communication, understanding of available programs at both agencies, and delivery of services and resources to impacted individuals and communities.”

But Kim said in years past, when USDA helped with fladry, they only used it on 40 acres. At the time, she said, “they told us that’s one of the biggest areas they’d ever done. They’re used to dealing with small farms and ranches, not like the ones we have in this valley. And, you know, we kept our cows in that 40-acre pasture until calving season. We ended up with one dead cow — from falling and not being able to get up — another, which my husband, with a torn bicep, was able to help, and quite a few cases of mastitis (a mammary gland infection), which we’ve never had but did because we kept them in such a small area.”

CPW completed its goal of releasing 10 wolves captured in Oregon onto the West Slope last Friday. A pair of those 10 were part of the large Five Points pack in Oregon that killed three livestock animals. In an email to The Sun, Duncan responded to claims that once a wolf preys on livestock they will continue to do so in the future, by saying any wolves that have been near livestock will have some history of depredation, including the pack in Oregon, but that it “does not mean they have a history of chronic depredation.”

“If a pack has infrequent depredation events, they should not be excluded as a source population, per the (Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management) plan,” he added.

As for what the Gittlesons are going to do if the wolves that have been attacking their cattle come back: “They keep telling us we can shoot them, but I guarantee you, the first person that shoots a wolf in Colorado is going to go through hell,” Kim said. “I think the governor is going to make (CPW) come after us as hard as they can.”

In an email to The Sun, CPW said it stands by regulations in the Colorado wolf management plan.

Fouling The Nest

For the smartest critters ever, "modern" humans are almost unbelievably stupid.

I don't quite get how we decided it's OK for people to just walk away from their responsibility to clean up after themselves when they've profited from fucking up the air and the water and the soil.

Why do we do that?

Five women in my family lived either at our house on Independence Way, or on Hackberry Hill in Arvada. All five had bouts with cancer, and four of them died of it - and this in a family of some very long-lived old gals. The ones who lived in Arvada got sick.

Northern Jefferson County has been a known Disease Cluster for 50 years - downhill and downwind of Rocky Flats (plutonium) - and I'm just now learning about this uranium shit seeping into the drinking water!?!

What the actual fuck, you guys.

Cleanup company walks away from Jeffco uranium mine, state takes $7.3 million bond

Colorado mining officials say they will take over water purifying that keeps radioactivity and other contamination out of Denver and Arvada water supply.

The company charged with keeping uranium-tainted water out of Denver and Arvada’s drinking supply is walking away from cleaning up Jefferson County’s shuttered Schwartzwalder mine, and state officials are taking over a $7.3 million surety bond they say will continue to fund treatment.

Without water treatment and other uranium reclamation, the Schwartzwalder mine above Ralston Creek and Ralston Reservoir has leaked tainted water into key city supplies, state reclamation officials said in their stipulated agreement with Colorado Legacy Land. The company’s water treatment plant at the mine has been running May to October in recent years, and the state said Friday the previously posted bond will allow work to continue in 2024.

Colorado officials won’t know until the end of next year’s treatment season how many years the surety bond will last in running the plant, said Michael Cunningham, acting division director for Reclamation, Mining and Safety. Colorado could invest the surety bond and use proceeds to continue treatment, but the state may also have recourse to seek more funding from Colorado Legacy Land, Cunningham said.

The state revoked Colorado Legacy Land’s permit to run mine or cleanup operations at Schwartzwalder as part of the stipulation agreement. The stipulation agreement says no civil fines will be issued as part of the revocation and transition to state control. The latest surety bond agreement was for $7.6 million, but the state is moving to take over about $7.3 million left in the fund.

Community activists who have tried to track the uranium cleanups in both Jefferson County and Canon City said they were not surprised about CLL’s surrender of the Golden efforts.

The promises were “never going to be enough for the best cleanup possible,” said Carol Dunn, co-chair of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste. “I could not guess where CLL got the highly optimistic idea that there was ‘easy money’ to be made.”

Reporters in the past have not received responses to inquiries at Colorado Legacy Land. A message left with Colorado Legacy Land representative Jim Harrington on Friday was not returned.

The walkaway agreement signed last week is the latest in a series of failed cleanup sagas for two major Colorado uranium sites once controlled by Colorado Legacy Land, which in turn had taken over the two sites from Cotter Corp.

Schwartzwalder, about 7 miles northwest of Golden, has not produced uranium since 2000, state officials said, and is in the final stages of rock and dirt reclamation. Water treatment at the Jeffco site must go on for years, according to regulators at the reclamation division and the state health department.

Colorado Legacy Land had also taken over and later walked away from the Cotter Mill cleanup, an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site at Cañon City. Colorado Legacy Land surprised Cañon City residents in February with an insolvency and news it was giving up its share of cleanups at both Cotter Mill and Schwartzwalder.

State action at Schwartzwalder dates at least to 2010, when reclamation officials demanded action from then-owner Cotter Corp. over discharges into surface water. The state’s stipulation agreement last week says that without proper summer water treatment, tainted mine water builds up and then overflows into Ralston Creek, which feeds Ralston Reservoir.

Unless the treatment equipment is turned on again in spring of 2024, the pool of tainted water would begin overflowing in June, state officials said in the stipulation agreement approved by the mining reclamation board on Wednesday.

The land portion of the reclamation has a finite end and will be completed under the surety bond, the state’s Cunningham said. Rock waste is being moved above any water contact on the valley floor, and will be capped with soil to be covered in vegetation, he said.

“The division is going to have a much clearer idea of how long that water can be treated utilizing the financial warranty once we get to the end of the 2024 season,” he said

“The system that’s in place there will ensure that the water that is discharged into Ralston Creek meets water quality standards,” Cunningham said. “This is what Colorado Legacy Land has been doing themselves since taking over this permit. And they’ve been successful in meeting water quality standards up there.”

Arvada water officials said they have been monitoring the discussions about Schwartzwalder and have been advocating “for the protection of Ralston Creek.”

“At this time, we have no concerns about risk to water supply or water quality in Arvada,” said Arvada infrastructure communications manager Katie Patterson. “We are confident that the state and the Mined Land Reclamation Board are committed to continuing to run the water treatment plant in the year ahead and to determining a path for long term management of the site. The city will continue to monitor, support, and engage with the state in the future management of the site to ensure the protection of Ralston Creek.”

Denver Water officials have said in the past that their own water treatment systems for Ralston Reservoir water also keep uranium or other contaminants out of city supplies.

Friday, Denver Water officials said they are “monitoring the situation at the mine and appreciate the leadership of the Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety in its work to ensure water treatment continues at the site.”

Cunningham said the state has known since early this year that Colorado Legacy Land would be leaving the site. “CLL stated and confirmed it does not presently have the financial capacity to perform its obligations under the permit,” the stipulation says, in part.

“We feel well positioned to take the site over,” Cunningham said.

Rivets

More bad news about the mass extinction mess we've gotten ourselves into.



Insects are in dramatic decline in Colorado, 35-year-long study reveals

62% fewer insects were trapped in a pristine meadow near Gothic, a loss correlated with less winter snowfall, less summer rain and warmer temperatures

Nora Underwood, a Florida State University professor of ecology and evolution, sweeps her net for grasshoppers in a study plot at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, Colorado on July 28, 2023. Underwood, her husband, Brian Inouye and father-in-law David Inouye, research the affect of climate change on the insect and flower species populations in the mountains near Crested Butte. (Dean Krakel, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Dramatic insect declines previously reported around the world are also occurring in Colorado. Researchers with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, or RMBL, report that flying insects in the mountains outside of Crested Butte have declined more than 60% since 1986.

The current research, published in the scientific journal Ecosphere, is noteworthy for the length of time covered and the relatively undisturbed mountain environment where it was conducted. The declines correlated with drier and warmer weather, suggesting an impact of climate change.

“Increasingly we are seeing insect declines in places that are more pristine, which is much more alarming,” said Julian Resasco, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado.

While historically seen as agricultural pests and personal nuisances, insects and other invertebrates (no backbone) are increasingly recognized for the vital services they provide in nature: pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling and sustenance for birds and other animals higher on the food chain. The continued decline of insect populations could have profound consequences for the environment, humans and other animals.

“We rely on insects for ecosystem services. We need them to be abundant and diverse,” Resasco said.

Concern about declining insect populations surged in 2017 after researchers reported that flying insects in Germany had declined by more than 75% over 27 years. That was followed by several studies mostly, but not uniformly, reporting alarming declines in insect populations around the world. The reality and the causes of insect decline are ongoing debates among entomologists.

For their study, the RMBL researchers set up a tentlike trap in the middle of a 27-acre meadow at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, 9,500 feet above sea level near the abandoned mining town of Gothic. Surrounded by the peaks and meadows of the Elk Mountains, the setting is stunning — and far removed from intensive agriculture, urban growth, pesticide use and other human activities that have been blamed for insect declines.

“We thought that it was important for us to look at a site that is free from all those influences,” said David Inouye, co-author on the research paper, and a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland.

Two days a week, the researchers capture flying insects — mostly bees, wasps and flies. They count and dry the insects, weigh them and divide them into several broad groupings. Since 1984, researchers have captured and recorded data about the insects every week of every subalpine summer for 40 years.

“If you want to see a long-term trend, you need decades of data,” Inouye said. Insect populations can fluctuate several fold from year to year. Data collected over a longer period helps identify less dramatic long-term trends. The current study is the longest controlled study of insects in Colorado and one of the longest in the United States.

The project has lasted so long that it has relied on three generations of scientists. Authors on the paper include the now-deceased originator of the work, Michael Soulé; David Inouye, who is spending his 53rd season at the laboratory this summer; and David’s son, Brian Inouye, and daughter-in-law, Nora Underwood, both professors of ecology and evolution at Florida State University.

The paper analyzes 35 years of data, from 1986 through the summer of 2020. The researchers documented a 62% decline in the number of insects captured and a 49% decline in their total weight over the period. The insect decline was correlated with less winter snowfall, less summer rain and warmer temperatures.

Average annual snowfall at the laboratory fell sharply during the study period, to 344 inches per year from 463 inches. Abundant winter snow cover provides protective insulation to overwintering insects. Average summer rainfall did not change significantly during the study’s 35 years, but years of low summer rainfall had fewer insects. Summer rainfall promotes plant growth that feeds many insects. Average temperature rose about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the study period and was correlated with the insect decline, although less so than precipitation.

“Changes in precipitation and warmer temperatures are expected to continue under climate change,” the researchers wrote in their report. “Thus, continued insect declines might be expected even in relatively undisturbed habitats.”

“We should be concerned,” Underwood said. “There are a lot of cascading effects of insects.”

Fewer insects can mean less food for other animals, fewer flowers pollinated and fewer nutrients recycled through the environment. Underwood does have faith in the resilience of nature and is not predicting an imminent insect apocalypse or deserts in the mountains. But she notes that the study documents big changes occurring to important players in the environment with likely, but unknown, impacts occurring as climate change continues.

Underwood invokes the rivet hypothesis by famed biologist Paul Ehrlich, for whom both she and Brian worked during summers when he came to RMBL. An airplane has thousands of rivets holding it together. You can remove one rivet without causing any trouble. But if you keep removing rivets — or insects — eventually the plane will fall apart and crash. No one knows which is the crucial rivet, and maybe it is best to keep as many as possible.

David Inouye believes the insect declines in Colorado and around the nation may have already rippled through the environment. In 2019, researchers reported an alarming 29% decline in North American birds, a net loss of 3 billion birds, since 1970. Birds that feed on insects were a prominent portion of those losses. Around the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, researchers have likewise documented a striking decline in white-crowned sparrows, an insect-eating bird whose distinctive call is heard less often than in past years.

Insects and white-crowned sparrows are just one of several changes that David Inouye has observed in his decades at the laboratory. Moose and fox now live there year-round, and a Wyoming ground squirrel has moved up from lower-elevation Almont, to Crested Butte and now the laboratory. Ticks and mosquitoes that can carry West Nile virus have also appeared around the laboratory in recent years. Wildflowers are blooming earlier.

“I think in the long term, most people are going to find those changes undesirable,” he said.