EcoWatch

National Wildlife Federation     November 8, 2017

Why the Line 5 Oil Pipeline Threatens the Great Lakes

A diver with the National Wildlife Federation examines Line 5, Enbridge’s oil and gas pipeline running along the bottom-lands of the Straits of Mackinac. National Wildlife Federation

An aging oil pipeline moves 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids per day along the bottom-lands of the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron crash into each other in the heart of the Great Lakes.

This pipeline—Line 5, built in 1953—is operated by the same company responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in North American history: Enbridge. During that pipeline rupture, previously known cracks formed into a 6 foot gash which spilled more than 840,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010.

Endangered piping plovers nest along the Great Lakes shorelines which would be impacted by a Line 5 oil spill.Vince Cavalieri / USFWS

What’s Wrong with the Pipeline?

There are numerous places along the underwater section of the pipeline where protective coating is missing, and for much of the history of the pipeline, sections of pipe were not properly supported on the Lake Michigan lakebed—where it gets pummeled by oscillating currents. In fact, those supports were not replaced until video from a National Wildlife Federation dive inspection revealed they were lacking. Recently, Enbridge itself confirmed that part of its outer protection coating was missing from sections of the pipeline, and revealed in October 2017 that it has known about missing sections of coating since 2014 but failed to report the easement violation to state officials.

An April 2017 National Wildlife Federation report revealed that the land-based sections of Line 5 have leaked at least 29 times since 1968, spilling more than 1 million gallons of oil. We cannot risk a spill in the Straits, which a 2016 University of Michigan study estimates could put up to 700 miles of shoreline at risk depending on current and weather conditions, with up to 150 miles impacted in any one spill, risking a 17,000-square mile spill zone.

Additionally, the pipeline has been operating without an adequate spill response plan, as required by the Clean Water Act. Due to this, the National Wildlife Federation sued the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in January 2017, challenging this illegal operation of the pipeline.

What’s at Stake?

At risk are the fish and wildlife of the Great Lakes, the drinking water relied upon by citizens, and the region’s recreation and tourism economy which supports the northern Michigan way of life. So it should be no surprise that two-thirds of Michiganders oppose the continued operation of the pipeline under the Straits, as reported by a 2016 EPIC-MRA poll commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation.

Of particular note is the threat to the endangered piping plover shorebird. Piping plovers nest in the summer along the sandy beaches of the Great Lakes, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated critical habitat for piping plovers which falls within the spill zone risk identified by the University of Michigan.

What’s Being Done About It?

The State of Michigan released a report on alternatives to Line 5 on June 29, while the week before it scrapped a risk analysis due to a conflict of interest arising from an employee of the firm hired to do the analysis also working on a separate project for Enbridge.

In September, Michigan’s Pipeline Safety Advisory Board authorized a panel of academic experts from Michigan’s universities, led by Dr. Guy Meadows of Michigan Technological University, to resume the risk analysis.

“This is a positive step in getting the state the actionable information it needs to decommission Line 5,” said Mike Shriberg, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center, and a member of the Pipeline Safety Advisory Board when the academic study was approved. “Engaging top academic minds will ensure that Michigan’s residents and resources will be prioritized.”

Demand Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder act to keep the Great Lakes safe!

ThinkProgress

Trump’s choice for No. 2 at EPA admitted he saw coal baron’s action plan to dismantle agency

Lobbyist attended meetings on Rick Perry proposal to subsidize coal plants.

Mark Hand           November 8, 2017

Andrew Wheeler, President Donald Trump’s nominee for deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, testifies at his confirmation hearing on November 8, 2017. CREDIT: screenshot/Senate EPW committee

President Donald Trump’s nominee for deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admitted he viewed a plan developed by a top coal producer to roll back environmental regulations at the agency and attended meetings on Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants.

Testifying at his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Andrew Wheeler said Murray Energy was one of his lobbying clients while working at the law firm Faegre Baker Daniels. But Wheeler said he de-registered himself as a Murray Energy lobbyist in August.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), in his questioning of Wheeler, said Robert Murray, the head of Murray Energy, “has said that he has a three-page plan that is being implemented by Scott Pruitt at the EPA. He said they’re already through the first page.”

Wheeler, who previously worked on the staff of a top congressional climate science denier, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), acknowledged seeing a copy of Murray’s “action plan” earlier this year. Murray said he provided the plan to Trump in January to help the struggling coal industry. “I did not work on that [plan] or have a copy of that memo,” Wheeler said. “I saw it briefly at the beginning of year but don’t have possession of it. I looked at it.”

Whitehouse contended it’s significant if the CEO of a coal company “has given his regulator a three-page plan” and “takes credit for having gotten through the first page of it already.”

This coal baron has Trump’s ear. What he says is utter nonsense.

PBS gave Robert Murray a platform to say climate change is a gambit to enrich Democrats, not a crisis for humanity.

 

With Wheeler’s nomination, “We have a candidate for deputy administrator who said he’s seen it and can confirm it exists. I think the American people are entitled to an EPA that is not following a coal company’s three-page plan but is following wherever the best interests of the American people lead,” Whitehouse said.

Since Trump took office, Murray has repeatedly met with administration officials, including at least three times with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Murray has also met with Perry, whom Murray pressed for an executive order to keep coal plants from closing.

Wheeler told the Senate panel that he met with the Department of Energy on behalf of Murray a few months ago about Perry’s proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants. He said he also participated in a Capitol Hill meeting on the proposal, which Perry sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for implementation.

Politico reported Monday that Perry’s proposal to change the nation’s electricity markets would provide a windfall for a small group of companies, including Murray Energy. The narrowly written plan would mostly aid power plants in a part of the Midwest and Northeast where Murray Energy is the primary coal supplier, according to Politico.

The Sierra Club said it strongly opposes Wheeler’s nomination to the No. 2 position at the EPA. “Wheeler was not only a key D.C. advocate for the coal industry, but also a former aide for outspoken climate-denying senator James Inhofe,” Matthew Gravatt, Sierra Club’s associate legislative director, said in a statement Wednesday.

ThinkProgress

White House admits Trump climate policies will destroy all U.S. coastal property

Will GOP tax reform burst the trillion-dollar U.S. coastal property bubble?

Joe Romm          November 7, 2017

 Downtown Houston flooding from Superstorm Harvey, August 28, 2017. CREDIT: AP/Jason Dearen

The massive climate report released by the Trump administration on Friday makes clear that the President’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the decades to come.

That means more than $1 trillion in U.S. coastal property will eventually be valueless. So the only question is “when” and not “if” that trillion-dollar housing bubble will burst.

The answer appears to be sooner, rather than later, for two reasons. First, the administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst-case scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming. Second, the GOP tax reform bill will directly deflate coastal property values because it targets the tax breaks for the most expensive properties.

Climate change poses ‘nightmare scenario’ for Florida coast, Bloomberg warns

America’s trillion-dollar coastal property bubble could burst “before the sea consumes a single house.” Here’s why.

Sea levels are rising, and Trump policies will speed that up

Let’s start with how Friday’s congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) makes clear Trump’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the coming decades.

The report, the “authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States” by scientists from 13 federal agencies — which the Trump administration reviewed and cleared before releasing Friday — paints a grim picture for our coasts.

The scientists can’t rule out eight feet of sea level rise by century’s end (the “extreme” scenario). But then, the Arctic sees upwards of 18°F warming in the 2071-2100 timeframe, so melting of the Greenland ice sheet will be off the charts.

The NCA looks at a variety of scenarios, including ones where the nation and world meet or even surpass the Paris climate targets to minimize total warming. But it also examines higher emissions scenarios where Paris fails. They reflect plausible worst-case scenarios on the business-as-usual path, which is the path that Trump’s policies keep us on.

In those “intermediate-high” and “high” scenarios, sea levels rise 4.9 to 6.6 feet respectively by century’s end. Significantly, they rise 1.4 to 1.8 feet by 2050, which is in the time frame of 30-year mortgages that banks will soon be considering. When banks stop providing those mortgages, property values will plummet.

Remember, the storm surge from future Harveys and Sandys will be on top of whatever sea level rise we see, which is why studies find that, in high emissions scenarios, Sandy-type storm surges occur every year or two by mid century.

NOAA: Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise To Make Sandy-Type Storm Surges The Norm On East Coast 

The report also looks at the often neglected rate of sea level rise in the coming decades. In the “high” scenario, seas are rising 8 inches per decade by 2050, and 14 inches per decade by 2090. That rise continues to accelerate until it reaches a rate of 2 feet per decade early in the next century.

How exactly do coastal areas adapt to such rapid and accelerating sea level rise? How rapidly do you abandon places that you know will be repeatedly inundated by the combination of sea level rise and storm surge in the coming decades?

And for those who consider such rates of sea level rise unlikely, the NCA has some bad news. The United States is all but certain to see higher “relative sea level” [RSL] rise than the global average especially in the Northeast and the western Gulf of Mexico. In fact for “for high [Global Mean Sea Level] rise scenarios, RSL rise is likely to be higher than the global average along all U.S. coastlines outside Alaska.”

Moreover, the report warns that “climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change.” Again, that means sea level rise is likely to be higher and faster than the report’s projections, especially under Trump’s policies.

The trillion-dollar coastal property bubble is ready to burst

The implications for coastal property values are grave. “The risk will rise as sea levels rise, and when that happens, you’d expect your property value to fall,” as Lloyd Dixon, the director of the RAND Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation, told the International Business Times last month. “At some point, the property becomes worthless.”

Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned a year ago that the coastal property bubble will burst sooner than expected: “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses. Others will not be so lucky.”

As Bloomberg put it in April, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”

That process may already be starting. Last November, the New York Times reported that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”

Jesse Keenan, who studies coastal property, has “begun to see evidence in survey data that middle-income people are leaving Miami Beach and other places with nuisance flooding that makes it difficult to get around at high tides or insure a car,” Scientific American reported back in May. “It’s not out of the question that Miami Beach loses 20 percent of its population and most of those people go to the mainland,” said Keenan. “I’m talking about the next 20 years.”

The GOP tax plan could start to deflate the bubble

The GOP tax reform bill the House of Representatives is considering takes a few whacks at states with a lot of coastal property. As the New York Times reports, it proposes “to put a cap of $10,000 on the property taxes that can be deducted at the federal level; to eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes; and to restrict the mortgage interest deduction to loans of $500,000 or less.”

The key point is these changes hit the highest-price homes the most — and coastal property values are nearly double the value of similar inland property, according to a Congressional Budget Office study. They could deflate coastal property values more than 10 percent.

Given that the coastal property bubble must burst sometime in the not-too-distant future — and that the early sellers of overpriced coastal property will do a lot better than the later ones — this initial deflation may well hasten the inevitable sell-off.

Here’s the ultimate question for owners of coastal property —  and the financial institutions that back them: Who will be with the smart money that gets out early  —  and who will be with the other kind of money?

The Nation

The GOP Tax Bill Is an Attempt to Destroy Government

Americans need more services, not less.

By Robert L. Borosage        November 3, 2017

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell with Senate majority whip John Cornyn, and Senator John Barrasso, talk to reporters, July 25, 2017. (AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin)

The House Republican tax bill has been introduced, packaged beautifully with lies. Now House Republicans will push to pass, in one week, a 500-page bill written in secret that transforms the tax code. Powerful special interests will spend millions for and against. Legions of lobbyists will fill congressional offices. Experts will duel over the effects. Trump is already boasting about “a great Christmas present” of the biggest tax cuts ever.

Republicans hope that the fog of competing claims will cover their tracks. In the midst of the frenzy, remember one thing: this entire project is utterly wrong-headed. Few politicians dare say it, but the reality is Americans are not overtaxed. They are under-served by their government.

American corporations and American citizens are not overtaxed, compared with other industrial nations. The greatest impediment to corporate competitiveness isn’t what corporations pay in taxes; it is an inefficient, outdated, and increasingly dangerous infrastructure. It is time wasted in traffic jams, slow trains, and overcrowded airports. Our broadband is slower and costs more than that of other leaders in the industrial world. Nine percent of all bridges are rated “structurally deficient” and 40 percent are over 50 years old. Our energy and water systems are aged and fragile. A bridge falls every other day in America. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that our increasingly decrepit infrastructure will cost about 2.5 million jobs and $7 trillion in sales by 2025. For businesses, the best use of public dollars isn’t tax cuts for the rich and big corporations but investments in rebuilding America.

Similarly, America’s workers are gouged far more by inadequate and wasteful public investment than by high taxes. We pay about two times as much per capita for health care—with worse results and leaving millions of people still not covered. The costs of educating kids—from pre-K to summer programs to soaring college tuitions and fees—rise far faster than stagnant wages. Crowded and pot-holed roads steal time and tax cars and tires. Flint is not alone in suffering from aging pipelines and poisonous water. For working people, the best use of public dollars is to invest in Medicare for All, tuition-free college, universal pre-K, and efficient roads and water systems.

Trump and Republicans want to sell tax cuts as key to growth and jobs, but this too is a con. In using public money to create jobs, the most authoritative assessment—made by Moody’s Mark Zandi, a former adviser to John McCain—is that investing in infrastructure would produce far more “bang for the buck” in jobs and growth than tax cuts would create. The money would be more likely to stay here, since 35 percent of corporate tax cuts would go to foreign investors or companies. The working people hired on public projects spend their wages, the rich less so. All this is particularly true now: Corporate profits are near-record levels, inequality is at record extremes, and interest rates are still low. Corporations don’t need tax breaks. They need customers. The rich will get more money under the GOP plan, but they’ve already captured so much of the nation’s income and wealth that even the conservative International Monetary Fund has warned that inequality has reached extremes that are an impediment to growth and jobs.

Republicans hypocritically will run up deficits and add a trillion or two to the national debt, but the real damage is that they will exacerbate what is now a crippling public-investment deficit. For all the alarms you’ll hear from Democrats and some Republicans in the next weeks, the budget deficits aren’t much of an economic concern. Inflation, if anything, is too low, and America bonds sell at remarkably low interest rates.

Budget deficits, however, are a political club. Once the tax cuts are passed, Republicans will return to hectoring about deficits and debt. Their budget documents already call for brutal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the entire range of public services. As crippling as America’s public investment is today, passage of the Republican tax plan virtually insures that it will get far worse.

As Republicans rush to get this bill passed before it is read, the big lies will be exposed. The rich will clean up; some in the middle class—particularly those with large families—will pay more. Wealthy real-estate operators, investors, lawyers, and accountants will pocket most of the so-called small business “pass-through” tax break. Repatriation and territoriality will give corporations even more incentive to rig their books to report profits in tax havens abroad. But the specific outrages are neither as destructive nor as appalling as the entire project itself. By making it harder to address America’s crippling public-investment deficits, large tax cuts, if passed, will accelerate this country’s decline.

Robert L. Borosage is a leading progressive writer and activist.

ThinkProgress

Embattled Navajo coal plant is a preview of what’s ahead as coal declines across the U.S.

“It tied us to those jobs and didn’t allow us to diversify.”

Nexus Media          November 6, 2017

Navajo Generating Station, Arizona. CREDIT: Wolfgang Moroder

By Jeremy Deaton

It looks like it doesn’t belong there. The lonely, aging power plant stands out against the red desert, connected to the nearest town by a single, crumbling road. It will soon become an artifact, a relic from when coal was king.

If the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) closes — as it is set to do in 2019 — it will leave the local communities with 800 fewer jobs and a massive dent in revenue. But opponents to the plant say the cost to human health has been too high, and it’s time to turn to alternative sources of energy and jobs.

The plant is facing a future familiar to many coal-fired power plants, struggling to compete with smaller, more nimble natural gas-fired generators, wind farms, and solar arrays.

“You know the old saying, ‘You make money if you buy low and sell high’? They’re buying high and selling lower,” said David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

If the Navajo Generating Station shuts down, locals will lose some 800 jobs, both at the plant and in the nearby Kayenta mine, which supplies coal to the generating station. Facing unemployment rates upwards of 40 percent, the Navajo and Hopi tribes are eager to protect those jobs, to say nothing of the revenue the operation provides.

“The Navajo Nation is so dependent on the jobs and the revenue for their budget. It’s really sad because, looking forward, it just doesn’t seem to be a sustainable economic enterprise,” Schlissel said. “I have no idea who would put their money here.”

Credit: Stephanie Smith, Grand Canyon Trust

Some, however, are happy to see the plant and the mine close down. While the operation is the cornerstone of the local economy, it is also a symbol of exploitation. Built on sacred land and without the consent of traditional leaders, the operation has better served its corporate owners than the tribes themselves. Thanks to a one-sided lease brokered by the federal government, for decades the Navajo and Hopi tribes received pennies on the dollar for every ton of coal mined.

Critics of the plant see its closure as an opportunity to create new businesses owned and operated by Native Americans in tourism, agriculture, and energy. Experts believe the tribes could repurpose much of the existing infrastructure associated with the Navajo Generating Station — including power lines to populations centers — to support new solar and wind projects. The transition to renewable energy sources would be difficult, but it could breathe life into the community.

In many ways, the embattled plant is a microcosm of a story unfolding across the country. As coal loses ground to natural gas and renewable energy, coal miners and plant operators are looking to the Trump administration to keep them afloat. But there is only so much policymakers can do. The Navajo Generating Station offers a preview of what’s to come.

The Navajo Generating Station as viewed from above. CREDIT: Ken Lund

The rise and fall of the Navajo Generating Station

The story of the Navajo Generating Station dates back to the late 19th century, when government surveyors discovered expansive reserves of copper on land inhabited by Hopis, Navajos, and a handful of Mormon settlers. As Judith Nies explains in Unreal City, a history of coal power in the Southwest, President Chester A. Arthur worried that Mormons would snatch up the mineral-rich land at a time when demand for coal was on the rise.

In 1882, Thomas Edison flipped the switch on the world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant, and it was clear that the electrification of the United States would drive up demand for coal. That same year, Arthur signed an executive order creating an Indian reservation that spanned a large swath of Arizona coal deposits. The president’s order would keep coal reserves out of the hands of Mormon settlers, giving the federal government the opportunity to exploit those resources at a future date.

That day came nearly a century later, as the rapid growth of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and other cities in the Southwest spurred investments in coal power. In 1966, Navajo and Hopi leaders signed a lease allowing coal giant Peabody Energy to mine 40,000 of acres of their reservation. The lawyer who represented the Hopi tribe also represented Peabody, and he did much better work for the coal company than he did for the Native Americans.

The Peabody lease “violated every guideline that the Department of Interior had set up for leasing on public lands: no competitive bidding, no automatic renegotiation clauses, a fixed rate rather than a percentage royalty rate,” Nies writes. At that time, the royalty rate on federal lands was $1.50 per ton of coal, but under the terms of the lease, the Hopi and Navajo tribes would earn just 37 cents on each ton of coal mined. Hopi leaders decried the lease as “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion.”

The Kayenta Mine. CREDIT: Doc Searls

The deal was a giveaway to Peabody, but Nies writes the lease was “about more than money. It was about growth — the power to pump water into Phoenix, air-conditioning to Los Angeles, and the electricity to light the giant casinos and cool thousands of homes in Las Vegas as the population doubled and then tripled every year.” All of it depended on a steady supply of cheap electricity.

In 1973, Peabody began operations at the Kayenta mine. Three years later, the Navajo Generating Station came online, delivering power to customers across the Southwest. The tribe mined coal, exported electricity, and raised revenues, but the biggest winners were Peabody energy and the power utilities that owned the plant. “The Navajo Nation really didn’t get its fair share out of those operations,” said Brett Isaac, a Navajo solar entrepreneur. “It tied us to those jobs and didn’t allow us to diversify.”

Now, with the plant set to close, workers are worried about how they will make ends meet. “A lot of the miners and plant operators, they are pretty much lifelong employees of that operation,” Isaac said. “I have an uncle who has worked at the Peabody mine since right out of high school. The next week after graduation he started working at the mine. He’s never had to apply for a job.”

Until recently, coal was the country’s cheapest and most abundant source of power, and utilities relied on large facilities like the Navajo Generating Station to provide reliable electricity. In recent years, however, coal has lost ground to other power sources. Wind and solar are growing cheaper by the day, while advances in hydraulic fracturing have made natural gas more affordable than coal. Small, gas-fired power plants can ramp up and down more quickly than large, coal plants, allowing them to track consumer demand more closely.

Natural gas has overtaken coal as the largest source of electricity in the United States. Coal production is expected to continue its long decline. Credit: Energy Information Administration

“All of the major utilities in the region, who are already co-owners of the plant, have decided for economic reasons that it’s cheaper for them to produce their own power or buy power from gas and renewables,” said Roger Clark, a program director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group based in Arizona.

“The outlook has gotten dimmer and dimmer as the years have past,” Isaac said. “We knew we would have to diversify, but we didn’t think it would be this sudden.”

The Navajo Generating Station is in an especially precarious position. Because the plant is situated 4,000 feet above sea-level, where the air is thinner, the coal burns less efficiently than it would at a lower elevation. The plant is also hundreds of miles away from major markets like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and some electricity is inevitably lost en route. Utilities would rather generate power from solar, wind or natural gas closer to where it’s being used.

“For one thing, you’re not having to pay 800 people to run the mine and the power plant,” said Clark. At a gas-fired power plant, “a shift might be three to five people. At the Navajo Generating Station, it’s several hundred people.”

The high cost of generating coal power is only one problem. There is also the human cost of operating the mine,  which has left a generation of workers with black lung disease. The power plant ,  which is the seventh-largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, along with a host of toxic chemicals that worsen asthma, provoke heart attacks, and shorten lives. Pollution from the plant can be seen as far away as the Grand Canyon.

“You can see the haze,” said Isaac, who lamented the years of operation. “What did it actually cost us? People getting sick.”

Navajo Generating Station, Arizona. Credit: Myrabella

A power plant on life support

Perhaps more than the Hopi and Navajo tribes, Peabody is determined to keep the Navajo Generating Station open. The coal company said it has found a number of potential buyers for the plant, but it has not disclosed any names, and it seems unlikely that investors would be lining up to purchase the generating station. IEEFA projects it would cost upwards of $400 million to keep the plan online through the end of 2019, and it could cost more than $2 billion in subsidies to keep the plant running through 2030.

Peabody has an ally in Trump administration, though, which is desperate to make good on its promise to rescue the coal industry. In addition to rolling back dozens of environmental safeguards, the administration is pushing regulators to compel utilities to buy costly, polluting coal power. It has made the Navajo Generating Station a priority, not simply because the federal government has an ownership stake in the plant.

“If NGS closes, it will be very damaging for the administration,” Mike McKenna, who served on Trump’s transition team, told ClimateWire. “Closure is a preventable tragedy. The administration needs to prevent it.”

Trump administration throws weight behind keeping Arizona coal plant open

Owners want to wash their hands of unprofitable coal plant.

Representatives from Peabody Energy recently met with officials at the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy, as did Navajo and Hopi leaders. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is exploring options for keeping the plant open, including erecting a high-powered solar facility that would be compatible with the current operation.

“Since the first weeks of the Trump administration, one of Interior’s top priorities has been to roll up our sleeves with diverse stakeholders in search of an economic path forward to extend NGS and Kayenta Mine operations after 2019,” Zinke said in a statement in June. The administration has yet to put forward a plan to stave off the plant’s closure.

Window Rock, a sandstone formation on the Navajo reservation. CREDIT: Ben FrantzDale

An uncertain future for the Navajo and Hopi tribes

It’s unclear how locals could replace the jobs and revenue from the Navajo Generating Station, but experts have a few ideas. A recent report from IEEFA proposed that the Bureau of Reclamation, Peabody, and the utilities that own the plant “provide a substantial core of replacement jobs that require skill sets similar to those of the existing workforce.”

The report also recommended the tribes invest in infrastructure, tourism, agriculture, and water. Clark pointed to the infrastructure associated with the power plant, which includes a water pump, power lines, and an electric railroad that runs from the mine to the generating station. “All of these things might be able to be repurposed into a renewable-energy powered water system,” he said.

The power plant uses as much as 30,000 acre-feet of water each year, water that is siphoned from Lake Powell using a large pump, Clark explained. “If the power plant is taken down, that pump is a stranded asset, which also might complement the fact that the Navajo Nation itself has a legitimate claim to every bit of that water that the power plant is using plus another 20,000 acre-feet,” he said.

The Navajo tribe could build solar arrays to power the pump, which could be used to carry water from Lake Powell to the current site of the plant, a high point in the region. Water could then be fed to other parts of the reservation. “The water itself may be worth more than the coal to the Navajo Nation,” Clark said.

Lake Powell. Credit: Wolfgang Staudt

The Navajo tribe could also invest in clean energy, both to sell across state lines and to provide power locally. “Other states don’t buy coal power anymore,” Isaac said, “but other states will buy renewable energy. So, we’re looking for ways that we can capitalize on that.”

A 2012 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that “neither solar, wind, nor geothermal power alone can replace all the types of benefits currently provided by [the Navajo Generating Station]. They might in aggregate, however.” The IEEFA report found that solar power could “replace some of the lost generation capacity, jobs, and revenue” from the plant’s closure.

Isaac said that many Navajos doubt the viability of clean energy, so they built mobile solar power units to bring electricity to parts of the reservation that are off the grid — around a third of homes on the Navajo Reservation lack power. “I wanted to build something that people could touch,” Isaac said. “Essentially, we’re building stories, because that is hopefully what’s going to encourage communities to shift.”

One of Isaac’s mobile solar units. Credit: Brett Isaac

The Department of Commerce has awarded some $420,000 to the Navajo and Hopi tribes to help them cope with the plant’s closure, money that could be used to implement some of these ideas. Even if the plant stays online for a few more years, it is inevitable that it will close sooner rather than later. Any effort to keep the plant open distracts from the hard work of creating new businesses. Isaac says the Navajo tribe needs to look beyond coal for jobs and income.

“We seriously thought we couldn’t survive without that royalty. We couldn’t survive without those jobs. We kind of put ourselves in a corner when it came to how to discuss the economic impact,” Isaac said. “It’s going to hurt, but we are a lot more savvy than we give ourselves credit for.”

Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated news-wire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.