The Los Angeles Times

From spectacular vistas to the pits: A decades-long public land battle continues in the California desert

The Eagle Mountain iron mine closed more than 30 years ago, and it still haunts the park that borders it on three sides.

By Bettina Boxall, Contact Reporter, Reporting From Desert Center, California   August 7, 2017

Just beyond the southeast corner of Joshua Tree National Park, rows of boarded-up houses, gouged mountainsides and concrete ruins are an ugly reminder of the never-ending battle over the West’s public lands.

This scarred piece of California desert is what’s left of one of the country’s largest open-pit mining operations and the little company town that Kaiser Steel Corp. built after World War II. More than three decades after the Eagle Mountain iron mine closed, it still haunts the park that borders it on three sides.

Plans to turn the site into a huge landfill and dump as much as 20,000 tons a day of Southland garbage into the gaping mine pits died in 2013 after years of court battles. Now, a private company wants to use the pits for a $2-billion hydropower project.

The plant, proponents say, would help boost renewable energy use in Southern California and lower greenhouse gas emissions. But park officials fear the hydropower project could draw down local groundwater levels and harm wildlife.

The Eagle Mountain tract, shaped like a handgun aimed at the park’s interior, offers a lesson in what can happen when federal monument protections are stripped from public lands — as President Trump’s administration is considering doing at a number of national monuments in the West.

“It’s been a sordid history,” said Mark Butler, a former Joshua Tree superintendent who is retired from the National Park Service.

It’s been a sordid history.

— Mark Butler, former Joshua Tree National Park superintendent Steve Lowe, president of Eagle Crest Energy Co., stands amid the ruins of the ore loading area. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Joshua Tree National Monument on roughly 825,000 acres of federal and railroad holdings northeast of Palm Springs, capping a hard-fought campaign to conserve a singular desert landscape of Joshua trees, massive boulders and spectacular vistas.

But the monument’s ban on new mining claims infuriated gold and silver prospectors who’d long mined the area. In the 1940s, Kaiser Steel bought old patented claims to iron deposits in the Eagle Mountains and started digging them up.

In 1950, Congress shrank the monument by more than a third, chopping a chunk off the northern boundary and the Eagle Mountain area. The way was cleared for Kaiser to blast millions of tons of iron ore out of the mountainsides over the next three decades and ship it by rail to the roaring blast furnaces of the company’s Fontana steel plant.

The 1994 California Desert Protection Act that upgraded Joshua Tree to a national park added much of the Eagle Mountains to the park. But the law omitted the abandoned mine and surrounding federal land.

The reservoirs would be part of what Steve Lowe calls “an elegant solution” to a problem California is confronting.

On a recent day, the town remnants baked in 120-degree heat beneath a mountain of mine tailings. The hulking ruins of the ore loading area looked like a bombed-out village in Afghanistan. Rock benches traced the excavation of four huge pits.

Jeff Harvey and Steve Lowe of Eagle Crest Energy Co. climbed to the top of a metal tower that Kaiser foremen had used to direct mine traffic.

The 360-degree view swept from park peaks to the north, over the moonscape of the mine to the haze-veiled Chuckwalla Valley in the distance.

“This would be full of water,” said Harvey, looking at one of two pits that Eagle Crest wants to convert to reservoirs.

Separated by about 1,400 feet of elevation, the reservoirs would be part of what Lowe calls “an elegant solution” to a problem California is confronting as it boosts renewable energy production.

The sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow according to peak electricity demand. Utilities need some way of storing wind and solar power — or shifting the production time.

One way is with battery systems. Another is through pumped water — the method that Eagle Crest proposes to use in an area that averages less than 4 inches of rain a year.

When the solar panels and wind turbines that are sprouting from the desert floor churn out more power than the electrical grid needs, Eagle Crest would use some of that excess to pump water through an underground tunnel system to the 191-acre upper reservoir.

Later in the day, when energy demand climbs, the water would be released back into the tunnel system, powering turbines and generating electricity at it flowed downhill to the 163-acre lower reservoir.

Pumped storage is not new. There are seven of the operations scattered around California at reservoirs and lakes. Eagle Mountain would be the biggest in the state, capable of producing 1,300 megawatts of electricity — enough to supply nearly 1 million homes.

Like all pumped hydropower systems, it would actually consume more energy pushing water uphill than it generates with the downhill flow.

Unlike the other California operations, Eagle Crest would use groundwater — piped from three new wells drilled on private land in the Chuckwalla Valley to the south.

Over the project’s four-decade life, the company says, it would withdraw a total of about 100,000 acre-feet from the Chuckwalla aquifer. That is enough to supply 200,000 homes for a year.

It is also enough to worry park officials.

They don’t think groundwater feeds their springs. But the Pinto Basin aquifer on Joshua Tree’s east side supplies the Chuckwalla with underflow. Draw down the Chuckwalla, they fear, and groundwater levels in the park could drop.

“The aquifers that underlie the park are ancient,” Joshua Tree Superintendent David Smith said. “Once you start depleting those reservoirs, no one knows what’s actually going to happen. How will that affect the park.… I don’t want to take that risk.”

He cited a 2012 research paper by federal scientists who concluded that groundwater recharge rates in the Chuckwalla Basin may be much lower than previously estimated, suggesting the aquifer is already in overdraft.

A view of the lower portion of the Eagle Mountain mine site and abandoned company town. A large solar farm is in the distance. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Eagle Crest, which bought the 10,000-acre Eagle Mountain site two years ago for $25 million, disputes the paper. Even if it is accurate, Harvey says, company wells would deplete the Chuckwalla aquifer by less than 1%.

Groundwater isn’t the park’s only worry. The hydropower project would disturb an area that has been largely quiet for decades, allowing bighorn sheep and other wildlife to return.

Butler warns that plopping two artificial lakes on such arid land would attract ravens and other predators that could prey on threatened desert tortoises and other park wildlife.

“You’re going to be essentially changing the ecology of that region,” said Butler, who was Joshua Tree’s superintendent from 2011 to 2014.

Despite the park service objections, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Eagle Crest a hydropower license in 2014.

In April, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced it was preparing to approve a right of way on federal land outside of the park for 12 miles of Eagle Crest transmission lines and a 15-mile, buried water pipeline from the wells.

Both agencies essentially concluded that the hydropower project would not cause significant environmental harm and would not deplete the aquifer over the long term.

“It’s a FERC-licensed project, so it is pretty much the law of the land right now,” Smith said with an air of resignation.

He grew up in San Diego County, the son of desert rats who headed for Joshua Tree and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park on the weekends. He learned how to climb on Joshua Tree’s boulders. He got his first permanent park service job there.

“I love Joshua Tree. It’s part of who I am as a person,” said Smith, who succeeded Butler as superintendent.

He manages a park that is surging in popularity — Smith expects 3 million visitors this year — and is beset by outside pressures.

Development is on its doorstep. The nitrogen in Southland smog fertilizes invasive grasses that spread across the park, carrying ecologically destructive wildfires with them. Global warming threatens the park’s signature Joshua trees.

“Once you start depleting those reservoirs, no one knows what’s actually going to happen…. I don’t want to take that risk.”

— David Smith, superintendent at Joshua Tree National Park

Weed-filled streets and boarded-up houses are all that is left of the company town. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Yes, he acknowledges, the Eagle Crest project could help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change. “My concern is that the solution does not cause problems in the park,” he said.

Lowe, Eagle Crest’s president, ticks off the ways in which the abandoned mine is “a great site” for his project.

It is close to existing electrical transmission corridors and solar farms — a new one glints just down Kaiser Road. And, he says, it’s “repurposing a brownfield site that is never going to wind up the way it was.”

Lowe and his late father, Art, founded the company in 1991 and started pursuing the hydropower project despite the competing landfill proposal.

Initially, they eyed the wind turbines popping up in the desert. Now, with the growth of solar and California’s push for renewable energy, Lowe figures his time has come.

“The grid needs this,” said Lowe, who runs the company out of Santa Monica.

Two years ago Eagle Crest signed up a development partner, NextEra Energy, a large energy producer with several solar farms in the California desert, including Desert Sunlight, the 4,000-acre operation down the road.

But Lowe has yet to line up utility customers for the hydropower. And conservation groups have filed protests of the pending right-of-way approval in a move that foreshadows another court fight.

The long battle over Eagle Mountain, it seems, is not yet over.

“Since those boundaries were changed, there’s been almost 70 years of fighting over this landscape,” said David Lamfrom, California desert director for one of the groups, the National Parks Conservation Assn.

“So when people are thinking about the real implications of rolling back national monuments — they are severe.”

“I’ve spent a decade of my career trying to correct past wrongs as they relate to Joshua Tree National Park,” he added.

EcoWatch

Union of Concerned Scientists

Three Renewable Energy Numbers to Impress Your Friends With: 7, 43, 50

By John Rogers August 5, 2017

Next time you’re talking with a friend about the exciting things happening in our electricity sector (aren’t you always?), here are three easy numbers for remembering how we’re doing: 7, 43 and 50. That’s: wind energy’s progress, solar energy’s growth and the number of states making it happen.

Wind’s Growth = 7

Renewables on the Rise, a new report from the Environment America Research & Policy Center and the Frontier Group, details some of the progress we’ve made in this country over the last decade, and includes handy accompanying graphics. Here’s a glimpse of what it all looks like.

Growth in renewable energy in recent years has meant we produced almost seven times as much wind-powered electricity in the U.S. in 2016 as we did in 2007. And wind’s share of our national electricity generation increased from 0.8 percent to 5.5 percent.

All told, the tens of thousands of wind turbines dotting the landscape generate enough to cover the electricity needs of some 25 million typical American homes.

Environment America / Frontier Group

The wind action is taking place from coast to coast and particularly in plenty of places in between, from coal-has-been-king-but-here-comes-wind Wyoming to where cod rule (think offshore wind).

And, increasingly, wind is an energy option that decision makers ignore (or get wrong) at their peril.

Solar’s Growth = 43

Recent gains have in some ways been even more impressive for solar. The baseline is maybe a little tough to pin down (and our own calculations suggest an even greater growth), but the new report says that we got 43 times as much electricity from solar in 2016 as in 2007.

Environment America / Frontier Group

That steep upward trajectory has taken solar from a minuscule 0.03 percent of U.S. electricity generation to 1.4 percent. Still small, but definitely noticeable—and definitely worthy of notice, in terms of solar past and future. As my colleague Julie McNamara points out in that post, our 19.5 billion kilowatt-hours of solar generation in 2016 would have been enough to cover residential electricity needs in half the states.

And solar, like wind, isn’t resting on its laurels. Just last year, the U.S. industry installed enough new solar capacity to provide 2 million homes’ worth of electricity.

States Involved = 50

So where’s all this progress coming from? Though some are still finding their way, every state has some generation from solar and wind, and some have taken those technologies to pretty impressive heights.

For Texas, it (mostly wind) added up last year to 59 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to keep 4 billion light bulbs burning every evening of the year. In North Dakota, wind generation added up to the equivalent of 45 percent of the state’s electricity consumption; in Iowa, 42 percent. For California and Hawaii, solar, with help from wind, produced enough to have accounted for one out of every six kilowatt-hour consumed.

Sure, some states really need to get in on the action in a much bigger way (the details in the back of the new report help highlight leaders and … others). And they’d benefit in doing that by reaping all that renewables have to offer.

But even states without much yet on the generation side are contributing—and benefiting—in other ways, through manufacturing, for example, of components for solar or wind installations (see map). And that progress has meant jobs—in most cases, more solar and wind jobs than coal has to offer.

Our 50 united states are far from done. Every one of them has a lot more potential in solar, wind and other renewables. Taking it the next step, and beyond, will be crucial.

But for a moment, acknowledging and celebrating clean energy progress is really important. For that, for the near term, just remember 7, 43 and 50.

American Wind Energy Association

John Rogers is a senior energy analyst with expertise in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies and policies at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

EcoWatch

The Poison Papers: Secret Concerns of Industry and Regulators on the Hazards of Pesticides and Other Chemicals

By Center For Media and Democracy July 27, 2017

Risa Scott / RF Scott Imagery

The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy released a trove of rediscovered and newly digitized chemical industry and regulatory agency documents Wednesday stretching back to the 1920s. The documents are available here.

Together, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press. These papers will transform our understanding of the hazards posed by certain chemicals on the market and the fraudulence of some of the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment.

“These documents represent a tremendous trove of previously hidden or lost evidence on chemical regulatory activity and chemical safety. What is most striking about these documents is their heavy focus on the activities of regulators,” Dr. Jonathan Latham, executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, said. “Time and time again regulators went to the extreme lengths of setting up secret committees, deceiving the media and the public, and covering up evidence of human exposure and human harm. These secret activities extended and increased human exposure to chemicals they knew to be toxic.”

The Poison Papers are a compilation of more than 20,000 documents obtained from federal agencies and chemical manufacturers via open records requests and public interest litigation. They include scientific studies and summaries of studies, internal memos and reports, meeting minutes, strategic discussions and sworn testimonies.

The majority of these documents have been scanned and digitized for the first time and represent nearly three tons of material. The regulatory agency sources of these documents include: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense. Chemical manufacturers referenced in the documents include: Dow, Monsanto, DuPont and Union Carbide, as well as many smaller manufacturers and the commercial testing companies who worked for them.

The Poison Papers catalogue the secret concerns of industry and regulators over the hazards of pesticides and other chemicals and their efforts to conceal those concerns.

Most of the Poison Papers were collected by author and activist Carol Van Strum.

“In total, the stark truth revealed by these 50 years of documents is that the entire pesticide industry could not exist without lies, coverups, rampant fraud, and government enablers,” said Van Strum, who authored the 1983 book Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights.

Corporate concealment is not a new story. What is novel in the Poison Papers is the abundant evidence that EPA and other regulators were often knowing participants or even primary instigators of these cover-ups. These regulators failed to inform the public of the hazards of dioxins and other chemicals; of evidence of fraudulent independent testing; and of widespread human exposure. The papers thus reveal, in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves, an elaborate universe of deception and deceit surrounding many pesticides and synthetic chemicals.

The chemicals most often discussed in the documents include dioxins, herbicides and pesticides (such as 2,4-D, Dicamba, Permethrin, Atrazine and Agent Orange) and PCBs. Some of these chemicals are among the most toxic and persistent ever manufactured. Except for PCBs, almost every chemical discussed in the Poison Papers is still manufactured and sold today, either as products or as product contaminants.

“The Poison Papers will be a tremendous resource for researchers, the media, and everyday Americans worried about many of the chemicals used on farm fields and in common consumer products,” said Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy.

Explore: Some of the 20,000+ documents in this repository have surfaced over the years. Many have never been seen online or publicly written about. The Poison Papers therefore offer a unique opportunity for researchers, the public and the media to discover much more about what was known about chemical toxicity, when and by whom.

Access: You can access the papers at PoisonPapers.org. Important instructions on how best to search these old documents are also available here and on the website.

Poison Papers Reveal:

Secrecy — They disclose EPA meeting minutes of a secret high-level dioxins working group that admitted dioxins are extraordinarily poisonous chemicals. Internal minutes contradict the agency’s longstanding refusal to regulate dioxins or set legal limits.

Collusion — They demonstrate EPA collusion with the pulp and paper industry to “suppress, modify or delay” the results of the congressionally-mandated National Dioxin Study, which found high levels of dioxins in everyday products, such as baby diapers and coffee filters, as well as pulp and paper mill effluents.

Deception — They provide important new data on the infamous Industrial Bio-Test (IBT) scandal. By the late 1970s, it was known that more than 800 safety studies performed by IBT on 140 chemicals produced by 38 chemical manufacturers were nonexistent, fraudulent, or invalid. The Poison Papers, however, show that EPA and its Canadian counterpart, the Health Protection Branch (HPB), colluded with pesticide manufacturers, to keep invalidly registered products on the market and covered up massive problems with many IBT tests.

Cover-up — The papers also show that EPA staff had evidence that this IBT scandal involved more independent testing companies and more products than ever officially acknowledged.

Concealment —Show that EPA concealed and falsely its own studies finding high levels of dioxin–2,3,7,8-TCDD–in environmental samples and human breast milk following routine use of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (Agent Orange) by the federal Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

Intent — Show that Monsanto chief medical officer George Roush admitted under oath to knowing that Monsanto studies into the health effects of dioxins on workers were written up untruthfully for the scientific literature such as to obscure health effects. These fraudulent studies were heavily relied upon by EPA to avoid regulating dioxins. They also were relied upon to defend manufacturers in lawsuits brought by veterans claiming damages from exposure to Agent Orange.