To the editor

Attribution requested

A long guest column by Adam Amador about Project Jupiter appeared in your June 12 issue. Such articles usually have a paragraph at the end identifying the writer. This article didn't have any such identification, though I would assume that Mr. Amador has some kind of connection with Project Jupiter. 

As this ongoing propaganda war continues, I hope you will make sure to identify every writer, both pro and con. This is an asymmetric war -- a multi-billion-dollar corporation versus a bunch of citizens who lack the enormous resources that Project Jupiter has. It would be a nice touch if you would at least lend an air of fairness to this battle.

Gordon Solberg

Radium Springs, NM    

Editor’s note:

Mr, Solberg:

Thanks for reading the Bulletin. You are correct that, when written by people with an official role, we provide a bio on the writer. With the Opinion piece you reference, that information was inadvertently omitted. We apologize for the oversight. In this case, the column is longer than we generally run, but as Dr. Amador was attempting to take a balanced look at the project, we ran it despite its length.

Adam Amador is the Board Chair of the Las Cruces Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Chief Academic Officer at Alma d’Arte Charter High School.

As a side note, many people are weighing in on Project Jupiter, and the Bulletin believes that all of them are entitled to be heard as long as their arguments are fair and honest. Some of those contributors will not have credentials.

The big sell

The big sell is ON. Clearly, the County of Dona Ana can benefit financially from the development of Project Jupiter in the short-term, but at what cost to the environment? Our county can use more well-paying jobs, but are these the kind of opportunities that will actually increase prosperity for local folks long-term?  These questions remain to be answered as a nebulous data center establishes operations in the midst of the desert scrub in the southern part of the county. 

In last week's opinion column, Dr. Amador very astutely breaks down the pros and cons of Project Jupiter. As stated, water stewardship and environmental responsibility may be just the tip of the iceberg. As a society, we like to talk a good line about the environment while conveniently looking the other way. The existing oilfields in Eastern New Mexico are a case in point.

A data center requires massive amounts of power to run. It can use as much as 15,000 to 75,000 households of electricity, depending on its size. Sounds scary to me. We just don't know what we are getting into with such an operation on our doorstep. Perhaps they should take the time to develop their own power source. After all, we have about 300 days of sunlight/year (hint).

As for water, we all know the water table is getting more stressed due to our growing agricultural demands. The Rio is also a shadow of its former self due to lower snowpacks in the Southern Rockies. These are not variables. These are facts due to climate change.

Perhaps the additional revenue and employment opportunities will offset any impacts, but I am aware of the pushback A.I. data centers are facing  across the nation because of their impacts on our quality of life. What are our real priorities? It seems only our utility bills will know for sure.

Dave Adie

What about the drought?

As we debate data centers, why no consideration of drought on the Colorado River? In this era of transmountain diversions, water misfortune in one drainage area means misfortune in other drainages. So, the prolonged Colorado River drought is very much a Rio Grande drought.

The Southwest — located amid the Chihuahuan, Sonoran and Mohave deserts — has historically experienced devastating droughts of, sometimes, 80 to 100

years duration. The Arizona city of Phoenix is so named because 19th-century settlers realized they were building on the ruins of some vast civilization, that of the Hohokam, displaced by drought and related factors in the 1300s.

Today’s Southwest was most dramatically changed — after a historically unprecedented 1950-to-1995 wet period caused us to think the region is far more hospitable than it really is — when no snow fell in the Colorado and Utah high country during the winter of 2001-2002. That summer, what had been thought to be “a 10-year supply of water in storage” in dozens of reservoirs, disappeared in months.

In drought, those reservoirs have not significantly replenished, while flows on the Colorado River in 2022 were so low that they badly damaged Glen Canyon Dam at Lake Powell. Also in 2022, Lakes Powell and Mead hovered near “deadpool,” or so low that water cannot flow from them without pumping.

When Navajo Reservoir, near Farmington, is full, 110,000-acre feet of Colorado River water flows into a tunnel that transports it under the Continental Divide to explode from under the San Juan Mountains northeast of Chama on the Rio Grande drainage. But in recent drought years—including this year—Navajo is too low for San Juan-Chama water to flow into the diversion tunnel.

Since the Colorado and the Rio can’t meet current water demands, are water-intensive data centers just a very dangerous idea?

Kathleene Parker

Los Alamos