These Courts Could Challenge Climate Change

In the meantime, cities and states that rely on the river's water are looking for alternative sources. One alternative that is being implemented in some parts of the Southwest is potable water reuse—recycling water that’s been used by households and businesses.

Other plans involve desalination—taking salt out of seawater even by states hundreds of miles from the ocean. Last week, it was reported that Arizona is in talks with the San Diego County Water Authority to pay for desalination projects there. In exchange, Arizona would be able to take more from the Colorado River than it is currently entitled.

A local Phoenix TV station reports that the biggest hurdle in the negotiations would be price, because desalination is expensive—up to ten times more costly than existing rates. This does not take into account environmental costs and concerns.

Utah could be looking to desalination with shared investment in California, too—an idea that has floated around for at least two years.  In 2024, the president of the state senate, J.Stuart Adams, a Republican, told a Salt Lake City TV station that they could build desal plants in California and trade them for Colorado River water.
 
In another proposal, the nonprofit recreational organization, the BlueRibbon Coalition, is urging the construction of eight huge desalination plants on the California coast to be powered in part or fully by nuclear reactors, which would supply the heavy electricity demands required. The group says that their plan would cost $40 billion and mesh with the Trump administration’s gutting of environmental regulations and defunding of wind and solar power. The resulting fresh water would then be pumped more than 100 miles to farm fields in California’s Imperial Valley, freeing up some Colorado River water for other states.

In response to that proposal, Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities told USA Today that the proposal is laughable and stupid. He added that the $40 billion price estimate is nowhere close to the actual cost. In addition, he said there’s no clear plan for dealing with the extra salty water that’s extracted so it doesn’t endanger aquatic life when it’s returned to the sea.

If that weren’t enough, there’s another reason not to treat soils like dirt. In every gram, there are about 1,000 different species of bacteria, some of which are precursors to modern medicines. More than half of the world’s antibiotics come from soils, and they’re used to treat a long list of illnesses from tuberculosis and meningitis to leprosy and Legionnaires’ disease. 

Unfortunately, we are reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics by over prescribing them—and in more troubling news—a new study out this week by researchers at CalTech found that drought may promote antibiotic resistance as well.

Microorganisms live in the watery part of soils and produce antibiotics to defend themselves against each other. Humans have harvested these antibiotics to fight disease. But as lead author Xiao Yu Shan told H2O Radio, when soils dry out, the amount of antibiotics gets concentrated. So, if you’re a microbe that has resistance to that antibiotic, you survive.

That has potentially far-reaching public health consequences, Shan says because climate change is increasing droughts around the world. It means more people could be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria just through everyday activities like playing at a park, gardening, or he says, through breathing dust in the air or eating food. He said his research shows that environmental and human health are inseparable.

The study was published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Now, researchers at Trinity College of Dublin University have found a new way to harvest rare earths using oyster shells. In the lab, the team crushed shells from mussels, cockles, and oysters and exposed them to solutions containing rare earth elements.  

The result was that chemicals in the shells were dissolved and turned into new minerals that contained the rare earth elements and became crystals locked inside the shell material. Oyster shells were the best at capturing more rare earths compared to other shells. The authors say that the shell waste could be used as a low-cost way to treat contaminated water and even to recover valuable metals from industrial streams.

Rare earth elements in rivers or lakes can disrupt plants, animals, and microorganisms. Many streams, lakes, and rivers have become contaminated by runoff from abandoned coal mines or precious metal mining. Given that millions of tons of shell waste are produced every year by the aquaculture industry and end up in landfills, this discovery could help clean up those environments in a natural way. 

The study was published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Tennis courts come in three types—hard courts made from concrete or asphalt, grass courts like at Wimbledon, and clay courts made of either crushed brick, which are red, or from metabasalt, which are green.

The researchers found that green clay courts can absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide through a process called “enhanced rock weathering.” Enhanced rock weathering is the acceleration of a natural process in which rocks absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when it rains and lock it away for thousands of years. It’s been used as a climate solution in agriculture where crushed volcanic rock called basalt is spread on farm fields.

So, the team asked, how much could green clay courts sequester since they are made with metabasalt? They analyzed 17,178 green clay courts in the U.S., factoring in carbon emissions during mining and processing, transportation to court locations, construction, and maintenance.

They found green clay courts sequestered more than 25,000 metric tons of CO2 per year and would take only 3.5 years to become “net negative” where they have compensated for the carbon involved in their production. Replacing existing hard courts with green clay courts could edge us closer to game-set-match for the climate.

The study was published in the journal Applied Geochemistry.