Las Vegas is hot and dry, as it should be, since it’s in the desert. Years of droughts in southern Nevada have emphasized the point.

The area usually only gets about 4″ of rain a year, anyway.

Despite that, the allure of Vegas has drawn an estimated 400,000 new residents since 2002. And then all those thousands of newcomers planted pretty lawns and lush landscaping.

Green lawns don’t belong in the desert. Keeping them green means a constant drain on southern Nevada’s precious and limited amount of water.

Today, even though the recession has halted Las Vegas’ population growth, the city still has more than 1.8 million residents, and 40 million visitors a year.

The source of all water in southern Nevada is Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado River. The lake’s water level has dropped dramatically in the last decade. In 2008, one report said, the water level of the 250-square-mile lake was 102 feet below its old waterline.

Fear that a large, heavily populated region of the United States could be without adequate water in the not-too-distant future has prompted swift and creative responses from the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Ten years ago, they started the Water Smart Landscapes Rebate program, providing cash back to home and business owners who yank out their turf and replace it with native plants and water-saving landscaping.

Since it started , the authority says 130 million square feet of grass has been removed, and billions of gallons of water saved. An estimated $138 million in turf rebates have been paid out. One report said that between 2002 and 2007, even as Las Vegas’ population boomed, water use dropped by 15 billion gallons – an 18 percent decrease.

In that region, turning landscapes into low-water-use xeriscapes can save about 75 percent on the annual water bill, another report said.

The water authority pays $1.50 for every square foot of grass removed and replaced with native landscaping — up to the first 5,000 square feet. Hit the 5,000-square-foot mark and they’ll still keep paying, $1 a square foot up to a maximum of $300,000 a year.

Other cities in the dry southwest have implemented similar programs. Los Angeles’ Department of Water and Power started a program last month to pay single-family homeowners $1 for every square foot of grass they pull up and replace with drought-tolerant plants and permeable ground cover. The department will pay up to $2,000.

Twenty-nine cities within California’s East Bay Municipal Utility District (including Alameda, Berkeley and Oakland) can get 50 cents for every square foot of grass they replace, up to $1,000 to single-family residences.

Cities in Arizona, Mesa and Chandler, for example, also give cash back to those who replace grass with low-water plants.

Even though cash for grass programs are popping up in drought-ridden states across the country, they have a long way to go to match Las Vegas.

In addition to the grass payback, Southern Nevada’s water authority instituted a water-saving car wash program, providing coupons to car washes that either recycle their own water or send it to a treatment facility for recycling. Residents can get money back for buying a swimming pool cover (without it, the authority says, 10,000 to 15,000 gallons of water can evaporate from a pool). There are other programs, as well.

Other useful information from the water authority includes a step-by-step how-to video to go from grass to low-water landscaping.  There is a chart to show how much water can be saved by making the change, and a before-and-after photo gallery of beautiful landscape conversions.

Photos from Southern Nevada Water Authority, before and after photo gallery

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

In its waning days, the outgoing Bush administration is promoting oil-shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming by passing regulations that would open public lands to oil-shale exploration, leasing and development. In November, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management put these regulations into effect to develop an oil shale program that the bureau says could add 800 billion barrels of oil from land in the Western United States.

In response, earlier this week, 11 environmental groups notified the administration and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of their intent to file federal lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act. The BLM has 60 days to respond. The environmental groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, among others, want the administration to consider the effects that commercial oil-shale development will have on endangered species.

Oil-shale development destroys habitats, causes air pollution and depletes and pollutes scarce water resources in the West, says Melissa Thrailkill, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco. In addition, the process of turning oil-shale into a usable fuel source demands massive amounts of electricity.

As many as 10 new power plants will be needed in these three states to generate this electricity, which then increases greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Polar bears, ribbon seals, Pacific walrus, American pika and ocean corals are all at risk of extinction due to global warming.

And in order to produce energy from oil-shale, large amounts of water are required from the Colorado River, a water supply upon which many residents and farmers depend. The river is also home to four endangered fish species.

In a mid-November statement, Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals Management Stephen Allred, defended the program, saying, “The United States needs all types of energy resources, both conventional and renewable, in order to meet our future needs. Production from domestic resources makes us more secure and less vulnerable to future energy crises, and increases our security and economic well-being. The tremendous oil shale resources that we have in the U.S., containing several times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, can be a vital component of that secure future.”

Tracy Boyd, communications and sustainability manager with Shell Exploration and Production, says these regulations were supposed to come out a while ago. “They are not so much eleventh hour maneuvers but just wrapping up business as the administration comes to a close,” he says. It’s possible, he says, that the environmental entities who are challenging the regulations may not realize the realistic timeline for development. “These regulations do not authorize the initiation of any actual commercial leasing. It may be as long as 10 years away. There are many more reviews that need to be conducted. [Oil shale] leasing is way down the road,” he says.

Thrailkill, though, says the new oil-shale regulations will have huge impact on global warming that “is simply unacceptable,” adding that, “dirty energy development will have enormous and damaging effects on the waters, wildlife and lands of the West.”

The new Bush administration laws will be procedurally hard to rescind. “This is a big hassle for the incoming Obama Administration,” she says. “Congress could step in,” she says, but with much of the population clamoring for oil, especially “homegrown and not foreign oil, there’s a lot of pressure to develop this land.”

“There needs to be incentives for companies to develop clean energy and at the same time reduce demand,” she says.

Unfortunately, Thrailkill says, the Bush Administration and the Bureau of Land Management did not consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to come up with an environmentally smart program. “Commercial oil-shale development could help lead us to catastrophic climate change, [rendering] thousands of plants and animals around the world extinct. “

“The Obama team is going to have to make [clean energy] one of its top priorities,” she says.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media