Cuts and freezes are jamming up some of the basic functions of
government at agencies targeted in President Donald Trump’s
rollbacks of his predecessors’ energy and environmental
policies, more than a dozen federal employees told POLITICO.
Lockdowns of spending and an absence of guidance from political
appointees are leaving Environmental Protection Agency
scientists unable to publish their research, preventing some
Energy Department officials from visiting their department’s
laboratories and forcing the cancellation of disaster planning
exercises at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the
13 employees, who were granted anonymity to avoid reprisals.
They said the chaos has also left recipients of Biden-era
energy grants in limbo as they wait for approval to continue
the projects they’ve started. … Other affected agencies
include the Interior Department and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, which conducts crucial climate
research and oversees the National Weather Service.
As the Senate continues to comb through the Big Beautiful Bill,
258 million acres of public land across the western U.S.,
including large swaths of California, could soon be eligible
for sale. A map published by the Wilderness Society, a
nonprofit land conservation organization, reveals which parcels
of land across 11 states would be up for grabs, in accordance
with the land sale proposal detailed by Sen. Mike Lee, a
Republican from Utah and the chairman of the Senate Committee
on Energy and Natural Resources. If the budget is passed
by the July 4 deadline, an estimated 16 million acres in
California are at risk of being sold over the next five years.
Those vulnerable parcels of land include areas adjacent
to Yosemite National Park, Mount Shasta, Big Sur and Lake
Tahoe. … In all, up to 3 million acres across
all states would be authorized to be sold out of 258 million
eligible acres across the West.
… Originally born in Colorado, (Richard) Sloan moved to
Fresno with his parents when he was around 4 years old. He
moved to Khartoum, Sudan for two years and returned in 1964 to
Fresno. It was then, when he was 13 years old, when he first
became acquainted with the San Joaquin River. … During
his final years in (Army) service and after, Sloan began
volunteering for the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation
Trust. That was when he experienced his first canoe ride down
the river, where he noted that he was “never out of sight of a
tire” while on the water. … “I thought, ‘Oh my God, why
doesn’t anybody do anything about that?’ and that’s what
spurred me onto that first cleanup, then after that, I started
organizing tire cleanups and they turned out to be pretty
popular,” Sloan said. In 2000, he got a full-time position
with the trust as the River Steward Coordinator and also became
chair of the Sierra Club Tehipite Chapter. Through his
positions he was able to coordinate the river’s first clean up
at Camp Pashayan, where they pulled out 60 tires and an
old-timey soda vending machine.
California Trout (CalTrout) and Pacific Gas & Electric
(PG&E) kicked off construction today on a project that will
remove the last unnatural barrier to fish passage on mainstem
Alameda Creek, the largest local tributary to the San Francisco
Bay. … This project will open more than 20 miles of stream
including quality spawning habitat in the upper watershed to
Chinook salmon and steelhead with completion anticipated in
winter 2025. … In 2022 and 2023, former barriers at the BART
weir and inflatable bladder dams in Fremont, eight to ten miles
upstream of where Alameda Creek enters the Bay, were made
passable for fish due to newly constructed fish ladders by the
Alameda County Water District and after years of advocacy by
the Alameda Creek Alliance. The newly constructed fish ladders
enabled Chinook salmon and steelhead to migrate through the
lower creek into Niles Canyon and access parts of the upper
Alameda Creek watershed for the first time in over fifty years.
Soon, these fish will be able to consistently swim even further
upstream.
2026 is shaping up to be a key year for the Colorado River and
the seven basin states that rely on its water. Those states
hope to wrap up negotiations on how to use less of the
overallocated river’s water by the end of this year — that
means Arizona lawmakers and the governor would have next year
to approve the deal. Joanna Allhands, digital opinions editor
for The Arizona Republic, has written about this and joined The
Show, along with editorial page editor Elvia Díaz, to discuss.
… “If it plays out like what groundwater negotiations have
done so far, that just means no one compromises, everything
falls apart, we don’t get anywhere. And then that could be
really disastrous for us, specifically because Arizona is the
only Colorado River basin state that is required to have
legislative approval for whatever deal comes our way,” (says
Joanna Allhands).
… The Colorado River system rushes through
turbines inside Glen Canyon Dam on Lake Powell, producing
affordable, carbon-free hydropower. … Climate change and
chronic water overuse continue to constrict the mighty river’s
flows, though, jeopardizing the dam’s ability to produce
hydroelectric power. The lack of water has also created a slew
of environmental problems in the Grand Canyon’s ecosystem,
which sprawls below Glen Canyon Dam — most notably for an
ancient, threatened fish species, the humpback chub, which is
hunted by invasive smallmouth bass. Under Biden last year, the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation finalized a decision that allows the
dam to periodically release surges of water that bypass the
machinery that generates power. These flows cool the river
below the dam, which curbs smallmouth bass reproduction. Utah
Republicans and power providers say that decision has only
further threatened the valuable energy source — and they hope
to undo it.
If you know anything about the Salton Sea, maybe you’ve heard
that California’s largest lake has been shrinking for decades,
the fish are dying, and toxic dust from the lakebed is blowing
around the Coachella Valley. The term “apocalyptic” gets thrown
around. For the people who live here, that’s not a helpful
way to think of the place. … Thinking of the Salton Sea as a
place that’s doomed can make it hard to see it as a place in
the middle of dramatic change, affected in real time by humans
— and lately by the equivalent of a really big faucet.
Long-running plans to add more water — more sustainable water —
to the edges of the sea are now coming online, which should be
great news for the region’s most devoted tourists: the birds.
… As water is rerouted from the lake to San Diego and
other urban areas, the Salton Sea is getting saltier. So the
fish are dying off, and the fish-eating birds, like pelicans,
are also going elsewhere as the place changes.
Lake Tahoe’s iconic blue waters were the third murkiest on
record last year and the worst they’ve been in several years,
according to data from scientists who have studied the lake for
decades. Clarity of the alpine lake — measured by dropping a
white disk into the water and noting when it disappears from
sight — is a signal of its overall health. Tiny particles are
major culprits of reduced clarity, including the sediment and
other pollutants that wash into the lake from runoff and air
pollution and the plankton that grow in its
waters. Researchers with UC Davis’ Tahoe Environmental
Research Center reported today that the average murkiness in
2024 was exceeded only in 2021, when fires blanketed the lake
in smoke and ash, and in 2017, when the lake was clouded by
sediment-laden runoff during a near-record wet year. The
report says that clarity levels are “highly variable and
generally not improving,” and recommends that “future
research should focus on examining the nature of the particles
that affect water clarity.”
The remote and rugged Klamath River in Oregon and California,
one of the mightiest in the American West and an ancient
lifeline to Indigenous tribes, is running free again, mostly,
for the first time in 100 years after the recent removal of
four major dams. At the burbling aquifer near Chiloquin, Ore.,
that is considered the headwaters, a sacred spot for native
people, a group of kayakers, mostly Indigenous youth from the
river’s vast basin began to paddle on Thursday. Ages 13 to 20,
they had learned to kayak for this moment. Stroke by stroke,
mile by mile, day by day, they plan to reach the salty water of
the rugged Northern California coast, more than 300 miles away,
in mid-July. If all goes as planned, the kayakers will
pass the rehabilitated sites of the largest dam-removal project
in U.S. history. They will pass salmon swimming upstream
in places that the fish had not been able to reach since the
early 1900s. They will pass through the ancient territory of
their tribes — the Klamath, Shasta, Karuk, Hoopa Valley and
Yurok among them.
After sitting near capacity for almost a month, Lake Oroville
is beginning to slowly creep back down in water elevation as
the California Department of Water Resources steadily increases
outflows. Lake Oroville was reported at 896.35 feet in
elevation Monday and will likely lower more in the weeks to
come. DWR spokesperson Raquel Borrayo said the lake was once
again bolstered by a wet and snowy winter. “Thanks to
above-average precipitation and average snowpack levels in the
northern Sierra for the last three years, water levels at Lake
Oroville have been peaking in May and June and then slowly
declining to their low point around November,” Borrayo said.
Borrayo said the higher releases are sent into the Feather
River, though some of the water remains local. … On
Monday, inflows into Lake Oroville were estimated at 3,000
cubic feet per second.
Other reservoir and snowpack news around the West:
San Lucas residents, who have been without clean drinking water
for nearly 14 years, may soon see a resolution as local leaders
approve a plan to bring affordable water to the community. In
the small, rural town of San Lucas, with a population of a
little over 400 people, residents struggle with a basic
essential: water. They have lived without proper drinking
water for over a decade, with the cost of clean drinking water
being their biggest obstacle. Now, county leaders, along with
the San Lucas Water District, have a solution. ”We were
able to bring in a partner, CalWater, to be able to be that
water provider, and in doing so the average monthly bill in the
community is expected to be around 90 dollars. But the benefit
beyond that is anybody who is low-income, which we know 90% of
that community is, will only pay about 60% of that bill, so
they are going to average around 50 to 60 dollars a month. As a
water bill, that is doable,” said Monterey County Supervisor
Chris Lopez.
President Donald Trump promised to break California’s water
rules wide open. So far, he’s mostly working within them. Five
months after Trump issued a pair of directives for federal
agencies to overturn state and Biden-era rules limiting water
deliveries, the federal government has done no such thing.
Instead, it’s quietly increasing water flows following the very
rules Trump once railed against — at least for
now. … What’s changed? For one, California had a
wet winter, which tends to smooth over political differences.
… Newsom has also aligned himself more with Trump on water,
as when he jilted Delta-area Democrats last month in pushing to
expedite a tunnel to move more supplies from Northern to
Southern California. More substantively, some of the water
districts that might be expected to agitate for Trump to
overturn Biden-era water rules concede that they actually allow
more deliveries than Trump’s version.
Other Trump administration and California water news:
UC Davis Professor of Law Emeritus Harrison (“Hap”) Dunning
passed away at the end of March 2025 at the age of 86. You can
read the details of his life in the Davis
Enterprise Obituary, including the story of his extensive
work in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, but he is best
known in the UC Davis community for his work on water law and
the public trust doctrine. From serving on the Governor’s
Commission to Review California Water Rights Law in the 1970s
to his work on the California Water Commission and the Bay
Delta Advisor Council, he lived a life of service to the
California water community. California’s public trust doctrine
is built in part on Prof. Dunning’s legacy of scholarship,
which includes a foundation public trust conference at UC Davis
that resulted in several papers cited in the California Supreme
Court’s Mono Lake decision. [Harrison was a longtime
board member of the Water Education Foundation].
… Data centers are central to the internet’s environmental
impact. While they consume a lot of electrical energy, massive
amounts of water and have harmful pollutants, those levels have
been relatively stable in the past decade. … Since AI servers
run much hotter than a typical server, they require much more
water for cooling. In 2023, Google’s data centers consumed over
23 billion liters of freshwater for cooling its servers; for
context, that’s just one billion liters shy of PepsiCo.’s
reported overall freshwater consumption for the same
year. … AI’s environmental impact has been a topic of
increasing concern for researchers like Ren and Mohammad Islam,
a computer science and engineering professor at the University
of Texas, Arlington, who co-authored a paper on “making AI less
thirsty.” “GPT-3 needs to ‘drink’ (i.e., consume) a 500ml
bottle of water for roughly 10 to 50 medium-length responses,
depending on when and where it is deployed,” Ren and Islam’s
paper reports.
… Since Trump returned to the White House in January, his
administration has fired or let go hundreds of climate and
weather scientists — and cut ties to hundreds more who work in
academia or the private sector. His team has eliminated major
climate programs, frozen or cut grants for climate research and
moved to shutter EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program. The
Trump administration has slow-walked climate-related contracts
— including one for the upkeep of two polar weather satellites.
And it’s begun to wall off the United States from international
climate cooperation. … (H)is budget strategy calls for
even deeper cuts in the months and years ahead. That includes
billions of dollars in cuts to climate and weather research at
NOAA and NASA, widely considered two of the world’s top science
agencies. All told, it’s an unprecedented assault on
humanity’s understanding of how global warming is transforming
the planet, scientists say.
Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure
Committee introduced 15 water-related bills
Thursday, targeting everything from the length of federal
permitting to the types of water resources protected by the
Clean Water Act. The bills would benefit oil
and gas companies, farming interests, homebuilders, water
utilities and others who say that environmental reviews and
long permitting timelines are stifling development. They were
introduced by Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee
Chair Mike Collins, (R-GA) … Doug LaMalfa,
(R-Calif.) and others. “The Clean Water Act was
intended to protect water quality, support healthy communities,
and balance the demands of economic growth across the United
States,” (Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman
Sam) Graves said in a statement.
The EPA announced that it will provide $26 million in grant
funding to U.S. states and territories to reduce lead in
drinking water at schools and childcare centers. The funding is
part of the EPA’s ongoing efforts to support testing and
remediation of lead-contaminated water at locations where
children learn and play. Since 2018, the agency has distributed
more than $200 million toward reducing exposure to lead in
drinking water. … Grants will be issued through the Voluntary
School and Child Care Lead Testing and Reduction Grant Program.
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four U.S.
territories are eligible for funding. A separate allocation for
tribal entities is expected to be released soon. The EPA’s
broader efforts include the “3Ts” program — Training, Testing,
and Taking Action — which provides guidance for local and state
officials to implement voluntary lead reduction
initiatives.
On Wednesday, June 11, the U.S. Senate released a provision in
President Trump’s H.R.1 – One Big Beautiful Bill Act that calls
for the sale of approximately 2.2 million to 3.3 million acres
of federal land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service.
… According to the tax and spending bill, lands in
Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New
Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming could be sold off
for energy and/or housing development over the next five years.
… The Greater Yellowstone Coalition wrote via press
release that the privatization of federal lands could lead to
the loss of public access, negatively impact local economies
and result in development that harms wildlife habitat and
water resources. “Our national public lands
are not a luxury, they’re our legacy,” Greater Yellowstone
Coalition Executive Director Scott Christensen wrote. “These
are outdoor spaces that connect us to each other, fuel the
economies of western states and provide clean drinking water to
millions of Americans downstream.”
Canadian Wave-powered desalination innovator Oneka Technologies
has secured regulatory approval to move forward with its
wave-powered desalination pilot project off the coast of Fort
Bragg, California. According to Oneka Technologies, the
Fort Bragg Planning Commission unanimously approved the
initiative on May 28, 2025, following the completion of the
environmental review process. The review included a 30-day
public consultation. The project, partly funded by the
California Department of Water Resources (DWR), is now entering
the deployment phase. … This is said to be the first
seawater desalination pilot to complete the CEQA process since
California updated its regulations in 2015. The system is
designed to produce freshwater using wave energy, operating
off-grid and without greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier this month, Fresno welcomed 448 members of the
Salmonidae family to town. … The 448 adult salmon
represent a milestone for the San Joaquin River Restoration
Program, marking the highest number of captured returns since
spring-run juveniles were reintroduced to the river system in
2014 following the 2008 legal settlement that modified the
operations of Friant Dam to provide minimum flows for native
fish. … Most of this year’s bumper crop were trapped in fyke
nets placed downstream of the Eastside Bypass Control Structure
in Merced County. (Some made their way upstream to Sack Dam
until being captured.) After being placed into tanks with
oxygenated, temperature-controlled water, the salmon were
trucked 120 miles then examined and measured before being
released back into the river in northwest Fresno. … What
measures are taken to ensure nearly 450 adult salmon residing
on the outskirts of a city of 547,000 people remain undisturbed
until they can reproduce? The short answer is enforcement and
education. –Written by Fresno Bee columnist Marek Warszawski.
