Water is hard to come by on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, and it has been for a long time. The Chippewa Cree tribe members who live on this reservation in north-central Montana get most of their water from a thin underground aquifer that is insufficiently replenished by occasional rainfall, and they’ve been under some form of water restriction for several decades. There’s only enough groundwater for cooking and hygiene, so residents aren’t allowed to water their yellowing lawns or run sprinklers. It’s illegal to operate a car wash.

“It’s been in place for most of my life,” said Ted Whitford, the director of the tribe’s water resources department. “And if we get a water main break on our main line, what happens is it drains the tanks, and pretty much puts everyone that’s on that system out of water.”

When the tribe reached a deal to obtain water rights for the reservation in 1997, the federal government agreed to pipe in water from a reservoir on the Marias River, almost 60 miles away, replacing the aquifer water. But for more than 20 years, that project proceeded at a crawl, with the government spending only enough money each year to build a small portion of the pipeline. In the meantime, the reservation’s water problems grew more dire with every spell of drought. 

That changed last year. The federal Bureau of Reclamation, flush with money from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress passed in 2021, directed $57 million to the Rocky Boy’s Reservation for the project. This year, the Bureau spent another $77 million, allowing construction crews to complete a new water treatment facility at the reservoir and build several miles of pipeline, extending the project closer to the reservation. In the coming years, the feds will pay more than 90 percent of the total project costs.

“When I became familiar with the project, in my mind, it was doomed from the beginning because it was a project that was scheduled to be completed over a 40- to 50-year period,” said Whitford. “We were getting spoon-fed funding. Now we can accelerate that process.” While he once doubted that the pipeline would reach the reservation’s central town of Box Elder in his lifetime, it now looks like the pipe could reach there as soon as 2025.

A looming depletion of groundwater across the U.S. has drawn nationwide attention in recent years, as local officials in states from Kansas to Arizona struggle to manage dwindling water resources even as homes and farms get thirstier. However, the federal government’s surprisingly robust push to address this crisis has drawn far less attention. With little fanfare, the Biden administration is funneling billions of dollars to a suite of infrastructure projects designed to break the country’s dependence on vanishing groundwater. An infusion of money from the 2021 infrastructure bill is now being deployed, reviving long-dormant proposals for pipelines, reservoirs, and treatment facilities in rural areas across the U.S. West. 

These rural areas have long relied on underground aquifers as their only source of water, lacking access to the major rivers and reservoirs that sustain cities such as Denver, Colorado, and Los Angeles, California. As climate change leads to worsening droughts, the water level in these aquifers has fallen as there’s less rainfall to recharge them. As a result, many of these communities have suffered dire water access issues: Some have found their aquifers contaminated with unhealthy chemicals, while others have lost water access altogether as irrigated farms drain water away from household wells.

The $8.3 billion in funding from the infrastructure bill should help change that. By building pipelines to import clean water or facilities to treat contaminated groundwater, the administration will help address the sins of over-pumping in rural areas, cleaning up the mess made by a century of intensive agriculture. Under ordinary circumstances, the Bureau of Reclamation, which has managed Western water infrastructure for more than a century, would never have found the money to support big construction projects in cash-poor rural areas. The infrastructure bill has made the math for these projects much easier. 

“We have had steady funding for these projects in our discretionary budget, but you need these bursts of investment because of the scope,” said Camille Camimlim Touton, the Bureau’s commissioner, in an interview with Grist. “It’s the octane to getting these done.”

Even though federal, state, and local officials all agree on the need for water projects like the one at Rocky Boy’s, the money for it only arrived thanks to the $550 billion legislative package that Democrats (and a small number of Republicans) passed before losing control of Congress in last year’s midterm elections. The new money is far from sufficient to address all the groundwater issues in the West, and there’s no guarantee that Congress will give Reclamation another burst of funding down the road. In the meantime, though, the Bureau has been able to complete projects that have languished for decades. 

The largest of these projects — and the best indication of how Reclamation seeks to use its new windfall — is a $610 million pipeline effort called the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The 130-mile pipeline will deliver melted snow from a reservoir in the suburbs of Denver to a dry valley of southeast Colorado, relieving a long-standing water crisis in that area. Much of the Arkansas Valley’s groundwater contains high amounts of selenium, which can cause hair loss and cognitive impairment, as well as radionuclides that can increase cancer risk if consumed over long periods. Prolonged drought periods made this contamination even worse.

“Almost everybody down there drinks bottled water, because they can’t drink the water out of their faucets,” said Chris Woodka, the senior policy and issues manager at the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which is managing the project. “They have to replace their appliances all the time because they get caked up with minerals. A lot of farmland has disappeared, and in some communities people have had to move out.”

Congress first tried to tackle this problem more than half a century ago when it authorized the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in 1962 — then-president John F. Kennedy visited the valley that year to commemorate the effort — but funding for the project never materialized, and Reclamation had to shelve it. Aside from some preliminary construction in the 1980s, there was no progress on fixing the valley’s water issues. The amount of water needed to supply the parched communities was minuscule, but the area’s population was so sparse — most towns along the pipeline’s 100-mile length have just a few hundred residents — that providing the water was insurmountably expensive.

That changed last year when Reclamation announced its first suite of infrastructure grants. The Bureau pledged to fund around 80 percent of the dormant project, finished the final paperwork, and soon there were shovels in the ground. Woodka told Grist that the whole line should be operational by 2031, years earlier than previously projected.

“There are people who’ve been working on this for their careers who didn’t believe that it would happen,” said Touton. “So to be out there with 6 miles of pipe waiting to be put in the ground was just an amazing feeling.”

The new money has also been a game-changer in the llanos of eastern New Mexico, where federal dollars are helping to build a pipeline that will carry fresh mountain water from a reservoir called Ute Lake to two farming counties on the Texas border. In this case, the issue is quantity rather than quality: As big farming operations have expanded across the area in recent years, farmers have drained the local aquifers at an unprecedented rate, accounting for more than 90 percent of water usage in the area. Many of the area’s 73,000 residents have grown concerned that their wells will soon grow dry. After years of stasis, the local water authority is moving forward on an $666 million, 151-mile pipeline, with the federal government paying around 75 percent of the cost.

Over the course of the next five years, as Reclamation doles out dozens of new grants, it will reach areas where federal investment is almost nonexistent. The beneficiaries include small towns in central Montana such as Ryegate and Lavina, which have populations of 223 and 136 respectively, and tribal nations such as the Jicarilla Apache, who have fought for water access on their remote New Mexico reservation for decades. Had it not been for the jump in funding, these areas might never have seen long-promised upgrades and repairs.

Even so, Reclamation’s focus on bolstering water supply has critics in some areas, who argue that reservoirs holding surface water are no more reliable than underground aquifers. Many of the Bureau’s projects are holdovers from a previous era when large water infrastructure projects such as dams and pipelines were more common. In recent years, this “water buffalo” policy — a term referring to politicians who solved water issues by seeking out new supplies — has given way to a focus on reducing usage and increasing water recycling.

In the case of the New Mexico pipeline, some in the area think the better solution to the area’s water problems is to reduce irrigation demand rather than importing new supply. Warren Frost, an attorney for rural Quay County, opposes the Ute Lake pipeline and is suing to stop it. He argues that the local governments in the region should buy out some of the farmers and ranchers that are using up the area’s groundwater and repurpose that water for residential use.

“They haven’t taken any steps to buy water rights from the irrigators,” Frost told Grist. “They’re not trying to save their groundwater there. They’re just letting them pump it while they’re building this pipeline.” Frost said that buying out agricultural water rights would be much cheaper than the pipeline, and furthermore that the surface water supply from Ute Lake isn’t reliable given future drought: As has become clear on the Colorado River, even large river reservoirs are vulnerable to overuse and can vanish during drought periods. 

Meanwhile, in California, environmentalists have criticized a long-standing proposal to create a new reservoir in the mountains north of Sacramento, arguing it will help perpetuate a pattern of unsustainable water use for farms and ranches. The Bureau has spent $60 million on that effort.

Touton acknowledged that the United States has a water demand problem as well as a supply problem. Even so, she said, the projects will ease or prevent dire health concerns in rural areas that have no other options for firming up their water supplies.

“We’re the largest water deliverer, that’s our mission, and we look to use these tools to meet our mission,” said Touton. “But that also means that we need to have water to deliver, and part of that is recognizing that it has to be a sustainable system.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s $8 billion quest to solve America’s groundwater crisis on Oct 23, 2023.

If there’s one person in the Catholic Church who ought to have the ability to influence climate action on a global scale, it’s the pope. And yet as Laudate Deum, his most recent exhortation on climate, demonstrates, even Pope Francis seems frustrated by how little has changed despite his best efforts.

The pontiff didn’t shy away from calling out those he sees as responsible, and after outlining the science proving that climate change is human-caused, he made clear that developing nations contribute little to the problem but bear the brunt of its impacts. He rejected the idea that technology alone will avert disaster and lamented the failure of repeated meetings of the Conference of the Parties to hasten the abandonment of fossil fuels. In drawing from scientific studies, governmental reports, and the works of authors like feminist tech scholar Donna J. Haraway, Francis showed a firm grasp of both the science and politics of climate change while conveying the moral and spiritual implications of the crisis, with the goal of urging “all people of good will” to act. 

“Our responses have not been adequate while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” the Holy Father wrote in the document released October 4. 

As the leader of a hierarchical institution with 1.36 billion adherents worldwide, the pope has authority over more people than all but two heads of state. From the first day of his papacy in 2013, Francis made clear that he would leverage his position for the sake of the planet. He took the name of the patron saint of ecology, and in 2015 released a landmark encyclical — the highest form of papal teaching on Catholic doctrine — on the environment, Laudato Si’, which some environmentalists have heralded as the most important climate document of the decade.

But reading Laudate Deum, it’s hard not to be struck by its tone of lament and exasperation at how little has changed in the eight years since Laudato Si’. “It feels like a sad document, as well as an angry one,” said Dorothy Fortenberry, a Catholic writer and intellectual. “There’s a real undercurrent of heartbreak.”

It’s not hard to see why. For all of Francis’ focus on the crisis — and the response from Catholics in much of the Global South — emissions have continued to rise. Support for his call to action has been lukewarm at best, however, in the country with the greatest per capita emissions. An analysis of official writings from U.S. bishops in the wake of Laudato Si’ concluded that the leaders of the Catholic church in America are “silent, denialist, and biased about climate change.” The response to Laudate Deum has been no better.

No wonder Francis is frustrated. The pontiff’s latest document, and the feelings expressed in it, offer a poignant reminder that no one person can fix things on their own. Laudate Deum hints at the importance of sharing and building collective power to effect change, and of working toward a better world no matter how bleak the outlook.

That Francis would express such strong views about the climate crisis is no surprise to those who have followed his papacy. He has represented, to many Catholics and non-Catholics alike, a refreshing direction for the Church. He has earned a reputation for being more open than his predecessors toward LGBTQ unions and the ordination of women. He remains an ardent critic of unbridled capitalism and consumerism. And he has emphasized consideration of the poor and established new processes for listening to and considering Indigenous perspectives. 

That said, his positions don’t align neatly with those of any specific political party. In Laudato Si’, for example, Francis reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s official stance against abortion, which Fortenberry called “an attempt to remind everybody of his places of conservative overlap,” perhaps in a bid to convince that demographic to take seriously his calls for climate justice.

Making that call in an encyclical was no small thing. Such letters are the highest form of papal teaching and convey the Church’s point of view on a given topic. In Laudato Si’, Francis made clear that Catholics are called by God to be good stewards of “our common home.” The fact that he issued a follow-up focused on climate change is a sign that the crisis should be a top priority for the church, said Jose Aguto, executive director of the nonprofit Catholic Climate Covenant.

“It indicates how important this issue is for him,” Aguto said. “This is not a secondary aspect of the Catholic faith; it’s an integral aspect.”

The missive also reveals the Holy Father’s personal investment in the issue, Aguto noted. Where Laudato Si’ was likely shaped by “a lot of consultation and a lot of authors,” years of preparation, and appeals to Catholics across the political and theological spectrum, Laudate Deum has “a very personal tone to it,” Aguto said. “You feel Pope Francis’ direct voice in this.”

The pontiff’s deep personal connection to the issue is perhaps best exemplified by his being the first pope to take the name of Francis of Assisi, a saint known for his solidarity with the poor and his love of the natural world. Francis, who also is the first pope from Latin America, has channeled his namesake by seeming to intuitively understand that caring for marginalized people is impossible without caring for the land, water, and air they rely on. Throughout his papacy, he has repeatedly emphasized the connection between “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” as he wrote in Laudato Si’. 

For Catholics already working on climate, Francis’ latest exhortation may provide a reenergizing reminder that the Vatican is behind them, and that they are doing the right thing. “As a Catholic environmental family, we were completely thrilled at this,” said Christina Leaño, assistant director of the Laudato Si’ Movement. “It just gives us that extra motivation and excitement and hope.”

The very existence of Leaño’s organization is a testament to the impact the pope’s focus on climate has already had. Since the release of Laudato Si’, organizations focused on mobilizing Catholics to action have blossomed all over the globe, especially in Asia, South America, and Africa, where clergy and laity alike have been grappling with the crisis for years. Filipino bishops have, for example, called for Catholic institutions’ divestment from coal and transitioned their own parishes to solar. The archbishop of the Democratic Republic of Congo facilitated 12 days of “African climate dialogues” to highlight how the continent is impacted by climate change. 

But Leaño recognizes that “there’s still quite a gap” between the Holy Father’s official statements and what is preached during weekly Mass here in the U.S. “If you talk to the average churchgoer, they will say that they have never or rarely heard about climate or environmental issues from the pulpit,” she said. 

Sharon Lavigne is a devout Catholic whose work stopping a $1.25 billion plastics manufacturing plant from being built in her community earned her a 2021 Goldman Prize. Yet she hadn’t heard anything about Laudate Deum before Grist asked her about it. “I know in my church, we haven’t done anything [about the climate and pollution],” she said. “We haven’t even mentioned it.” 

So why hasn’t one of the clearest priorities of the highest authority in the Catholic church been widely embraced here? One clue comes from the ways American Catholicism mirrors American politics. 

One in four people in the United States identify as Catholic. A small but vocal number of them — a group that includes some bishops — has spent the last few years building a campaign that claims Francis is not the real pope, just as some within the Republican Party claim Joe Biden is not the real president. The point is to undermine Francis’ authority, said Fortenberry. 

“The only way to square the circle that the guy at the top is making these extremely clear statements about church doctrine that are incompatible with certain aspects of right-wing ideology is to say that he’s not the pope,” she said. 

If the pontiff seems frustrated, it’s no doubt because global emissions keep rising — but it’s likely also due to his encountering so many “dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions,” as he wrote in Laudate Deum, from climate deniers within the church.

Though such views are exceptions, recent research shows that the nation’s Catholics are as a whole “no more likely than Americans overall to view climate change as a serious problem.” As with most people, it’s not denial that impedes action, but the demands of daily life. In Fortenberry’s experience, it’s not that people don’t believe in or care about climate change, it’s that they’re focused on other things. 

For all the frustration laced through Laudate Deum, the document provides hints of what Francis hopes could invoke the kind of change he wants to see. It also reflects his belief that “every little bit helps, and avoiding an increase of a tenth of a degree in the global temperature would already suffice to alleviate some suffering.”  

One change that could achieve that, he seems to think, is rethinking the kinds of hierarchies that give a handful of people so much power over others. “This feels like he’s in his ‘name names’ era,” Fortenberry said, noting the way that the pope criticized the COP process, called out this year’s host the United Arab Emirates as a “great exporter of fossil fuels,” and praised the activists “pressuring the sources of power.”

“In whose hands does all this power lie, or will it eventually end up? It is extremely risky for a small part of humanity to have it,” Francis wrote. “Unless citizens control political power — national, regional, and municipal — it will not be possible to control damage to the environment.”

Fortenberry and Leaño noted that Laudate Deum was released on the first day of the much anticipated Synod on Synodality, a conference to consider questions that could change the course of Catholicism. It has been called “one of the most important gatherings in the long history of the Catholic Church,” but at first glance, it seems unrelated to climate — the ongoing sessions bring together Catholic leadership and laity from around the world to discuss topics like the possibility of women’s ordination and the church’s relationship with the LGBTQ community.

But on another level, this synod is about the very thing the pope wrote about in Laudate Deum — the question of who is included, and therefore who has power. It hearkens back to the claims he made in his exhortation that “everything is connected” and “no one is saved alone.” If women feel the impacts of climate disaster more intensely, what impact might their ordination have on Catholic climate mobilization? If queer youth are more likely to be unhoused, and unhoused people are more vulnerable to extreme weather, what might a more queer-friendly church mean how that population experiences the climate crisis? 

Ultimately, there’s no guarantee that the synod will succeed in making the church more inclusive, or that Laudate Deum will spark greater climate action from Catholics, let alone the rest of the world. But the very attempt to undertake them drives home one more takeaway from the Holy Father — that good work is worth doing, whether the outcome is promised or not.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The pope leads 1.4 billion Catholics. Getting them to care about the climate is harder than he thought. on Oct 23, 2023.

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Arizona, stressed by years of drought, has declared its house-building boom will have to be curbed due to a lack of water, but one of its fastest-growing cities is refusing to give up its relentless march into the desert — even if it requires constructing a pipeline that would bring water across the border from Mexico.

The population of Buckeye, located 35 miles west of Phoenix, has doubled over the past decade to just under 120,000, and it is now priming itself to eventually become one of the largest cities in the U.S. West. The city’s boundaries are vast — covering an area stretching out into the Sonoran Desert that would encompass two New York Cities — and so are its ambitions.

Buckeye expects to one day contain as many as 1.5 million people, rivaling or even surpassing Phoenix — the sixth largest city in the U.S. that uses roughly 2 billion gallons of water a day — by sprawling out the tendrils of suburbia, with its neat lawns, snaking roads, and large homes, into the baking desert.

Arizona’s challenging water situation appears a major barrier to such hopes, however. In June, the state announced that new uses of its groundwater have essentially hit a limit, placing restrictions on house building, just a few months after the state lost a fifth of its water allocation from the ailing Colorado River.

There isn’t enough water beneath Buckeye to support homes not already being built, Arizona’s water department has said. But the city is embarking upon an extraordinary scramble to find water from other sources — by recycling it, purchasing it, or importing it — to maintain the sort of hurtling growth that continues to propel the U.S. West even in an era of climate crisis.

“Personally, my view is that we are still full steam ahead,” said Eric Orsborn, Buckeye’s ebullient mayor. Orsborn said he understands the state has to be “really careful” with water resources but that the city is exploring “options to keep us going and allow us to continue to grow at the rate that we want to grow.”

Some of the grander options are ambitious to the point of appearing outlandish, such as a plan to bring desalinated seawater from Mexico to Arizona via a lengthy, uphill pipeline. Arizona may, instead, pipe in water west from California, or from 1,000 miles east, from the Missouri River. Buckeye has already shown it is prepared to spend big to achieve its dreams — in January the city council agreed to spend $80 million for a single acre of nearby land, an area smaller than a football pitch, just to secure its attached water rights.

“We’ll be as big or larger than Phoenix, ultimately — we don’t have to have all that water solved today,” Orsborn said in city hall, which itself may have to be upsized to deal with Buckeye’s growth. On his office wall is a map of the vast expanse of untouched desert that sits within the city’s voluminous territory.

“What we need to figure out is what’s that next crazy idea that’s out there,” said the mayor, who also owns a construction company. “We’re just hustling to get to that point, to keep things moving along.”

Perhaps the most “crazy” of the ideas is the one that would involve building a desalination plant in the Mexican town of Puerto Peñasco, perched on the edge of the Gulf of California, to suck up seawater and then send the treated water in a pipeline several hundred miles north to Arizona. Much of the pipeline’s proposed route is uphill and will traverse an international border, a federally protected area famed for its cactus and several small towns.

Read Next

How efforts to protect an Indigenous oasis almost led to its demise

Maria Parazo Rose & Daniel Penner

Environmentalists have already criticized the plan for its potential ecological impact upon both land and sea — the salty brine left over would be dumped back into the Gulf of California, altering its composition and potentially harming its marine life. The odds may be against the pipeline, given the cost and opposition. But IDE, the Israeli company that proposed the $5 billion plan, has said the pipeline would be “transformative” for Arizona, would provide enough water for the entire state and “secure Arizona’s future growth.”

Arizona’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority (or WIFA), the agency tasked with implementing a new inflow of water to the state, is assessing the Mexico idea, as well as other options. Chuck Podolak, director of the agency, has his own office map that helps him envision other possible stupendous infrastructure undertakings, such as a pipeline running from another desalination plant, in California, or a pipeline that could convey water from the distant Missouri River to the thirsty desert.

“Those are big, audacious ideas, but I don’t think any are off the table,” said Podolak. “We’re going to seek the wild ideas and fund the good ones.”

Podolak acknowledged any pipeline from Mexico will face numerous hurdles — Wifa has been in touch with lawmakers in Mexico, some of whom are unfavorable to the idea — but insisted Arizona will continue to push for a new, leviathan project to make up its water shortfall.

“I just want to see multiple projects and figure out the best one for us. If we want to have that long-term security, we do need a new bucket, so to speak, a new source of supply outside of the state. This is a fantastic place to live.”

Podolak points out such big ideas are in keeping with previous monumental, and seemingly impossible, projects. “We dammed up the Colorado River and built the Hoover Dam, we have an artificial river that runs from Lake Havasu to Tucson uphill 300 miles — it’s called the Central Arizona Project,” he said.

“All these things seemed audacious, but now they’re part of the landscape. We’ve been doing it for 100 years.”

Such grandiose plans are being mulled because Arizona faces pressures like never before. The state has been in the teeth of a drought, spurred by global heating, that is the worst the U.S. Southwest has seen in approximately 1,200 years. About a third of the state’s water supply comes from the Colorado River, which has shrunk as temperatures have risen. Last year, under a mechanism where Arizona shares water with other states, its allotment of Colorado River water was cut by 21 percent.

Arizona’s other major water source — from underground aquifers, sucked up by wells — has become depleted in some parts of the state and, in the rapidly growing areas on the fringes of Phoenix, have been entirely laid claim to by developers who have to show under law that there is a reliable 100-year supply of water before erecting new homes on the cheap desert land.

In June, in a sobering dose of reality, the state declared there was not enough water for all current planned construction in the Phoenix region — amounting to a 4 percent shortfall over the next century — and that all future housing developments will have to find some other source of water. Already approved projects, and new housing within Phoenix itself, could still continue, the state stressed. “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water,” said Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s governor.

While the decision won’t halt Arizona’s growth — which has been fueled by relatively cheap housing, fine weather, and fresh jobs brought by firms such as Intel and newcomer battery manufacturers — some see the end of an era in which sprawling homes, swimming pools, lawns, and water-intensive crops could endlessly unfurl into the desert.

“It’s a clear sign that this sprawl was never sustainable and that there is just no more groundwater left to do that,” said Christopher Kuzdas, senior water program manager at Environmental Defense Fund who argues Arizona should better conserve its own groundwater before turning to new pipelines.

“We are at a real crossroads as to how Arizona grows,” he said. “There just aren’t many easy options left when it comes to water.”

Read Next

Arizona is evicting a Saudi alfalfa farm, but the thirsty crop isn’t going anywhere

Jake Bittle

For Buckeye, the conversion of farmland to new housing will subsume existing irrigation rights — agriculture takes up more than 70 percent of Arizona’s water, after all, with Hobbs recently removing state land from being used to grow alfalfa, a particularly thirsty, and controversial, crop in order to protect what she called the state’s “water future.”

Beyond that, as the city expands into virgin desert, there is water recycling, where waste water is treated and reused, or perhaps a raising of the dam on the nearby Verde River to collect more water. Any new water pipeline from further away will take many years, and billions of dollars, if it happens at all. But Orsborn insists the city will find a way.

“I’m not saying it’s not going to be a challenge, but it’s not going to break that growth,” said the mayor. “For thousands of years, water’s been moved from one point to another point. We just have to continue to do that.”

Driving around Buckeye — there isn’t really any other option to get around — can feel rather disjointed. The city’s downtown is somewhat threadbare but then at the periphery there is a frenzy of building activity, with rows of new beige and cream colored houses with piles of roof slates being put in place, swarms of machinery preparing dusty tracts of ground, flags fluttering with legends such as “new homes” and “now selling.”

Drive a further 30 minutes north into the desert, a mix of scrubland dotted with saguaro cacti and two starkly beautiful mountain outcrops, you’re somehow still in Buckeye and work is under way to conjure up a massive new development called Teravalis — meaning “land of the valley” — that calls itself a “city of the future” that will eventually house 300,000 people and various businesses.

“We are effectively building a small city,” said Heath Melton, president of the Phoenix region for the developer, the Howard Hughes Corporation. Teravalis will reclaim water and be cautious with its use of turf and irrigation, according to Melton. “We want to enrich people’s lives and be good stewards of the environment,” he said. “Buckeye is very bullish on its growth and it’s good for them to be bullish.”

For the optimists, Arizona’s past is instructive. The state has found spectacular fixes to secure the water that has catapulted its growth and is getting better at saving it — somehow Arizona uses less water than it did in the 1950s despite now having 500 percent more people.

But past conditions bear a dwindling resemblance to Arizona’s future. This summer was, globally, probably the hottest that humans have ever experienced. In Phoenix, there were a record 31 consecutive days above 100 degrees F (37 degrees C) and the seasonal monsoon season was the driest since 1895. It will only get hotter and drier. Arizona may be able to move the sea from Mexico, but somehow out-engineering the climate crisis in the longer term will be an even more grueling feat.

“I think Buckeye has some real challenges and the degree of their success will depend on the degree to which people are willing to pay for those more expensive solutions,” said Kathryn Sorensen, an expert in water policy at Arizona State University.

“But it’s absolutely feasible,” she adds. “We pave over rivers, we build sea walls, we drain swamps, we destroy wetlands, we import water supplies where they never would have otherwise gone. Humans always do outlandish things, it’s what we do.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Welcome to Buckeye, the desert city out to surpass Phoenix by importing water on Oct 22, 2023.

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and is republished with permission.

Mohsen Ramadan’s name is stamped on the corner of a yellowing copy of entomologist Fillipo Silvestri’s 1914 report on Mediterranean fruit flies. 

The record chronicles Silvestri’s 11-month voyage from Europe, around Africa, to Australia and, finally, Hawai’i. Along the way, Silvestri collected parasites of the fruit fly, one that was ravaging Hawaiian horticulture at the time. The then-U.S. territory was suffering, its products barred from entering the mainland.

The African wasps Silvestri introduced to Hawai’i did the job, killing off the problem. It’s an early example of biological control in Hawai’i, a scientific realm that continues to be paramount to the state’s ecological and agricultural balance.

But government bureaucracy and inadequate research facilities are now blamed for delaying potentially significant relief to industries like macadamia and coffee and possibly even providing a “silver bullet” in the battle against the invasive grasses that fueled the deadly wildfires on Maui.

Silvestri’s work more than a century ago inspired Egyptian-born Ramadan to move to Hawai’i in 1981, to study at the University of Hawai’i, and eventually become a modern-day Silvestri, the Department of Agriculture’s only exploratory entomologist. 

Ramadan has spent the past 26 years in the role, traveling between Hawai’i and more than a dozen countries, scouting for insects and pathogens that could be introduced to help eradicate or control invasive insects and weeds across Hawai’i.

His research has taken him across Southeast Asia for melon flies, maile pilau, and banana aphids and throughout Africa to find enemies of fireweed, coffee berry borer, and erythrina gall wasp, among other places and pests. 

His name has since appeared on more than 68 journal articles. And given that he works in Hawai’i — the invasive species and extinction capital of the world — there are plenty more in the pipeline.

Ramadan’s most recently published article is on the macadamia felted coccid, a microscopic pest to Hawaii’s lucrative macadamia nut industry. 

His research shows it will be successful, but its release has been a decade in waiting, as regulations and permitting hold up the process. 

 “I do not complain much,” Ramadan said. “But this … this is a really long time.”

Welcoming the agents

When the wiliwili tree was facing extinction in the summer of 2005, Ramadan ventured to Tanzania to find solutions. Biologists who were colleagues at UH traveled with him across southern Africa, together finding 30 potential solutions by the end of 2006. 

Four years later, a wasp was released in Hawai’i as a biological control agent.

It was a rapid response, especially considering the bureaucratic steps involved in the process, according to UH entomology professor Mark Wright, who worked with Ramadan on the project.

“Sometimes it can take 20 years to get something like that to happen,” Wright said. 

The process of identifying and locating potential biocontrol agents might take a few months or a year, but the permitting process can take far longer because delays are possible at every step on the federal or state level.

Entomologists such as Wright and Ramadan accept that the lengthy process is there for a reason but still bristle with it, especially as such problems seem acute.

The macadamia nut industry awaiting final sign-off to release a miniscule Australian wasp to kill off the felted coccid is another example.  

Without being able to deploy the wasp yet to control the pest, the industry is left with the use of pesticides as the only viable alternative to stay in business, Hawaii Macadamia Nut Association President Nathan Trump says. 

The industry has been effectively pesticide-free for the past 20 years, thanks to biological controls, according to Trump. 

“As an organic macadamia nut farmer, I would much prefer to import and release beneficial insects, as opposed to paying thousands of dollars to chemical companies for products that can degrade our environment and harm human health,” Trump said in an email. 

HMNA secretary Bonnie Self said the cost of spraying, with pesticides becoming increasingly expensive, spells the difference between breaking even and going into the red.

“But the cost of not spraying could be a loss of production or even the loss of an orchard,” Self said.

Hawai’i has a complex relationship with both pesticides and biological controls though, fed by global agrochemical conglomerates’ history in the islands and failed species control measures.

But to control invasive species, using what the sector calls integrated biological control, there is no entirely palatable solution.

Without biological controls, the only management options are manual or through chemicals.

DOA Plant Pest Control Branch Manager Darcy Oishi says the decision over what is better — pesticides or introduced species — is up to the public.

Hawai’i’s long history of biological control

The state has a long history of controlling undesirable species with enemies from their home ranges, bringing in 679 species of weeds and insects between 1890 and 1985.  

When asked about unintended consequences, Ramadan retrieves three records: a large book for the years until 1985, a sheet of paper for the 72 agents imported between 1987 to 2000, and a sliver of paper for the years until 2015. 

That decline is in part because warning bells were sounded in the mid-1980s, when the unintended effects of control agents’ introduction were highlighted by scientists, which led to a tightening of biosecurity measures worldwide. 

Still, Ramadan is quick to point out that of the species introduced between 1890 and 1985, 13.6 percent had an effect on non-target species. Only 7 percent had any effect on native species in Hawaii, and none got close to killing them off.

And since 1967, none of the releases have had unintended effects, he said.

A popular example of failed biocontrols is the mongoose, which was introduced by plantations to control rat populations. The mongoose has since wreaked havoc on bird populations locally.

But that introduction, along with several others, were conducted outside the scientific process and at a time when ecosystem management was an afterthought. 

Agriculture was the only consideration, but now entire ecosystems have value in the public eye, which fundamentally changes the entire process, Oishi said.

“We have mongoose and cane toad as permanent issues because there was a lack of pondering, philosophical thought, self-reflection and assessment on what is going to be the long-term impact,” Oishi said. “There was no generational approach.”

But there are functional realities that need to be addressed if there is to be more biological control in Hawai’i.

Chief among those barriers is the two facilities that exist in the state, according to Hawaii Invasive Species Council planner Chelsea Arnott.

“They’re outdated. They’re small. They don’t have the containment ratings to be able to work on really small organisms,” Arnott said.

Updating that infrastructure could make a substantial impact for environmental protection and reducing the effects of invasive species.

Oishi estimates it would cost approximately $5 million to build such a facility, with about $800,000 per year to keep it running.

That could serve to increase biological control work exponentially.

“There’s a volume discount, basically,” Oishi said.

In the weeds

At 71 years old, Ramadan has one final invasive species he wants to target before he retires: fountain grass.

That grass has been deemed invasive for years but was among the many blamed for fueling the August 8 Lahaina fires that killed at least 98 people, alongside guinea and buffel grasses.

Ramadan believes he found the potential answer in Africa in 2008, where the grass comes from and does not blanket the landscape as it does in Hawai’i.

There’s an unnamed insect that eats the seeds of fountain grass and a “smut fungus” that grows on them in their natural range.

“A project like this is not going to come in one or two years. It’s going to take 10 or maybe more,” Ramadan said. “There are other things we want to protect too: Kukiyu grass is from the same genus.”

Ramadan, despite being an entomologist, believes the fungus could be the state’s greatest defense against the invasive grass.

But it does not have a facility to do the research, so it may have to outsource the work to France.

“Pathogens tend to be very specific and some of them are very good at biological control,” Ramadan said. “I believe that this could be the silver bullet for fountain grass.”

“Hawaii Grown” is funded in part by grants from Ulupono Fund at the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This state employee is scouring the Earth for solutions to combat invasive species in Hawai’i on Oct 21, 2023.

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain wore a T-shirt reading “Eat the Rich” and a deadly serious stare when he announced a major development in the union’s monthlong strike: General Motors agreed to include its electric vehicle and battery factories in the forthcoming labor contract. That deal will cover 6,000 employees at four coming GM battery plants.

“We have been told for months this is impossible,” Fain said during the October 6 livestream. “We have been told the EV future must be a race to the bottom. We called their bluff.”

If Fain has made anything clear, it is that he, and the 383,000 people he leads, are not bluffing. In the two weeks since GM’s concession, the union has redoubled its efforts to win similar agreements from Ford and Stellantis. Last week, every one of the 8,700 workers at Ford’s massive Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville joined the picket line, halting production of the company’s line of Super Duty pickup trucks. 

GM’s promise to unionize its EV and battery operations comes after automakers sold 300,000 EVs in the previous quarter, and everyone involved in the labor dispute feels the electric transition is all but inevitable. The strike has increased pressure on the Big Three to include their electrification ventures in the master contracts they hold with United Auto Workers, or UAW. It also could press other automakers to increase pay or agree to unionize if they hope to compete for workers.

Fain has made negotiating stronger contracts, including cost-of-living adjustments and four-day workweeks, a priority since his election in March. He also has castigated the Big Three’s battery factories for their low wages. When contract negotiations stalled, UAW members went on strike on September 14. There are now 34,000 autoworkers on strike nationwide, a number that is likely to grow as negotiations drag on.

Dianne Feeley is a retired autoworker who, like other UAW retirees, remains an active and voting union member. She says the rank and file spent 40 years working toward this moment, a fight that started as years of stagnation and corruption kept the UAW from moving forward. That led to a band of members launching United All Workers for Democracy, which expanded members’ rights to participate in bargaining and helped propel Fain to into leadership. It’s also helped conversations about the EV transition and its impact on workers come to the fore.

“This [UAW] administration has said, ‘Yes, let’s do electric vehicles, but there has to be a just transition.’ Whereas the old leadership, they didn’t even want to hear about electric vehicles,” Feeley said.  

Beyond ensuring that the workers assembling electric vehicles are paid the same as those assembling conventional cars, the risks inherent in battery production are a major concern to union members. Safety issues at GM’s Ultium Cells battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, led to the factory’s unionization earlier this year. An explosion and fire there in March prompted an investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Its inquiry, released last week, found 17 violations, including inadequate respiratory protection equipment, emergency showers, and eye-washing stations. OSHA could levy $270,000 in fines. 

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for months about Ultium and these high-risk, high-skill EV battery operations,” Fain said in a statement to Grist. “This is dangerous work that deserves to be compensated well.” 

Pay at Ultium has risen by $3 to $4 an hour since the union vote in December, even though workers do not yet have a formal contract. The master agreements the UAW holds with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis await ratification, so none of the union’s recent victories are certain.

“It’s a little too soon to pop the bubbly and have champagne and celebrate, but it’s all good news,” said Arthur Wheaton, director of the Labor Studies department at Cornell University.

The fact GM is ahead of its domestic competitors when it comes to EV battery production played a role in its recent concession, Wheaton said. GM had already planned to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The UAW’s success at the Ultium plant, and more broadly within GM, could have an impact even beyond union shops, given the ongoing labor shortage and a need to stay competitive when attracting workers, especially when there is some evidence that EV plants will not, as some believe, require fewer workers. Auto industry analysts say any wage increases resulting from the strike will likely pressure large, stridently anti-union manufacturers like Tesla, which pays significantly less than the Detroit automakers, to raise wages in the hope that it forestalls the risk of unionizing. 

“If you get a big pay raise for GM and Ford, then many — not all — of the automakers will raise their wages to make sure they don’t get unionized,” Wheaton said.  “And you’ll see that in the battery sector as well.”

GM’s concession was far from assured. The Big Three co-own their battery plants with foreign companies, like Ultium, which GM co-owns with the Korean company LG Energy Solutions. These joint-venture plants are not automatically covered by existing UAW labor agreements, because they are what’s called a “permissive” part of those contracts that do not require either side to negotiate the terms of their operation. 

Beyond that, EVs have not had the same focus as other parts of the contract negotiations, despite the central role the cars, and the batteries powering them, will play in the future of both automakers and the men and women they employ. GM, Stellantis, and Ford had consistently claimed that conceding to UAW’s demands would make them less competitive against foreign automakers in the burgeoning EV market.

“That’s why [UAW was] happy to get GM, because they use what they call ‘pattern bargaining,’” Wheaton said, referring to a labor strategy, pioneered in part by autoworkers, that uses prior organizing wins to pressure other employers into take-it-or-leave-it offers. It may also bring the union fight back to an old battleground as EV battery plants open in an expanding “Battery Belt” spanning the right-to-work South, where several foreign automakers, including Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen, operate factories.

The UAW has struggled to organize Southern factories like the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which builds the electric ID.4. In a staggering loss considered a massive failure for the union’s organization efforts in the South, Volkswagen workers rejected union membership in 2019. Fain told Grist that the union has since the beginning of the strike been fielding calls from non-union autoworkers, “from the West to the Midwest and especially in the South,” indicating organizing priorities beyond the current contract fight.  

“We’re looking at organizing half a dozen auto companies in the coming years,” he said. “Pretty soon we won’t just be talking about the Big Three — more like Big Five, Big Seven, Big Ten unionized automakers.”

It’s an opportune time for UAW, since Inflation Reduction Act funds are only just now flowing to EV manufacturing. The money comes with stipulations that have been favorable to the union’s cause, in particular incentives for manufacturing everything from solar panels to EV batteries domestically with union labor. Because the allocations are just beginning to flow, many factories aren’t yet online, so hiring won’t start for a while. That gives unions like the UAW time to organize, with help from environmental groups. The Blue-Green Alliance, for example, has worked to bring labor and climate interests together.

“The Big Three have argued that there has to be a choice between paying autoworkers at family-sustaining union wages and benefits, and making the shift to EV production at a pace and scale that will meet both consumer demand and the climate crisis,” said Jason Walsh, the organization’s executive director. “We think that that’s a false choice. They can do both. And the agreement with GM suggests that they now recognize they have to do both.”

Feeley had similar thoughts when she decided to support the strike. She believes the EV transition must be equitable and just — not just now, but decades from now, because “one generation comes to the plant after another.” When autoworkers demand fair treatment and better pay, they do so not just for themselves, but for the children and grandchildren who will build the cars of the future.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline GM agreed to unionize its EV operations. Will others do the same? on Oct 20, 2023.