New Mexico Mercury

Smog in the San Juan Basin

The Four Corners region has become the CO2 mother lode of New Mexico. Air pollution in the San Juan Basin is like a tiny version of China’s, Mexico City’s, or the smog on a bad day in Los Angeles in the l960’s or like Pittsburgh and l9th Century London used to be.

If New Mexico could do one thing to contribute to the slowing of global warming, it would be to help shut down the coal fired power plants in the San Juan Basin. If it wants to play a part in totally stopping the air pollution that ruins the air in the northwest part of our state, affecting southern Colorado too, it can also stop the coal mining there, and turn off the engines that drive the 30,000 or so gas and oil pumps in the area. Working 24/7 the pumps make the basin not unlike the Los Angeles basin and its freeway system in seemingly perpetual gridlock.

And how, someone might ask, would we supply power to Albuquerque and most of the rest of the state? The answer is as simple as the doing of it is hard: Spend the money and political capital on renewable energy sources, decentralized energy technology, and non-polluting transportation. Is that going to happen any time soon? No. Is it unrealistic? No. It’s completely doable except for the fabulously wealthy obstructionists who don’t want to do it – even though it’s become deadly clear to most of us that coal fired plants around the world are a principle cause of global warming.

It’s also become deadly clear that those who deny climate change are funded predominately by the fossil fuel industry and its moguls.

In the broadest sense, climate change is the issue of the century. It pits the vast majority of humanity against fossil fuel oligarchs around the world who control the mass media discussion of the issue.

Every chance they get, the fossil media plays down the risks of doing nothing. Take, for instance, how the Albuquerque Journal refers to efforts to clean up air pollution in the Four Corners. They call it “haze” abatement, as if all that was at stake was a clearer view of Shiprock from Mesa Verde for the tourists.

It’s not about haze. It’s about the whole process of burning dirty coal and pumping natural gas. And everyone in Durango, Cortez, Farmington, and Pagosa Springs knows it too. They can smell it. They cough from it; their asthma and bronchitis flare up because of it.

Newspapers like the Durango Herald make no bones about their disgust. They charged that the New Mexico and Arizona power companies that own and operate one of the two biggest coal fired power plant in the region in Fruitland, New Mexico, run an operation that is among the 50 dirtiest power plants in the nation, considering nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, and mercury contamination.

Far from curtailing coal fired power plants, ten or so years ago proposals were made for three new coal-fired plants in the areas, one of them owned by a German company. None of them, thankfully, came on line due to strong opposition by local leaders and residents.

In a recent review of William D. Nordhaus’s new book The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, economist Paul Krugman showed the struggle over climate change to be the life and death battle that it really is. He wrote:

“The point is that there’s real power behind the opposition to any kind of climate action – power that warps the debate both by denying climate science and by exaggerating the costs of pollution abatement. And this isn’t the kind of power that can be moved by calm, rational argument.

“Why are some powerful individuals and organizations opposed to action on such a clear and present danger,” Krugman asks. Part of the answer is what he calls “naked self interest,” part of it the fanatical belief in “free markets” solving the problem. But as Nordhaus says “There are no genuine ‘free-market’ solutions to global warming.” And finally, Krugman reasons, “there’s a strong streak in modern American conservatism that rejects not just climate science, but the scientific method in general.”

And here we are in New Mexico, far, far away from the rest of the world it seems. But most of our power, which makes all of our economy and all of our research and development and all our civilized living conditions possible, comes from a couple of the world’s 2,300 coal fired power plants, all of which have to be dismantled as fast as possible if we have a chance to break even in the climate casino.  And what will they be replaced with, a lesser polluting natural gas, a substance New Mexico has in abundance. Gas will lower CO2 emissions by about half we’re told, but solar and wind power would simply end them for good.

And what will we do? We’ll go with gas, New Mexico’s short term hope for striking it rich again. But why choose gas over sunshine? We have an abundance of both. It’s just as Krugman says, naked self-interest on the part of the global natural gas oligarchy. And will folks in the four corners be happier? Probably. The air will be somewhat cleaner, but the pumps will still be pumping and spewing. But will gas lower the odds in humanity’s favor in the climate casino? Not so much.

Yes, burning gas produces some 45 percent less CO2 than burning coal. But fracking for natural gas, and that’s the method that will be universally used, is not only a hellacious and polluting drain on water supplies, but it releases quantities of methane which is a more powerful, if less long-lived, greenhouse gas than CO2 or carbon dioxide.

The EPA says, in fact, that the methane released in fracking for natural gas is “more than 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide.”  The EPA this September proposed the first national limits on CO2 emissions as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling recently that the EPA could continue its plans to limit emissions of carbon-dioxide in coal and natural gas fueled power plants.

What are the global warming gases released by wind and solar energy? What are the deadly hazardous wastes? The answer, of course, to both questions is none or next to none.

Zimmerman Library and the New Fangled UNM

       
This year is the 75th anniversary of the opening of UNM’s Zimmerman Library, the iconic building initially designed by John Gaw Meem which opened in l938.  The Library has grown and changed over the years. Architects George Pearl and Van Gilbert added new wings that are sensitive to the original context, but the essence has remained the same. I wish I could say as much about UNM itself.   

Yes the main campus with its forest and Spanish Pueblo Style architecture is still one of the most beautiful in the country. The students are, as always, inquisitive, energetic, and full of hope. Many faculty members are brilliant, dedicated, and devoted teachers.  But there’s something missing.

While Zimmerman’s a symbol to me of the nobility of learning and the inner peace and strength that it brings and the social good it fosters, UNM, itself, seems to be struggling to remember what it is. 
          
I like it that the new president,  Bob Frank, a UNM alumnus,  decided to live on campus and move into the Pueblo Revival style University House, like so many of his distant predecessors, including its first resident in l930 President James F. Zimmerman. It was a nod to tradition that not many recent presidents have made.          
UNM has been set somewhat adrift with nine presidents since l985, not all of them very likeable, and a number of them more corporate than academic, confusing most everyone with either strident inaction or new plans that went nowhere. The Board of Regents has become a wasteland of political infighting and struggles for personal power.  Little scandals have caused seismic rumbles. The school can’t raise the money it needs to keep up to speed because of a chronic fiddling and fumbling with the fund raising efforts of the UNM Foundation by various administrations.

The Alumni Association remains a solid rock that draws love to the school that it surely deserves, but it’s undergoing change. And corporate thinking has crept into the policy making apparatus of the labyrinthine leadership structure of the school.  Academic bureaucrats are plaguing departments with forms and “rubrics” and “assessments,” trying, it seems sometimes, to turn the University into a widget factory that resembles a technical high school.  The age-old problem of the mammoth medical school and the super-rich athletic department trying to run the main campus has worsened as inflated high hopes and entrenched power have tightened their grips.

And all this isn’t merely a function of size. It’s a matter of intellectual and ethical leadership. University presidents, provosts, and administrators are not corporate executives. They should be people who know, and believe in, what a university is about – teaching, learning, researching, nourishing students and serving the community.  A university is not about statistical models and achieving numerical goals.  Many administrators are fine people and work hard for students. But nothing makes a Lobo alumnus more irritable than to hear stories of how wonderfully students are taken care of at New Mexico State compared to the high priced job factory UNM seems to be becoming.

A lot of old timers yearn for the days when UNM really thought of itself as a community of scholars, proud of its calling, and loath to kowtow to plutocrats and political hacks who wanted to make a killing off the school as a power base, or conform the school to right-wing anti-intellectual think tanks while hollowing out its academic mission.

The old days were different at UNM.  Take the task of moving libraries, for instance. After UNM’s Zimmerman Library was completed in April 1938, long lines of students and faculty hand carried, and sometimes carted in little red wagons, the university’s library holdings from the first library near Hodgin Hall to Zimmerman’s towering stacks. President James F. Zimmerman, himself, lead the first parade of book haulers across campus.  The whole process took two weeks of commitment from the entire university community.

It seems almost too idyllic. But that’s what a learning community should be – a place of friendship, mutual service, a camaraderie of aspiring and accomplished scholars.

That’s one reason why Zimmerman Library is still so important. It represents an ideal and a set of values, as well as being the repository of 3 million print and electronic books. It’s a place to think, to explore, to innovate. That’s what you are supposed to do there, exercise your intellect and imagination, fulfill your curiosity, participate in the life of the mind.

When I first came to UNM in l958, the school did seem to be a community of scholars and students, working together. Young people registered for classes in Johnson Gym, and met their potential professors. Student advising was done by fulltime faculty.  Yes, that kind of effort was the function of a smaller school, only 7,000 students then, but those students could sense that the faculty did constitute a community of learning that they wanted to be a part of.  And the president at the time, Tom Popejoy, probably knew most everyone on campus after a while.

And always at the heart of everything was Zimmerman Library with its great reading rooms and magnificent ceilings of rows of corbels and vigas that made you feel as if you were in a church and that learning was a sacred task, that the university was there to help you learn how to live a good life, and maybe even be a the kind of person that would inspire your own self-respect. It was a serious place full of the joy of understanding, and still is. The symbol of the Library urged you to teach yourself the secrets of hard work, how be organized and self-disciplined, how to imagine an ideal variation of yourself and how to work toward achieving it. Zimmerman Library is still a place that tells students, just by its presence alone, that the world is there to be known, that it’s right at their finger tips, and that all it takes is effort, and the wise guidance of professors who have your best interests at heart.

Zimmerman represents a world in which students are not cyphers, not mere subjects of statistical performance evaluations, but future citizens of the world, young people upon whom the future of civilization and the humanitarian ideals of global justice will depend.

What Happens If the Colorado River Runs Dry

A friend of the Mercury was in Mexico City last month and reported that the municipal water supply in certain areas was being rationed, at the moment, by a very simple and thorough method. It’s turned completely off on Saturday and Sunday.  Millions of people save up water during the week and then don’t turn on their faucets for two days.

That’s what’s happened so far in one of the world’s greatest cities suffering from years of drought and years of overusing the aquifer around and under it. Climate change has hit the Valley of Mexico with withering intensity.

Mexico City has been rationing water off and on all during the early years of the 21st century. Its population is just a little less than that served by the Colorado River, the largest river in the Southwest. If the 14 years of drought that’s lowered the Colorado’s major reservoirs by over half continues through this winter with diminished snowpack, folks in Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, could see their water from the Colorado rationed, curtailed, or worse by 2016 or earlier.  The record rainfall in Colorado this summer did little to raise the levels of Lake Powell and Lake Meade. And once the rain ceased, the region returned to its underlying dry condition.

The current drought is the worst of its kind in 100 years and weather predictions do not hold out much hope for a snowpack turnaround anytime soon. 

Lake Powell, the feeder reservoir on the river, is at 45% capacity from low snowpack in the Rockies. The federal government is curtailing releases of water from Powell to Lake Meade this year by nearly 8 percent as a conservation measure. It is from Meade and other dams downstream that most of the desert west gets its water.

If the drought continues like this over the next seven years, researchers at Scripps Research Institute predicted five years ago that both Lake Meade and Lake Powell could be little better than useless puddles by 2021.

It’s all about snowpack in the Rockies and the other watersheds that feed the Colorado. Some 90 percent of the river’s water comes from winter snow. One can almost tell the future by how much it snows in Colorado. If the drought and low snowpack continues every major city in the west will suffer. And because New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah - the snowpack states, if you will - are required by the Colorado Compact to deliver vast amounts of water to California, Nevada, and Arizona on pain of having their own water cut off or severely curtailed, Albuquerque could find itself in a situation grave enough to require strict water rationing to stave off an eventual collapse of its aquifer.

What might all this mean?

It would mean, for sure, that without Colorado River water Albuquerque would be 100 percent dependent again on the Middle Rio Grande aquifer, which, no matter how much water residents conserve, will be depleted in an extended drought without snowpack or rainfall to slowly replenish it. We got along just fine for most of our history without having to drink river water. We only started to do that 2008. But we were draining the aquifer way too fast. And, unhappily, despite the profound reluctance of city officials and even many water experts to admit it, we have polluted our aquifer with superfund sites, potential superfund sites, and myriad other acts of unconscionable sloppiness and irresponsibility and bad plumbing for decade upon decade. So who really knows how much safe water we have left to drink?

It’s also certain that the Rio Grande Bosque would suffer terribly if we lost the use of Colorado River water. The Bosque has thrived on Colorado water since the mid-l970s when the Azotea tunnel under the continental divide, as well as other engineering works, allowed waters from tributaries of the San Juan to be stored at Heron Lake and distributed downstream into the Rio Grande.

Should the drought that afflicts the entire region not lift, the Rio Grande watershed would be affected too, as it already is. And the Bosque up and down the Rio Grande, could die off.

If this drought extends seven more years, with moments of wet relief not withstanding, Albuquerque could no longer deny the impact of climate change on its water supply. It could no longer get away with the terrific lies about its “reliable” water supply.  Like every other city in the west Albuquerque would start to lose population.  Questions about the quality of its drinking water would arise, especially in light of the 24 million gallon jet fuel spill near the sweet spot of the aquifer. The already nasty relationship between urban folks and “irrigators” or farmers would worsen. The fledging organic farming movement in the Middle Rio Grande Valley could well get caught up in such bitterness and suffer badly.

Is there anything to be done to prepare for such a possibility? I’m not sure.  Would massive expenditures for gray water and black water recycling and infrastructure help? Would more stringent water rationing have a lasting impact?  Would taps running dry for days at a time every week get the message across? Please don’t let us hear about “desalinization” in the desert, though, with its potential mountains of salt and arsenic waste. We can guess, however, that growth as we know it would come to a halt. Infill development would win the marketplace war with sprawl development for obvious reasons. Who wants to be stranded 30 miles from town with no water?

These are fascinating times to be a Westerner. We are at the mercy of the weather, as we’ve always been, no matter how hard we’ve tried to disguise it or deny it. I wonder if the citizens who watch the snowpack diminish will become a potent political force in municipal politics, demanding that conservation measures be taken, and growth incentives be revised and redirected?

An editorial in the Arizona Republic this weekend, put the western drought in perspective, both accurately and foolishly. “The fundamental cornerstone of the Arizona economy in 2020 must be an assured supply of water adequate to the needs of a growing urban population. Nothing was more important…50 years ago. Nothing will matter more in 2020.”

Arizona, like New Mexico, still harbors the wild and increasingly idiotic notion that cities can continue to grow the way they used to when they had enough water. That is simply an impossibility. Population growth can no longer be the bottom line measure of urban economic success in the West unless, of course, we’re going to ship water in from Mars.

(Photos: Coal smoke stack by Senor Codo, Zimmerman Library by Ryan Haack, dry river by biofriendly)