Glimmers of Hope from the Salton Sea?

With Global Leaders Failing Us, There May Be Some Hope in Our Backyard

By Jim Miller

Shrouded by the fog of war, bad news on the climate front still made its way down from the top of Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii. 

As the Guardian reported recently:

• [T]he daily atmospheric carbon dioxide readings from Mauna Loa in Hawaii, [is] the acid test of how the world is succeeding in combating climate change. A week before the 28th annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention opens in oil-rich Dubai, it makes depressing reading.

• At the time of writing it is 422.36 parts per million. That is 5.06ppm more than the same day last year. That rise in 12 months is probably the largest ever recorded – more than double the last decade’s annual average.

This disturbing revelation is coupled with the news, according to the New York Times, that the hosts of global climate talks ostensibly focused on ending the world’s addiction to fossil fuels don’t even believe there is any scientific evidence of climate change and are using the platform to promote their own oil interests: 

• [T]he Emirates has sought to use its position as host to pursue a contradictory goal: to lobby on oil and gas deals around the world, according to an internal document made public by a whistle-blower.

• In one example, the document offers guidance for Emirati climate officials to use meetings with Brazil’s environment minister to enlist her help with a local petrochemical deal by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Emirates’ state-run oil and gas company, known as Adnoc.

And if you were looking towards the United States for leadership on this issue, you’d be disappointed as President Biden is not even attending the event and is increasingly torn between pressure to act on climate coming from environmental activists and climate aware voters and competing voices clamoring for more domestic oil production.  Hence, the President’s contradictory moves on the issue, promoting a green transition in one moment while expanding drilling in another.  

My money is on him pleasing neither side. 

The bottom line is that it is becoming very clear that we will not even come close to meeting international climate goals in the near term, making the necessity for gains in greenhouse gas reductions both far more urgent and maddingly more complicated at the same time.  

In the past few weeks, I have written about the oil industry doubling their bets on expanding fossil fuel extraction as well as efforts to push harder for a transition to a green economy.  At present, advocates for our deadly business as usual seem to be winning the day.  Nonetheless, as the messy, unpredictable dramas of national politics and global conflict unfold, those looking for hope on the fight against the biggest existential threat we face might find some glimmers in our own backyard.  

Los Angeles Times climate reporter Sammy Roth wrote last week that the long-blighted Salton Sea may be home to a bigger piece of the solution to the climate crisis than previously thought.  Roth notes that the amount of lithium needed to produce a huge number of electric vehicle batteries might be significantly higher than researchers had believed:

• The new analysis — led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and reported here for the first time — finds we may be able to extract 18 million metric tons of “white gold” from the heated underground pool, which is not connected to the surface lake. That’s the first thoroughly documented public estimate of how much lithium is available at the Salton Sea, said Alex Prisjatschew, an engineer with the U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the analysis — and it’s higher than past guesses.

• “It’s going to be roughly the equivalent of 382 million electric vehicle batteries,” Prisjatschew told me.

• There are fewer than 300 million cars and trucks registered in the United States today. So yeah, that’s a big deal.

Of course, there have been and will continue to be concerns about the cultural and environmental costs of lithium mining, but Roth convincingly argues that we are well past the time when we can sit and wait for an ideal answer to the climate crisis: 

• [We] need to start accepting that staving off the worst consequences of climate change will have side effects. We need to champion solutions such as Salton Sea lithium and geothermal while accepting that not every solution will be quite so harm-free. We need to be willing to put the big picture above our narrow local interests.

When one considers that a project such as this one in the Imperial Valley would also produce a lot of good union jobs, marrying economic justice for working people with a big step toward addressing the climate crisis, it makes sense to not reject it with a jerk of the knee, despite legitimate concerns about the costs of the endeavor.

Given the lack of true leadership on the global stage and the bleak nature of our politics, waiting for the perfect may just be the enemy of the good.  So, while we might not want to resort to large scale industrial solutions with their risks to local habitats and more, the alternative is even less attractive.  As Roth writes of our dilemma, “That won’t be fun. But neither will 2 or 3 or 4 degrees Celsius of global warming.”

We need to do better, yes, but we also have to at least do something before it’s too late to even adapt to our already rapidly transforming climate. 

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Lead photo by Janet Harvey, Heidelberg University