When Matt McFadden came of age in southwestern Virginia in the early 2000s, he wasn’t planning on working for a clean energy outfit. He grew up playing in a high school garage band, part of his increasingly Republican county’s small punk scene. But staring out at the photovoltaic panels gleaming atop his daughter’s elementary school in July — an array his company, Secure Solar Futures, installed — he was beaming with pride. In the midst of the Inflation Reduction Act’s rollout, McFadden and coal-rich Wise County have something many politically conservative areas from Texas to Ohio are struggling to create: Real, and growing, support for solar. 

McFadden and his firm have not accomplished this alone. In 2016, a coalition of businesses, nonprofits, colleges, local governments, and citizens launched the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia, which collaborates with Secure Solar Futures. It includes experts in every aspect of the green transition, from community organizers who tell neighbors about the benefits of solar to legal experts who propose legislation. The organization was heavily involved in the deal to install arrays on 12 schools in Lee and Wise counties and brought the idea to the attention of the Appalachian Solar Finance Fund, which, along with some state funding, financed part of the ongoing project.

Wise County is one of seven coal-producing counties in southwestern Virginia, and the rock has been pulled from the surrounding hills since 1880. In 2021, a panel that advises President Biden named the region the nation’s fourth most coal-dependent economy and said it should be prioritized when considering grants to remedy environmental damage and create union jobs. McFadden said provisions in the IRA that provide tax credits for projects in low-income and coal communities, coupled with those that reward using domestically manufactured components, allow his company to save up to 60 percent on an installation — savings that it passes on to customers.

Such factors have made this solar energy’s time to shine in southwestern Virginia. According to a 2017 report from consultants at Downstream Strategies, projected installations of commercial, residential, and utility-scale arrays could generate 2,163 permanent and temporary jobs in the region by 2028. That may not seem like much compared to how many the coal industry employed at its peak, but advocates see solar as one part of a diversified regional economy.

“I know this is the future. I know this is where we need to go,” McFadden said. “And it’s going to help create jobs.”

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The enduring cultural importance of coal in central Appalachian communities has long been a hot topic inside and outside of the region, particularly after President Trump made “bringing coal back” a talking point during his 2016 campaign. Much airtime has been dedicated to asking why so many voters seek the return of an industry in decline. Virginia’s miners produced 10.2 million tons of the fossil fuel in 2022, down from a peak of 46.6 million in 1990. Outsiders often see this trend, driven in large part by declining prices for renewables and natural gas, alongside hesitancy about solar and ask, “Well, what’s wrong with them?” said Emma Kelly, who leads the Workgroup’s community outreach.

“I’m from the coalfields,” Kelly, who grew up in eastern Kentucky and now lives in southwestern Virginia, said. “And you have to understand. Coal mining is not just a job. The coal industry is not just an employer. It’s not like Walmart. [Coal companies] built towns, they built schools, they built churches, they made their own money. You cannot really overestimate the amount of domination they had over these social and economic systems.”

Because residents of southwest Virginia may see solar as helping accelerate the loss of coal jobs, she and McFadden consider their being locals an important component of building confidence in, and support for, the technology. 

McFadden grew up in Wise County and is raising a family there. He joined Secure Solar Futures in 2020 after a brief stint in the “hustle and bustle” of Charlottesville, Virginia while working for a home electrical wiring company. He returned home after realizing that “all the money I [was] helping make and all the stuff I [was] doing is not coming back to my economy.” While Secure Solar Futures is headquartered northwest of the coalfields in Staunton, Virginia, Matt is based in its growing Wise office. People trust him to oversee the work on their kids’ schools because if he makes a mistake “it’s my name in the mud.” Anyone with complaints knows where to find him. 

More important, though, is the fact local solar advocates and companies like Secure Solar Futures make it clear that their mission goes beyond profit. “I don’t get anything out of this except a sense of fulfillment,” said Kelly, who became involved in solar advocacy in 2022 after learning, to her surprise, of solar’s potential in the coalfields. 

“If you are from around here, people know that you know the history, people know that you know the land, she added. “And so people assume that you will be a lot more cognizant about not being extractive, not exploiting the community and not contributing to a lot of the already existing issues.” 

She’s alluding to mining’s environmental and health impacts. The industry’s automation and decline — resulting in widespread layoffs that require just two months notice — left residents with a gutted economy, polluted water, and respiratory diseases, not to mention deep mistrust of interlopers. Coalfield communities are primed to consider solar developers outsiders looking to use them and the land without creating self-sustaining communities. For many in central Appalachia, decades of exploitation of both their labor and resources with little long-term investment in workforce health has created the expectation that lofty economic promises leave behind devastation. Misinformation, often linked to the fossil fuel industry, about clean energy also is to blame for some of the local skepticism, as are prior negative experiences with government-led programs and initiatives.

As Kelly put it, “It’s very much a sense that ‘Oh, we were sold coal. We were told that coal is great, and now look what it’s done. Now here you are trying to tell us there’s this magic energy source, and it’s so amazing. [But] what does that mean for us in 20 years?’”

Given the region’s history, Kelly and other solar advocates in southwestern Virginia said being local, proving solar’s benefits, and building a coalition have been key to ensuring the technology’s success in the face of cultural and political opposition. In the year since the passage of the IRA, which provides roughly $370 billion in tax credits and grants to support the green energy transition, clean power advocates in other “red” counties have found similar success with that approach. 

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In the coalfield community of Whitesburg, Kentucky, just over the state line from Wise County, a solar pavilion and rooftop at the arts education center Appalshop has attracted curious neighbors, said Kathleen Byrne, the center’s development director. Until last year’s historic floods took part of the system offline, the project helped Whitesburg’s beloved “anchor institution” stabilize its energy costs rather than face Kentucky Power’s rate hikes. Byrne said she has sensed people’s interest in renewable energy because “it would help them in their bottom line when they’re paying their bills every month.”  

The increased interest Byrne senses may be manifesting across the area. Autumn Long, program director of Appalachian Solar Finance Fund, has said the group — which was created only two years ago and serves six states — is receiving applications for solar project funding and technical assistance from a “wide range of entities,” including churches and fire stations. 

If the Inflation Reduction Act has been a boon to local solar advocates, McFadden says state policy, historically friendlier to southwest Virginia’s utilities than customers, remains a roadblock. Until the Virginia Clean Economy Act took effect in July, 2020, public entities like school districts could not go solar without paying the hefty upfront cost of the photovoltaic array and operating it themselves. Provisions in the law made it possible for them to enter an arrangement called a power purchase agreement with solar installers, allowing schools to buy energy from the array they host without owning it — though they can choose to buy it when the deal ends.

Yet, Governor Glenn Youngkin has been pushing to downplay solar and wind and add more nuclear to the state’s energy mix instead. Given that the nation’s first small modular nuclear reactor is not expected to become operational until 2029, clean energy advocates wonder why Youngkin would push the technology when southwestern Virginia abounds with former strip mine sites suitable for hosting solar now. Wise County is already home to the first solar project in the state to be built on such land, a large array providing the Mineral Gap Data Center with as much as 3.6 megawatts, or enough energy to power roughly 622 homes. 

Youngkin’s 2022 energy plan states  that the plan his predecessors adopted “goes too far in establishing rigid and inflexible rules” for the state’s energy transition. Those rules include a mandate in the Virginia Clean Energy Act directing the state’s two major utilities, American Electric Power and Dominion Energy, to achieve 100% renewable generation by 2045 and 2050, respectively. Nuclear energy, unlike solar, would be controlled by utilities, which may explain their embrace of Youngkin’s enthusiasm. Typically, Virginia’s major utilities have fought efforts to expand consumer-generated energy like power purchase agreements and shared solar without prohibitive fees or caps.

Meanwhile, solar advocates hope small victories will help them scale up. McFadden said demonstrating the technology’s feasibility through community-focused projects like the 12 school installations his company is handling has changed perceptions in the area. McFadden said arrays on the seven schools in Wise County alone (six of which are complete) are expected to save the district $60,000 in the first year, a sum expected to increase as rate hikes from traditional utilities continue. Unless a customer insists, his company refuses projects that are not estimated to reduce energy costs in the first year. “I’m not going to try to sell someone on negative net equity,” McFadden said. 

Hiring locals to install and maintain the photovoltaic panels is key, too. In 2022, Secure Solar Futures started an annual apprenticeship program that trains local high schoolers to do everything from wiring arrays to the physical heavywork of carrying and arranging panels and pays them $17 an hour. This tangible example of a solar operation employing community members has been part of “the proof in the pudding.” 

“When a lot of parents and grandparents saw that there were benefits for their children,” he said, “thought processes changed.”

Hannah Wilson-Black is an environmental journalist and 2023 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow based in Huntington, West Virginia. Her work has appeared in Terrain.org, The Appalachian Voice, and The Daily Yonder.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How to sell solar in coal country on Oct 30, 2023.

This story is published in partnership with Earth in Color, a platform exploring the intersections of Blackness and Greenness. It is part of the Eatin’ Good collection — focused on climate-friendly eating, foodways of the African diaspora, food justice, and sustainable agricultural practices and community-generated initiatives grown out of New York.

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Imagine a bountiful plot of land, fences overgrown and overflowing with life: milkweed, mugwort, chicory, goldenrod, echinacea, yarrow, and raspberry bushes sprinkled among ripening apple, pear, and peach trees. Herbs like lemon balm, dill, mint, and oregano are boundless. There’s a colorful spread of fat melons, strawberries, cucumbers, butternut squash, beets, lettuce, kale, and tomatoes. There’s a blueberry bush, though it’s been stripped bare — food for the birds and bugs. The groundhogs and other small creatures — pesky as they may be — spend their days trudging lazily through the foliage. This place takes up about as much space as a smaller brownstone apartment — but it’s a jungle oasis. At least that’s the language that artist, environmental activist, and land steward Nkoula Badila uses to describe the ecological diversity of her backyard urban garden in Hudson, New York. 

“My childhood has definitely taught me to find my peace in nature,” Badila said. Her family spent a lot of time visiting and volunteering at local urban farms and gardens when she was growing up. “I feel like just having that influence and lifestyle around was very grounding.” 

Badila’s backyard garden is also something else—a space to preserve Black food traditions and cultivate community. “We are introducing a lot of these [gardening and farming methods] that are also things that our ancestors did,” Badila said. “We’re reintroducing those things and reclaiming how diverse, brilliant, and expansive our ancestors were.”

When you envision agriculture in the United States, you probably don’t picture spaces like Badila’s. And yet, sprouting in small downtown backyards or amidst the metal and concrete of many U.S. urban centers are surprisingly abundant growing spaces — community farms and backyard gardens, many of them Black-owned. Those spaces serve dual purposes as a local solution to food insecurity and a source of community cultivation in historically undervalued, underinvested, and abandoned areas.

These localized food systems find their roots in the food justice and community gardening movements of the ’60s and ’70s. In New York City, for example, urban farms emerged as one form of resistance and a safe haven in the face of police brutality and injustice. Urban farms persist today as a source of connection to culture and fresh, healthy produce. 

These urban growing spaces are also increasingly being recognized as a solution to another pressing issue — climate change. “There are so many benefits of urban agriculture when it comes to mitigating climate change,” said Francine Miller, senior staff attorney and faculty member at the Vermont School of Law’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems. “People need access to green space and they need access to local food. I think there are particular needs that are met in urban environments with more urban farming; the more access the better.” 

In response to continued injustices, today many Black land stewards are building on a history of urban farming as a source of community care and local food production. They are continuing to invest in these spaces by passing their tools and experiences onto the next generation. And while many of them do not consider themselves climate activists, this same work offers a roadmap toward climate mitigation.

Urban gardens as food justice

Black foodways in this country have historically been hit twofold through exclusion from agribusiness and unequal access to fresh produce at home. 

A 2021 analysis found that approximately one out of every five Black households in the US is located in a food desert—an area without adequate access to grocery stores or farmers markets. Some advocates prefer the term food apartheid to account for the racialized and intentionally discriminatory nature of food insecurity, describing a lack of access to nutritious food as a deliberate and systematic action against Black America. Combined with a history of Black farm loss, these disparities have created an environment where many Black and brown people grow up with very little connection to or say over the food they eat.  

The concept of food justice as a counter to this imbalance was formalized during the 1962 Greenwood Food Blockade. That year, Black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta were cut off from the Federal Surplus Commodities Food Program, which already-struggling farmers relied on for food assistance in the winter months. Activists, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, fought back against what they saw as retaliation from the all-white county Board of Supervisors against civil rights action in the area. The group established a food distribution program for affected farmers and ultimately petitioned the federal government to intervene. The fight for food access in both rural and urban America continued to evolve with initiatives like the Black Panther Party’s famous Free Breakfast for Children Program, established in 1969 to ensure that poor children had access to healthy food and to pressure local and national governments to improve their food access programs. 

Since the movement’s inception, food justice initiatives have also included spaces where Black communities steward their own land to provide opportunities the system gave them no access to. Some of the most famous examples are the Ron Finley Project in Los Angeles, California, Dreaming Out Loud in Washington, D.C., and Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. Those organizations have meshed sustainable and regenerative land practices with urban infrastructure to provide healthy, fresh produce to under-resourced and underfed, predominantly Black communities. 

New York City, in particular, has served as a longstanding microcosm for urban health issues and fights for environmental justice, green space, and food access. From Hudson to Brooklyn, and from the South Bronx to East New York, Black land stewards have developed many of the city’s gardening spaces as a reaction to urban renewal, White flight, food apartheid, and larger government disinvestment in Black and brown neighborhoods.

Although food insecurity across New York state sits just below the national average, approximately 20 percent of Black households in the state can be considered food insecure, compared to 5 percent of white households. 

Many New York community gardens sprouted up in the ‘60s and ‘70s. At the time, in well-known neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, riots against police brutality and long histories of injustice and exclusion in the boroughs set a tone for Black resistance. The crack epidemic was leaving many listless and on the street. In most cases, community gardens were a peaceful respite from the violence, and they were built in old churches and parking lots as a form of mutual aid, nature access, and community resilience. 

An overlooked climate solution

“When I was young, I never thought of farming — because I grew up in the ‘60s, when farming was still looked back on as slave work,” explained Karen Washington, who is now an urban farming advocate, co-founder of the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners (BUGS) Conference, and co-owner of Rise and Root Farm in Chester, New York. A former city girl and New York native, Washington got involved in the community gardening movement in the 1970s after learning about the health benefits of locally grown food. People she spoke to who had grown up farming and gardening “would talk about the food, how good it was, how they got everything from the farm or from the garden, how they were never sick a day, and we would laugh together about the taste of good fresh food.” 

For Washington, getting involved in community gardening opened her eyes to the many injustices the movement was created to address. “We live in the United States. Why is there hunger and poverty? Why do Black folks not have access to healthy food?” she wondered. “Once I got involved in the movement — especially in the Bronx, helping communities turn empty lots into community gardens — I started questioning people with power and privilege, looking at the full system and holding them accountable for the haves and the have-nots.”

In the early days of the community garden movement in New York City, there were over 15,000 vacant or abandoned lots, according to Washington. Efforts to convert these empty spaces into green spaces served as a growing form of resistance for areas that were falling into disrepair. Organizations like the Green Guerillas used seed bombs to beautify the lots, community leaders built gardens to feed the people in their neighborhoods, and individuals like then-64-year-old Hattie Carthan — founder of the Bed-Stuy Neighborhood Tree Corps — contributed to the planting of the over 1,500 trees that now provide Brooklyn with shade and help combat climate-caused extreme heat. 

“It wasn’t just about food,” Washington said. “During this time, I became a community organizer working on food, housing, drug issues, education issues … I found my voice in activism through the food justice movement.”

“Food justice is a verb,” explained Yonnette Fleming, president of the Hattie Carthan Community Garden and Farmers Market. “We do it every day with our Black bodies.”

According to Fleming, the Hattie Carthan Community Garden — created as a tribute to Carthan’s tree activism — is one of the largest growing spaces to come out of the New York community gardening movement. Comprising an urban healing farm, a farmers market, and a series of ancestral apothecaries, the organization has nearly quadrupled its land holdings since Fleming took over in 2009. 

That year, the garden crew converted a local toxic oil dump site into what is now the garden market. It’s just one example of yet another impact urban gardens and farms have on the historically disinvested neighborhoods they serve — to build resilience against climate change. While many standard agricultural practices in rural America exacerbate carbon and methane emissions, studies show that many urban farming spaces are a climate boon to the communities they serve. 

“[Urban agriculture helps with] stormwater runoff mitigation, reducing heat in cities due to the heat island effect, air filtration, carbon sequestration, mitigating flooding, attracting pollinators, mitigating against drought conditions through rainwater capture, improving soil quality … ” Miller explained. An emphasis on local food systems also reduces emissions associated with extensive food transport—and these localized systems have proven to be more nimble and responsive to shocks than the longer, globalized supply chains we’ve come to rely on.  

With New York City experiencing increasingly severe climate impacts, from wildfire smoke to extreme flooding, the natural benefits of urban gardens offer a small-scale solution for affected residents. While urban gardens alone will not prevent climate disasters, they do provide some mitigation for things like air pollution and extreme heat. 

Miller added that the beautification effects of urban gardens and green space also encourage community members to take better care of the land by reducing litter and creating a shared investment in the community. The vast urban grower community didn’t arise under the banner of climate advocacy, but those benefits are emerging from the fight for healthy food and beautiful outdoor spaces in New York’s historically disinvested and food-insecure boroughs. 

Growing into the future

It’s estimated that there are about 550 community gardens and over 800 gardens held in land trusts or public housing developments across New York City today. Alongside them, there are almost 750 garden schools working to expand the history and knowledge of food cultivation and intentional urban land practice to the next generation.

“We are truly empowering the people from our geographies — of all ages — to enter back into right relationship with the earth,” Fleming said.

In 2010, Fleming and Washington, along with several other food justice organizers, founded Farm School NYC. This hub for education, with an eye toward Black and Brown growers, draws on the ancestral and traditional expertise of New York’s residents to teach community members how to create their own localized food systems. 

Francine Miller was a member of the Farm School NYC’s inaugural class in 2010. Miller went on to teach at the school for a time and emphasized the city’s cultural and ancestral diversity as a foundation of the program’s agricultural success—immigrant populations and multi-generational land stewards have come together to build a resource for intentional urban agricultural practice through this school.

“The Farm School is this amazing city-wide, BIPOC-led initiative that really tries to reach deep into Black and Brown communities to support their agricultural leadership,” Miller said. “What I think is special about this is there is truly an ecosystem of Black-led organizations and training opportunities; there is so much potential support for Black farmers in New York.”

Among this next generation of Black growers are people like Nkoula Badila — who has translated the successful community garden formula into spaces of all kinds, including home and backyard gardens, as a continuation of the battle for food, green space, and sustainable agriculture practices. 

In June 2020, Badila created her garden Eden as a space to cultivate mindfulness, community interaction, and mental well-being during the stress of COVID-19 lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests. Drawing from the same principles and goals of the community garden movement of the past, and spurred by similar moments of social unrest and health crises, Badila has expanded her backyard safe haven into a resource and community connector through Grow Black Hudson, an informal organization that provides educational resources, workshops, and supplies to others in her community to replicate what she’s built in her own backyard. 

“This is not just about food, but about all the ways that we can grow as a people,” Badila said.

And although neither Badila, Washington, or Fleming call themselves climate activists, the spaces they are creating for Black people to celebrate their roots and nourish their communities are also propagating the types of physical green spaces that have the potential to reduce climate impacts in some of New York’s frontline regions.

“It’s so important to have a relationship to land and to food,” Washington said. “That’s where our power is. Look at the color of your skin. Your skin is soil.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Food justice advocates didn’t set out to save the climate. Their solutions are doing it anyway. on Oct 30, 2023.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is part of its special series “The Tough Stuff: Decarbonizing steel, cement and chemicals.”

Holcim Group, the largest cement manufacturer outside of China, has a dilemma.

On the one hand, its line of business couldn’t be more solid — cement is, after all, one of the building blocks of the modern world. But producing the material emits enormous amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide, surpassing the emissions of every country in the world except China and the U.S. These days, the Swiss company, like its handful of global cement manufacturing peers, is feeling increasing pressure to do something about it.

Holcim has managed to chip away at its emissions in recent years: Its 2022 annual report cited a 21 percent reduction in carbon emissions per unit of net sales from direct production and electricity consumption compared to the year before. The company has made progress largely because of a shift to lower-carbon cement and concrete products that reduce its use of clinker, the precursor material for cement, and by far the most emissions-intensive part of the industry. Crucially, costs have actually dropped along with emissions, the company says.

Its most recent step came just last week with a $100 million investment in its biggest U.S. cement plant that will increase production capacity by 600,000 metric tons per year while cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 400,000 tons per year.

“What we’re doing today is based on economics,” Michael LeMonds, Holcim’s U.S. chief sustainability officer, told Canary Media.

But not every solution to cement’s climate problem will present companies with such a clear-cut economic calculus. And while the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that more than a third of the industry’s emissions can be jettisoned using established technologies and processes like clinker substitution, the remainder of the solutions have yet to come into full focus.

Most uncertain of all is the pathway to eliminating what are called ​“process emissions,” which account for the majority of cement’s climate problem.

Process emissions are an unavoidable part of cement-making’s status quo. The core input of ordinary Portland cement — the product that makes up the vast majority of cement made today — is limestone, a mineral that’s about half calcium and half carbon and oxygen by chemical composition. When that limestone is converted to calcium oxide, the immediate precursor to clinker, the CO₂ trapped inside the mineral is released into the atmosphere.

Eliminating these emissions means either finding novel, emissions-free ways to create ordinary Portland cement or a safe structural equivalent, or figuring out how to economically use carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) technology to keep the CO₂ generated from the manufacturing process from entering the atmosphere. Though plenty of startups, companies and researchers are hard at work on both methods, neither has, at this point, proven to be workable at the necessary scale. For Holcim, CCUS is ​“the No. 1 midterm objective” for the company’s carbon-cutting ambitions, according to LeMonds.

Holcim’s current situation — publicly touting progress on near-term carbon-cutting tactics like clinker substitution while working toward an uncertain solution for slashing process emissions — provides a snapshot of where many of the world’s biggest cement and concrete companies are today on their path toward decarbonization. The lower-carbon solutions that make economic sense right now, and which are minimally disruptive, are gaining traction, but the progress they offer is incremental; they’re not enough to get to zero emissions.

For Holcim and the industry at large, dealing with process emissions — and eliminating carbon emissions completely — will require nothing short of a full transformation. 

A blueprint for action 

Change at the scale required for the cement industry won’t come cheap, or fast.

In the U.S., which produces just a fraction of the world’s cement, the industry will need to invest up to a cumulative $20 billion by 2030, and a total of somewhere between $60 billion and $120 billion by midcentury, according to DOE estimates. That’s a lot for an industry that made just under $15 billion in sales last year, and the necessary outlays are made more daunting by the fact that cement companies compete on razor-thin margins.

But even if the money wasn’t a problem, there would still be the other imperative to deal with: product quality. If cement-makers can’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their newly introduced products are as reliable as what they’re replacing, their customers will reject them, according to Ian Hayton, the senior associate leading materials and chemical research at Cleantech Group.

All of these factors make the cement industry ​“very slow” to change, Hayton said. ​“There’s lots and lots of infrastructure already deployed. It’s not just about finding the best way. […] You have to start to think about what we already have in place.”

But as with all major climate problems, moving slowly is a luxury that the world simply does not have.

“It’s really important for people to be moving fast,” Vanessa Chan, chief commercialization officer and director of DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions, told Canary Media. ​“Oftentimes, people think we can’t do this because the technology isn’t there. I think people should know that 30 to 40 percent of emissions can be abated from technologies that are ready today.”

What’s more, those near-term technologies will help the cement industry’s bottom line, she said. While they’ll require from $3 billion to $8 billion in capital investment to put in place, they also offer an estimated $1 billion per year in savings by 2030.

This chart from DOE’s recent Liftoff Report on cement decarbonization highlights both the short-term solutions available and the costly and long-term challenge of zeroing out emissions.

“These are technologies” that cement companies ​“could do right now if they could embrace them,” Chan said. 

That ​“do right now” list includes the clinker substitution Holcim is already having success with, but also changes to the fuel sources that power cement production.

The U.S. cement industry has already cut its emissions-intensity per metric ton of cement by roughly 10 percent since 1995, largely by replacing coal and coke with fossil gas, the DOE’s report states. Swapping gas for alternative fuels can offer an additional 5 to 10 percent emissions reduction potential through 2030, starting with burning waste-based fuels (e.g., old tires) like those Holcim is already using to nearly replace fossil fuel use at plants in Ohio and South Carolina, according to LeMonds.

But for these alternative fuels, ​“abatement potential is limited and deployment comes with supply and environmental constraints,” the DOE’s report points out. And the large-scale replacements for fossil fuels — clean electricity and hydrogen — are far off in both technical and cost terms. Even with the Inflation Reduction Act’s lucrative tax credits, clean hydrogen ​“may be prohibitively expensive,” while electrification technologies remain ​“technologically nascent and have uncertain but likely challenging economics.”

Another option available right now is to retool cement plants to be more efficient, which Holcim is also doing to clean up the 1,500-degree-Celsius kilns it uses to make clinker.

But of these ready-to-go solutions, clinker substitution carries the most promise; it’s already delivering the majority of the industry’s emissions reductions. And although the approach isn’t enough to decarbonize cement production on its own, accelerating this practice could deliver huge near-term progress simply by slashing the amount of Portland cement needed for every unit of cement used in construction around the world.

The science and economics of cement substitution

The math is fairly simple on clinker substitution: The greater the amount of clinker that’s substituted with another material, the lower the carbon footprint per ton of cement that results.

By far the most widely adopted substitute is ​“Portland limestone cement,” which replaces up to 15 percent of clinker with ground-up limestone. Because that ground-up limestone hasn’t been processed in a way that releases its embedded carbon dioxide, this variety of cement yields an average 8 percent reduction in emissions-intensity compared to ordinary Portland cement. PLC has been in wide use in Europe for decades but has only in the last three years caught on in the U.S.

“In just a couple of years, we’ve seen PLC go from 3 percent of the market” for U.S. cement sales ​“up to a substantial amount — 35 percent in 2023,” said Rebecca Dell, who directs the industry program for the ClimateWorks Foundation.

That statistic highlights both the slow-to-change nature of the cement industry — PLC was approved under a widely used industry standard in 2012, but took another eight years to grow from 2 percent to 3 percent of U.S. production — and the potential for quick adoption once cost and standards compliance drivers align.

“There are places in the United States where there’s a shortage of cement,” she noted. If cement-makers can add other materials to the cement they sell and incrementally relieve that shortage, ​“why wouldn’t you do that?”

The same logic applies to a long list of supplementary cementing materials that can displace clinker and make up 30 to 45 percent of a cement mix. By far the most commonly used today are fly ash from coal plants and slag from steel mills.

The problem with these materials, according to Samuel Goldman, policy advisor at DOE’s Loan Programs Office, is that they are byproducts of current-day manufacturing processes in heavily emitting industries. In a fossil-free future, ​“they are not going to be available in the amounts required,” Goldman said.

That means ​“the key to deploying clinker substitution at scale and keeping the economics positive are moving toward what we call next-generation substitutes,” Goldman said.

One promising ​“next-gen” substitute is calcined clays, a form of naturally occurring minerals used by companies such as Heidelberg Materials and Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies. The technology for using these minerals to replace up to half of the clinker in cement was developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, a government research institution that’s made the processes freely available for use, noted Dell of the ClimateWorks Foundation.

“It’s fully technologically mature, it saves money, it uses commonly available materials, and it can reduce greenhouse gases by up to 40 percent,” she said.

Other next-gen supplementary cementing materials (SCMs) involve commonly available calcium silicate rock such as basalt, gabbro and other minerals. Because these rocks contain no carbon, they can be processed without releasing CO₂. Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–founded cleantech investment organization, has invested in Terra CO2, a startup that’s processing calcium silicate rock into SCMs being tested in roadways and buildings today, and Brimstone, a startup that plans to produce both Portland cement and SCMs from its proprietary process.

Patrick Cleary, Holcim’s senior vice president of U.S. cement sales, highlighted another approach: treating and using the coal-plant fly ash that has already been deposited into enormous holding ponds, which are significant environmental and health hazards in their own right.

“We take a material that’s been buried that has to be dealt with…and put it through our process, and it becomes a product that has cementitious properties,” he said. Holcim announced its first fly-ash pond recovery project with Alberta, Canada–based energy company TransAlta in January, and it hopes to expand such projects in the U.S., he said. 

New cements, new processes — a steeper path to progress

Reducing clinker use and working lower-carbon SCMs into cement mixes can have a major impact now — but outright replacing or revamping the production of ordinary Portland cement is what the industry needs to eventually reckon with.

There are dozens of startups and university and government research projects working to come up with alternatives to ordinary Portland cement. Some are even engaged in pilot-scale demonstrations. But none have yet been embraced by the cement industry as a viable option for revamping a single integrated cement manufacturing plant — the first step to potentially overhauling the entire industry.

The challenge is that the chemistry of cement and concrete — the mix of cement and rocks, gravel and other materials that harden into forms and slabs — is incredibly complex, said Ryan Gilliam, CEO of alternative cement startup Fortera. While Portland cement is well understood, ​“there are still fundamental debates among scientists” on the nature of the chemical reactions that yield better or worse forms of concrete from different types of cement for use in different applications, he said.

Meanwhile, the industry has become more fragmented in recent years, moving from large centralized cement manufacturing to a more diverse lineup of smaller ready-mix and precast concrete operations that serve a multitude of end users. Each party in this chain relies on being able to secure consistent supplies and types of products for different needs, with an array of different standards that are difficult to alter to allow for new products to get to market. 

Plus, as Dell noted, the original patent for ordinary Portland cement was issued in 1824, giving the world nearly 200 years to understand its fundamental material properties.

“If you can make something that’s chemically identical to ordinary Portland cement but from different rock, you can port over those two centuries of experience in how it behaves and its structural capacity,” she said. But ​“people are going to be risk-averse, and it’s going to take a long time to get market uptake.”

These conditions make for an uphill climb for startups trying to bring new cement processes and chemistries to market.

For its part, Fortera’s alternative cement is based on technology first developed back in the 2000s to mimic the process that leads to growth in coral reefs, but it’s just one of many contenders. Others include geopolymer chemistries like Cemex’s Vertua low-carbon concrete, magnesium oxides derived from magnesium silicate chemistries developed more than a decade ago by now-defunct U.K.-based startup Novacem, and the belite-ye’elimite-ferrite clinker being developed by Holcim.

Some methods for reinventing cement aim to forgo the high-temperature kilns altogether in favor of electrochemical processes. Sublime Systems and Chement are developing ways to use electrolyzers, like those used to make hydrogen from electricity and water, to dissolve and then extract the precursor compounds that make up cement.

These novel technologies could be key to eliminating cement emissions; replacing carbon-intensive Portland cement with a low- or zero-carbon alternative is about as close to a silver bullet as the industry can hope to get.

But due to the industry’s cautiousness, any alternative binder would likely take a decade or more to gain acceptance, according to the DOE. ​“Though they can build initial market share and scale in non-structural niches” — applications like sidewalks and concrete floors that don’t need to hold up immense weight— ​“these materials could face a ~10–20+ year adoption cycle to be accepted under widely used industry standards,” per the report.

That’s why DOE sees an earlier opportunity for finding new, lower-carbon ways to make traditional Portland cement, instead of creating entirely new cements altogether.

There’s only a relatively small fraction of the cement market that can be replaced by alternative cements — ​“maybe at most 25 percent of the cement market,” according to Cody Finke, CEO of Brimstone, whose company is making a product that’s structurally and chemically identical to Portland cement. ​“We want to decarbonize the whole cement industry.”

It’s a worthwhile approach, but one that also remains far from guaranteed. Brimstone, the only startup to win industry approval that its alternative process results in ordinary Portland cement, is planning to build a pilot plant in Nevada to test its production methods before building a commercial-scale facility. Finke noted that the company hasn’t yet taken any strategic investment from the cement industry. ​“There’s a right time for that,” he said — and ​“the right time is after we de-risk the process.”

Carbon capture: The cement industry’s major focus comes with big challenges

These challenges with alternative cements and production methods have led many analysts to conclude that the fastest path to cutting cement’s carbon impact lies in simply capturing the carbon emitted through the ordinary Portland cement process.

DOE’s Liftoff Report cites cement-industry and third-party studies that suggest that carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) could account for more than half of the industry’s carbon-emissions reduction potential by 2050 ​“in the absence of alternative approaches.”

The Global Cement and Concrete Association has identified more than 30 cement CCUS projects worldwide, most of them in Europe. Europe is also the home of the largest heavy industrial carbon-capture project now under construction, the Heidelberg Materials cement plant in Brevik, Norway. The carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility is on schedule to start capturing and storing 400,000 metric tons of CO₂ per year by the end of 2024.

“That’s not a pilot project,” Dell said. ​“The thing they’re doing in this facility is the simplest thing you can do, which is post-combustion CO₂ capture. They’re not doing anything fancy — but they’re doing it at scale.”

In the U.S., by contrast, cement CCUS projects are just entering the exploratory stage. The DOE is working on four cement CCUS projects, including a Cemex plant in Los Angeles, a Heidelberg plant in Mitchell, Indiana, and two projects with Holcim at plants in Florence, Colorado and Bloomsdale, Missouri.

CCUS is attractive for an industry seeking decarbonization pathways that don’t require rebuilding existing manufacturing plants, Cleantech Group’s Hayton noted. ​“You can put a unit on the back of your clinker production site and start to separate out the carbon dioxide from what’s coming out of the flue,” and then ​“concentrate it down and store it, hopefully somewhere underground.”

But CCUS still presents the same challenges for the cement industry as it does for everyone else: high upfront capital costs for the equipment to separate CO₂ and the high energy costs to keep that equipment running. For the cement industry, that could equate to $25 to $55 per metric ton of cement produced, DOE’s Liftoff Report estimates.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s carbon-capture tax credits of up to $85 per metric ton of carbon captured and stored from emissions sources could help make this a cost-effective option. But even with that in place, there’s the cost of transporting and storing the captured CO₂. Notably, the biggest U.S. cement CCUS projects have potential access to underground geological formations that are suitable for holding large amounts of captured CO₂ for centuries.

One workaround to the latter issue is using captured CO₂ instead of storing it — the U in CCUS. Cement and concrete can absorb and store CO₂ at the timescales required for effectively keeping it from entering the atmosphere. There’s also evidence it can strengthen concrete. These facts have spawned a wide array of startups with technologies to do just that.

Some are injecting CO₂ into concrete as it’s poured or formed into precast shapes, such as CarbonCure, CarbonBuilt and Solidia. Others are expanding into using captured CO₂ in the cement-making process itself, such as Fortera and Leilac.

While the CO₂ these companies are embedding in concrete isn’t being pulled directly from the emissions from cement production today, it could be in the future, CarbonCure CEO Robert Niven said. His company recently unveiled the results of a project with direct air capture company Heirloom.

“Yes, for the volume, we’ll need to do some geological storage” of CO₂ captured from cement production, he said. ​“But why wouldn’t you use some of the CO₂ from that value chain…to make products you can sell to the market to create real value-added impacts?”

Driving demand for greener cement

So far, this discussion of decarbonization opportunities and challenges for the cement and concrete industries has focused on the supply side of the equation. But that’s only half the battle. Cutting carbon from these industries will also require what DOE’s Liftoff Report calls ​“demand signals” — clear mandates and incentives from cement buyers that reward the investments and risks they’ll be taking.

After all, even if a perfect carbon-free replacement cement product or process comes along tomorrow, cement manufacturers have to take on the risk of retooling or building brand-new cement plants. That’s an expensive endeavor: A new U.S. cement plant requires between $500 million and $1 billion in capital investment, DOE’s Liftoff Report states. Most of these plants are financed on cement company balance sheets, rather than via project-financing mechanisms that have helped bring down the cost of large-scale energy projects over the past few decades.

Without a policy push, major cement companies are simply not going to take on that risk. Governments could nudge cement producers in that direction with a stick, like a carbon tax, or as DOE’s Vanessa Chan pointed out, with the carrot of government procurement.

“Half of U.S. cement demand is driven by federal and state procurement,” she said. Anything that governments do to encourage or require cement producers to meet lower-carbon standards to serve these contracts will have a major impact.

In the U.S., the Biden administration’s Buy Clean Initiative is starting to set standards for this lower-carbon purchasing. Last year, the General Services Administration, which oversees about $75 billion in annual contracts, announced new ​“low embodied concrete” standards that require contracts for projects funded by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to secure cement and concrete with lower carbon emissions footprints than national averages.

Similar low-carbon concrete initiatives have been created in states including New York, New Jersey and California, Hayton noted. Private-sector efforts are also underway. Groups including the ConcreteZero initiative have aligned construction and engineering firms and property owners to set voluntary standards to buy and use lower-carbon cement and concrete.

But the trick is to get cement and concrete producers and buyers on the same page, Chan said.

“Oftentimes, you see that you can’t get people to create new technologies until there’s an offtake agreement — and you can’t get that offtake agreement until there’s a stable supply chain.”

That’s why it’s so important for policymakers to set incentives and standards not just for cement producers, but for buyers as well, Dell said.

“If you can pull these clean materials through the supply chain, you can do it in a way that does not materially affect the finished cost, but can supply significant green premiums — if you like that term — to the producers.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To decarbonize cement, the industry needs a full transformation on Oct 29, 2023.

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country.

In the 1950s, after quarreling for decades over the Colorado River, Arizona, and California turned to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final resolution on the water that both states sought to sustain their postwar booms.

The case, Arizona v. California, also offered Native American tribes a rare opportunity to claim their share of the river. But they were forced to rely on the U.S. Department of Justice for legal representation.

A lawyer named T.F. Neighbors, who was special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, foresaw the likely outcome if the federal government failed to assert tribes’ claims to the river: States would consume the water and block tribes from ever acquiring their full share.

In 1953, as Neighbors helped prepare the department’s legal strategy, he wrote in a memo to the assistant attorney general, “When an economy has grown up premised upon the use of Indian waters, the Indians are confronted with the virtual impossibility of having awarded to them the waters of which they had been illegally deprived.”

As the case dragged on, it became clear the largest tribe in the region, the Navajo Nation, would get no water from the proceedings. A lawyer for the tribe, Norman Littell, wrote then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1961, warning of the dire future he saw if that were the outcome. “This grave loss to the tribe will preclude future development of the reservation and otherwise prevent the beneficial development of the reservation intended by the Congress,” Littell wrote.

Both warnings, only recently rediscovered, proved prescient. States successfully opposed most tribes’ attempts to have their water rights recognized through the landmark case, and tribes have spent the decades that followed fighting to get what’s owed to them under a 1908 Supreme Court ruling and long-standing treaties.

The possibility of this outcome was clear to attorneys and officials even at the time, according to thousands of pages of court files, correspondence, agency memos and other contemporary records unearthed and cataloged by University of Virginia history professor Christian McMillen, who shared them with ProPublica and High Country News. While Arizona and California’s fight was covered in the press at the time, the documents, drawn from the National Archives, reveal telling details from the case, including startling similarities in the way states have rebuffed tribes’ attempts to access their water in the ensuing 70 years.

Many of the 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin still have been unable to access water to which they’re entitled. And Arizona for years has taken a uniquely aggressive stance against tribes’ attempts to use their water, a recent ProPublica and High Country News investigation found.

“It’s very much a repeat of the same problems we have today,” Andrew Curley, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Arizona and member of the Navajo Nation, said of the records. Tribes’ ambitions to access water are approached as “this fantastical apocalyptic scenario” that would hurt states’ economies, he said.

Arizona sued California in 1952, asking the Supreme Court to determine how much Colorado River water each state deserved. The records show that, even as the states fought each other in court, Arizona led a coalition of states in jointly lobbying the U.S. attorney general to cease arguing for tribes’ water claims. The attorney general, bowing to the pressure, removed the strongest language in the petition, even as Department of Justice attorneys warned of the consequences. “Politics smothered the rights of the Indians,” one of the attorneys later wrote.

The Supreme Court’s 1964 decree in the case quantified the water rights of the Lower Basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — and five tribes whose lands are adjacent to the river. While the ruling defended tribes’ right to water, it did little to help them access it. By excluding all other basin tribes from the case, the court missed an opportunity to settle their rights once and for all.

The Navajo Nation — with a reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — was among those left out of the case. “Clearly, Native people up and down the Colorado River were overlooked. We need to get that fixed, and that is exactly what the Navajo Nation is trying to do,” said George Hardeen, a spokesperson for the Navajo Nation.

Today, millions more people rely on a river diminished by a hotter climate. Between 1950 and 2020, Arizona’s population alone grew from about 750,000 to more than 7 million, bringing booming cities and thirsty industries.

Meanwhile, the Navajo Nation is no closer to compelling the federal government to secure its water rights in Arizona. In June, the Supreme Court again ruled against the tribe, in a separate case, Arizona v. Navajo Nation. Justice Neil Gorsuch cited the earlier case in his dissent, arguing the conservative court majority ignored history when it declined to quantify the tribe’s water rights.

McMillen agreed. The federal government “rejected that opportunity” in the 1950s and ’60s to more forcefully assert tribes’ water claims, he said. As a result, “Native people have been trying for the better part of a century now to get answers to these questions and have been thwarted in one way or another that entire time.”

Three missing words

As Arizona prepared to take California to court in the early 1950s, the federal government faced a delicate choice. It represented a host of interests along the river that would be affected by the outcome: tribes, dams, and reservoirs and national parks. How should it balance their needs?

The Supreme Court had ruled in 1908 that tribes with reservations had an inherent right to water, but neither Congress nor the courts had defined it. The 1922 Colorado River Compact, which first allocated the river’s water, also didn’t settle tribal claims.

In the decades that followed the signing of the compact, the federal government constructed massive projects — including the Hoover, Parker and Imperial dams — to harness the river. Federal policy at the time was generally hostile to tribes, as Congress passed laws eroding the United States’ treaty-based obligations. Over a 15-year period, the country dissolved its relationships with more than 100 tribes, stripping them of land and diminishing their political power. “It was a very threatening time for tribes,” Curley said of what would be known as the Termination Era.

So it was a shock to states when, in November 1953, Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. and the Department of Justice moved to intervene in the states’ water fight and aggressively staked a claim on behalf of tribes. Tribal water rights were “prior and superior” to all other water users in the basin, even states, the federal government argued.

Western states were apoplectic.

Arizona Gov. John Howard Pyle quickly called a meeting with Brownell to complain, and Western politicians hurried to Washington, D.C. Under political pressure, the Department of Justice removed the document four days after filing it. When Pyle wrote to thank the attorney general, he requested that federal solicitors work with the state on an amended version. “To have left it as it was would have been calamitous,” Pyle said.

The federal government refiled its petition a month later. It no longer asserted that tribes’ water rights were “prior and superior.”

When details of the states’ meeting with the attorney general emerged in court three years later, Littell, the Navajo Nation’s attorney, berated the Department of Justice for its “equivocating, pussy-footing” defense of tribes’ water rights. “It is rather a shocking situation, and the Attorney General of the United States is responsible for it,” he said during court hearings.

Arizona’s legal representative balked at discussing the meeting in open court, calling it “improper.”

Experts told ProPublica and High Country News that it’s impossible to quantify the impact of the federal government’s failure to fully defend tribes’ water rights. Reservations might have flourished if they’d secured water access that remains elusive today. Or, perhaps basin tribes would have been worse off if they had been given only small amounts of water. Amid the overt racism of that era, the government didn’t consider tribes capable of extensive development.

Jay Weiner, an attorney who represents several tribes’ water claims in Arizona, said the important truth the documents reveal is the federal government’s willingness to bow to states instead of defending tribes. Pulling back from its argument that tribes’ rights are “prior and superior” was but one example.

“It’s not so much the three words,” Weiner said. “It’s really the vigor with which they would have chosen to litigate.”

Because states succeeded in spiking “prior and superior,” they also won an argument over how to account for tribes’ water use. Instead of counting it directly against the flow of the river, before dealing with other users’ needs, it now comes out of states’ allocations. As a result, tribes and states compete for the scarce resource in this adversarial system, most vehemently in Arizona, which must navigate the water claims of 22 federally recognized tribes.

In 1956, W.H. Flanery, the associate solicitor of Indian Affairs, wrote to an Interior Department official that Arizona and California “are the Indians’ enemies and they will be united in their efforts to defeat any superior or prior right which we may seek to establish on behalf of the Indians. They have spared and will continue to spare no expense in their efforts to defeat the claims of the Indians.”

Western states battle tribal water claims

As arguments in the case continued through the 1950s, an Arizona water agency moved to block a major farming project on the Colorado River Indian Tribes’ reservation until the case was resolved, the newly uncovered documents show. Decades later, the state similarly used unresolved water rights as a bargaining chip, asking tribes to agree not to pursue the main method of expanding their reservations in exchange for settling their water claims.

Highlighting the state’s prevailing sentiment toward tribes back then, a lawyer named J.A. Riggins Jr. addressed the river’s policymakers in 1956 at the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual conference. He represented the Salt River Project — a nontribal public utility that manages water and electricity for much of Phoenix and nearby farming communities — and issued a warning in a speech titled, “The Indian threat to our water rights.”

“I urge that each of you evaluate your ‘Indian Problem’ (you all have at least one), and start NOW to protect your areas,” Riggins said, according to the text of his remarks that he mailed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Riggins, who on multiple occasions warned of “‘Indian raids’ on western non-Indian water rights,” later lobbied Congress on Arizona’s behalf to authorize a canal to transport Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. He also litigated Salt River Project cases as co-counsel with Jon Kyl, who later served as a U.S. senator. (Kyl, who was an architect of Arizona’s tribal water rights strategy, told ProPublica and High Country News that he wasn’t aware of Riggins’ speech and that his work on tribal water rights was “based on my responsibility to represent all of the people of Arizona to the best of my ability, which, of course, frequently required balancing competing interests.”)

While Arizona led the opposition to tribes’ water claims, other states supported its stance.

“We thought the allegation of prior and superior rights for Indians was erroneous,” said Northcutt Ely, California’s lead lawyer in the proceedings, according to court transcripts. If the attorney general tried to argue that in court, “we were going to meet him head on,” Ely said.

When Arizona drafted a legal agreement to exclude tribes from the case, while promising to protect their undefined rights, other states and the Department of the Interior signed on. It was only rejected in response to pressure from tribes’ attorneys and the Department of Justice.

McMillen, the historian who compiled the documents reviewed by ProPublica and High Country News, said they show Department of Justice staff went the furthest to protect tribal water rights. The agency built novel legal theories, pushed for more funding to hire respected experts and did extensive research. Still, McMillen said, the department found itself “flying the plane and building it at the same time.”

Tribal leaders feared this would result in the federal government arguing a weak case on their behalf. The formation of the Indian Claims Commission — which heard complaints brought by tribes against the government, typically on land dispossession — also meant the federal government had a potential conflict of interest in representing tribes. Basin tribes coordinated a response and asked the court to appoint a special counsel to represent them, but the request was denied.

So too was the Navajo Nation’s later request that it be allowed to represent itself in the case.

Arizona v. Navajo Nation

More than 60 years after Littell made his plea to Kennedy, the Navajo Nation’s water rights in Arizona still haven’t been determined, as he predicted.

The decision to exclude the Navajo Nation from Arizona v. California influenced this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in Arizona v. Navajo Nation, in which the tribe asked the federal government to identify its water rights in Arizona. Despite the U.S. insisting it could adequately represent the Navajo Nation’s water claims in the earlier case, federal attorneys this year argued the U.S. has no enforceable responsibility to protect the tribe’s claims. It was a “complete 180 on the U.S.’ part,” said Michelle Brown-Yazzie, assistant attorney general for the Navajo Nation Department of Justice’s Water Rights Unit and an enrolled member of the tribe.

In both cases, the federal government chose to “abdicate or to otherwise downplay their trust responsibility,” said Joe M. Tenorio, a senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund and a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo. “The United States took steps to deny tribal intervention in Arizona v. California and doubled down their effort in Arizona vs. Navajo Nation.”

In June, a majority of Supreme Court justices accepted the federal government’s argument that Congress, not the courts, should resolve the Navajo Nation’s lingering water rights. In his dissenting opinion, Gorsuch wrote, “The government’s constant refrain is that the Navajo can have all they ask for; they just need to go somewhere else and do something else first.” At this point, he added, “the Navajo have tried it all.”

As a result, a third of homes on the Navajo Nation still don’t have access to clean water, which has led to costly water hauling and, according to the Navajo Nation, has increased tribal members’ risk of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eight tribal nations have yet to reach any agreement over how much water they’re owed in Arizona. The state’s new Democratic governor has pledged to address unresolved tribal water rights, and the Navajo Nation and state are restarting negotiations this month. But tribes and their representatives wonder if the state will bring a new approach.

“It’s not clear to me Arizona’s changed a whole lot since the 1950s,” Weiner, the lawyer, said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Western states opposed tribes’ access to the Colorado River 70 years ago. History is repeating itself. on Oct 28, 2023.