Dead Pools And Toxic Dust: Great Salt Lake, And Lake Powell Drying Up, And Causing Real Problems.

Satellite view of Great Salt Lake in Utah. The 
lighter areas around the lake used to be under
water, but now are dry lakebed areas that 
blow potentially toxic dust into
populated areas east of the lake. 

Here in Vermont, we might be complaining about brown lawns, low water in our rivers and worries about our wells as our drought settles in. 

But a mega-drought out west is creating challenges far worse than ours.  

We have two examples, both involving large but badly shrinking lakes.

The Great Salt Lake is so low that dust blowing off now dry lakebeds are creating health hazards for those living nearby. 

And Lake Powell, an immense reservoir in the Southwest is getting so low that some worry it might not be able to provide crucial water supplies and hydroelectric power to millions.

GREAT SALT LAKE

The Great Salt Lake is at near record lows, exposing expanses of flat, formerly submerged lake beds which were once part of this lake. 

An area encompassing 120 square miles that was once under salty water is now dusty playa, which is a word for dry lake bed. 

Gusty winds stir up the dust and blow it into fast-growing neighborhoods near Salt Lake City.  The Wasatch Front, which encompasses the city's metropolitan area, has a population of about 2.6 million.

The dust blowing into many of those neighborhoods likely contains dangerous substances, such as arsenic and lead. 

Studies have shown these and other substances in the Great Salt Lake dust can cause cancer or cardiovascular disease, but no comprehensive research has been done on how all this is affecting people who live in the region.

Similar salt lakes that have largely dried up in other locations in the world, like the Aral Sea in central Asia and Lake Urmia in Iran have resulted in health problems in populations nearby that have been exposed to dust blowing off those lakes. 

The Great Salt Lake has no outlet. How deep it gets depends on how much water flows into it, and how much evaporates in Utah's hot summers. The lake has always gone up and down, but since the 1980s the trend has been downward. 

Part of the decline is due to the rising population and increased water usage for industry, farming, construction and people moving to the area. Utah is one of the fastest growing states.

Climate change has a role, too. Big droughts have allowed the lake to slip to such low levels.  Some scientists say this is regions worst drought in 1,200 years.

As the Washington Post explains, the state legislature passed several laws aimed at conserving water. Public opinion polls indicate Utahans firmly back those conservation efforts. 

But the lake won't turn around anytime soon, if at all. So the dust will keep blowing into populated areas. 

There's not a significant monitoring program along the Great Salt Lake to assess what's in the dust blowing off the playa and how dangerous it is. 

WaPo again:

"The counties near the lake have six federally regulated air quality monitors that track lake dust. The monitors don't routinely look at the composition of the dust.

While the EPA said it has no plans to monitor the lake dust on a federal level, Marisa Lubeck, an agency spokesperson, added that it 'supports Utah's leadership in actively monitoring and conducting research to understand dust from the Great Salt Lake and its potential impacts."

So for now, nobody in Utah knows how much bad stuff their breathing from the now- Not As Great Salt Lake blows dust into some of Utah's fastest growing cities, towns and neighborhoods.

LAKE POWELL 

This lake on the Utah-Arizona border has been plagued by low water levels for a number of years now, thanks to that mega-drought in the West and pressure from increased water usage by a growing population.

It's now at its lowest level in three years, which is forcing boat launches to close and raising fears about water supplies and hydroelectric power. generation.  

Per USA Today

Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border remains very
low, and if it continues dropping, water and electrical 
supplies could be at risk for millions of people.

 "There's a chance that Lake Powell's water level could fall to an elevation that would force the stoppage of power generation at the Glen Canyon Dam, which would affect electricity supply to millions of people in many states."  

Things could get extremely dire for millions of people if the water level gets too much lower. USA Today again:

".....another concern is the chance that Lake Powell could reach so-called 'dead pool' status by December, 2026. That is the level at which a dam can no longer release water downstream.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Department of the Interior, if dead pool is reached at Lake Powell, residents of seven western states,  - Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California, - could see power blackouts and water shortages."

Both Lake Powell and Lake Mead, another critical reservoir in the West are only at one third of their capacity.

We've been here before. In 2022, the reservoirs were only 25 percent full, but a couple of wet winters allowed water levels in both lakes to rise slightly, preventing an immediate crisis.

But the lake levels are falling again, and there's no guarantee a wet winter will save things again.  Climate change, with its drought and added heat, are evaporating water faster than it can go into the reservoirs.  

Recent research suggests that climate change has altered a complex relationship between the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean. This reconfigured atmospheric dance between air and ocean encourages drought in the Southwest. 

That's only part of the problem. Even if the region miraculously cooled off and got wetter, overuse and a rising population are keeping the Lakes Powell and Mead from stabilizing and adding capacity. 

Opinion is mixed as to whether Lake Powell will hit "dead pool" within the next year or two or not. But now is the time to start thinking about alternatives in the region, in case water and power supplies are eventually disrupted.  

Trump Continues To Rage Against Wind And Solar Power With Lies

Donald Trump ramped up his hatred of wind turbines
and solar power this week, which is bad news both
for climate change and an increasingly
serious electricity shortfall. 

 So we had this bit of tedium recently from Donald Trump via his ironically named social media site Truth Social:  

"Any State that has built or relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENEGY COSTS. THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!  We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!! MAGA." 

As usual, I don't even know where to begin with this train wreck/word salad.  But he clearly keeps ranting about wind turbines and solar installations. When he fixates on something, he doesn't let go. Usually for irrational reasons. 

One theory is that the wind turbines  Scotland installed offshore of Trump's golf course are ugly, at least to him, so therefore, all windmills around the world must go.

Or something like that. 

This latest screed came after the Trump administration announced Wednesday that going forward, he will not approve solar and wind power projects. 

Additionally, Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins said Monday that his department would rescind "all programs building solar panels on our farmland." 

Also this week, the Trump administration launched a national security probe into imported wind turbines and their components. This seems to be a prelude to big tariffs on wind energy. 

The administration, in typical fashion, does not give us reasons or evidence behind the probe. But as The Hill tells us, they're looking at the role of foreign supply chains, the affects foreign government subsidies and predatory trade practices. That sounds like economics, not national security, but who knows?

The Trump people said they are also checking into whether there's an ability to weaponize foreign-built wind turbines.  I'm not sure what that is. Maybe they think China can launch nuclear warheads or some damn thing from turbines installed near Sioux City, Iowa or something?

Spoiler: They can't. But who knows whether there's some other security risk. Again, we haven't been given any evidence so far. don't have evidence of that. 

THE NEED

Solar and wind power are great for combating climate change as an alternative to fossil fuel. But there's also a more immediate need for these sources of electricity. 

Electricity demand is outpacing supply in some parts as the United States, as CNBC reports. 

Electricity costs have gone up for many American consumers, but experts are saying that's mostly because of growing demand from data centers and related industries.

Per USA Today:  

"'We need to build more power generation now, and that includes renewable energy. The U.S. will need roughly 118 gigawatts (the equivalent of 12 New York Cities) of new power generation in the next four years to prevent price spikes and potential shortages,' said Ray Long, CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. Only a limited set of technologies - solar, wind, batteries and some natural gas - can be built at that scale in that frame."

Solar, wind and battery storage would ease the electricity shortage due to AI and expanded data centers the quickest, because you get them up and running pretty quickly. Solar and wind comprise most of the projects in line to connect to the grid. 

So, what Trump is doing is actually driving up the cost of we'll pay for electricity more. You know, supply and demand. Less supply, the price goes up. 

He's also creating a danger of electricity shortages, perhaps doing yet another thing to turn us into a third world country by causing blackouts to power the grid.  And if one part of the grid goes, it can cause an imbalance that can cause the whole thing to go dark. 

That's obviously a worse-case scenario, but since Trump is so cavalier about everything else, he also wouldn't care if all us serfs freeze in the dark.  

Will AI Make Climate Change Worse?

A coal-fired electricity generating plant in Pennsylvania'
AI is greatly increasing electrical demand, meaning
decommissioning fossil fuel run plants like this
are being postponed, harming the 
battle against climate change. 

 It turns out it takes TONS of electricity to generate AI. 

So much so that electricity demand in the United States, which had been on the stable side in recent years, is set to soar.  And that might screw up the battle against climate change. 

The amount of electricity needed for data centers will more than double between now and 2035. The increase is the equivalent to the amount of electricity the entire state of California used in 2022.

According to Environment America Research Policy Center: 

"Data centers currently make up 3 percent of America's energy demand but that is expected to rise to 8 percent by 2030.

The increase in data center electricity is primarily due to the significant data processing needs of Artificial Intelligence. As AI development accelerates, the need for data processing grows, and companies have to build more and larger data centers to meet those needs - and those data centers use a lot of electricity."

Moving toward EVs and other conversions that supposedly move away from fossil fuel is of course a good thing if you don't want to worsen climate change. 

But if demand for electricity skyrockets, the worry is some of that needed electrical generation won't be clean energy.  

Until now, electricity use hasn't grown much because of efforts to improve energy efficiency. As Environment America points out, the cleanest energy is the energy that never gets used in the first place.

They go on:

"When electricity demand is lower or at least stable and predictable, it is much easier to meet that demand with clean energy like wind and solar. A rapid and unexpected surge in electricity demand is the last thing we need, particularly when energy demand is already expected to grow due to electrification of buildings and transportation."

Environment America notes that utilities have extended the life span of coal plants and proposed new methane gas plants to meet the expected growth in demand from all these data centers. 

Each AI query a person does uses up a lot of juice. As NPR reported, one query to ChatGPT uses about as much electricity as what could power one light bulb for 20 minutes.  One ChatGPT query needs about ten times the amount of electricity as a Google search query.

So imagine what happens when millions of people are poking around Chat GPT or other sources of AI help. 

And as NPR tells us, a majority of that energy needed for AI still comes from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas.

The Washington Post tells us that soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina. 

Not only does this spiraling demand threaten to aggravate climate change, it also is making regulators worry that residential ratepayers will be stuck paying for the upgrades to the electrical grid

 Then there's this question. Like almost every Next Big Thing I've ever seen, there tends to be an over-enthusiasm bubble which might hit here. 

Will tech companies overbuild data centers only to see demand for AI fall short, maybe because of government regulation,  just too much capacity, or maybe the Next, Next Big Thing will come along after AI to wow the masses. 

If that happens, will we have built climate-damaging fossil fuel generating plants for no good reason?  And how much unnecessary emissions would that add to the world? 

I guess as the world gets more complicated, so does the battle against climate change. 

Worries Grow About Isolated North Carolina/Tennessee Wracked By Helene

 I, along with lots of other people, are especially worried about the people in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. 

Western North Carolina's 
road network is virtually
destroyed by the Helene
flooding, as can be seen here 

It's isolated from the catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene. I'm not just talking about a few backwoods hollows in the mountains. It's virtually the whole region. The crisis is worsening, and I fear the death toll up there will skyrocket.

Much like Vermont, there's tons of narrow, winding mountain roads in the region leading to an unknown number of houses, trailers, camps, resorts and local tourist attractions.  The flooding and mudslides up there were cataclysmic. Since there's no communications and electricity working, and nobody can get up there, nobody knows how many people have passed away, or are dying while they wait.

"This is looking to be Buncombe County's own Hurricane Katrina," Avril Pinder, the manager of the county which includes Asheville, told the Washington Post.  

And this from CNN:

"Officials in Buncombe County, North Carolina have received more than a thousand missing person reports through an online form, County Manager Avril Pinder said Sunday, cautioning that figure likely includes duplicate submissions and that communications outages mean people are struggling to reach one another, 

Gov. Cooper echoed that, telling reporters in a news conference, 'We know that a lot of these people are simply out of communication and are OK,"

In other words, there are certainly not 1,000 people out there that have lost their lives. The vast majority - I hope - just can't be reached via roads or phone or any means. 

But that doesn't mean everybody. Social media posts described people being swept away and not found. As the Washington Post tells us:

"The toll from the storm is likely to rise. Taylor Jones, Buncombe County's director of emergency management, said there had been multiple fatalities there, though he declined to provide exact figures. He said officials were resorting to their 'mass fatality plan' and trying to notify relatives, a process complicated by service outages."

 At 10 a.m. today, officials at a press conference confirmed at least 10 deaths in Buncombe County, reports the Asheville Citizen Times. 

As of Sunday morning, Asheville, an absolutely lovely, artsy city of about 94,000 at the foot of the Smokey Mountains, is pretty much cut off.  (Think Burlington, Vermont, only somewhat bigger and generally more upscale).

Most roads in and out of the city were still impassable. True, only parts of the city were inundated and destroyed by flood waters. But the entire metro area had no electricity, no cell service, in internet, no water through Saturday and into today at least.  

A scene from western North Carolina this week that 
almost exactly matches a similar photo taken after
devastating floods in Lyndonville, Vermont on July 30.

One news crew from Raleigh found a long roundabout way out of Asheville via South Carolina, but the service station was almost out of gas and probably is by now.  

Crowds gathered at the public library in downtown Asheville Sunday morning because wifi was available there. It was perhaps the only place in town where wifi was reachable. It does look like a crew arrived in Asheville this afternoon to set up Starlink so that other people could access wifi.

Still, it might be two or more days before electricity is restored. Power lines are down everywhere, and the city's water treatment plant was badly damaged by the flooding. 

As of Sunday morning, water and food distribution sites had not yet been set up, mostly because of transportation problems caused by the flooding. Helicopters have begun dropping supplies in remote areas. 

Small towns outside of Asheville like Castle Rock, Old Fort, Roan Mountain and Swannanoa have been almost completely destroyed. Accessing them will be harder than getting into Asheville.

I've vacationed in this part of North Carolina in the past and absolutely loved it. I hope the death toll doesn't really go up, and I hope, like everyone, that adequate aid gets there right away. As bad as the flooding and the suffering from it was in Vermont in the summers of 2023 and 2024, North Carolina and surrounding areas are far worse.