Climate change

In many Western cities, municipal water management is a job tied to the mountains. In Salt Lake City, for example, 80 percent of the city’s water supply comes from snowpack in seven Uinta and Wasatch Mountain watersheds. Yet it’s becoming all too clear that the mountains’ water yield will decrease, come earlier in the year, […]

Forty-five of the world’s top oil and gas producers received a letter, released at the end of October, that must have come as something of a wake-up call. Seventy investors that control a total of $3 trillion of those companies’ assets sent off the missive with one question in mind: What’s going to happen to […]

What started as a small blaze in the backcountry of central California this summer became the 250,000-acre Yosemite Rim Fire that forced thousands of nearby residents out of their homes. The tab at the end of the fire fighting efforts tallied over $100 million, and that’s not including lost revenue, damaged structures or the tens […]

We’ve had national parks on the brain a lot lately as we slogged through 16 days of federal shutdown. It’s been an economic burden to gateway communities and a frustration to tourists. But a depressingly dysfunctional government isn’t the only thing plaguing our parks. A new study shows that airborne nitrogen pollution is fundamentally changing the […]

Remember early July in the Southwest? New Mexico and Arizona were in the grip of record drought exacerbated by record high temperatures. Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly declared a state of emergency for drought on July 2. Feral horses across the Rez were dying of thirst. Crops withered. Lake Powell, which got only a meagre […]

There’s a hiking and biking trail near Gunnison, Colo. called “Sea of Sage.” The name conjures an accurate picture of how the area’s ecosystem looks to most people. But healthy sagebrush habitat is really more diverse than that – even the Gunnison sage grouse, a rare relative of the greater sage grouse, can’t survive on […]

The West’s largest coal-fired power plant, the Navajo Generating Station in northern Arizona, is in transition. It provides 520 jobs—85 percent of which are held by Navajos—supplies the juice that pumps Arizonans’ share of Colorado River water, and keeps the lights on for millions of people in three states. But the plant also churns out […]

Burning coal belches about twice as much carbon dioxide as burning natural gas, but the question of whether natural gas is a bridge to renewable energy or just a bridge to nowhere hinges on how much greenhouse gas escapes before it is used. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is 21 times more potent […]

Amphibians are vanishing at an alarming rate, even from areas we think of as pristine and protected. California’s Sierra Nevada is a prime example of this global problem—five out of seven amphibian species there are threatened. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint exactly why ponds that once held mountain yellow-legged frogs or California red-legged frogs […]

House Republicans moved forward a controversial bill last week that would cut a third of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, which raised the ire of environmentalists and caused at least one congressman to walk out of a committee meeting, calling the bill “an embarrassment.” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky) explained that the bill […]

There are all sorts of reasons to hit the highway this time of year. You might be trying to escape recent extremes of desert heat, bound for cooler high country and the freezing plunge of alpine lakes, or bone-chilling swells along the Pacific Coast. Or perhaps you’re the sort whose perfect lark includes the world’s […]