Building Steam in Lithium Valley
Imperial County, one of the most depressed areas in America, has a clean-energy fortune stored deep in an underground reservoir. Can it be extracted, and will downtrodden residents see the benefits? By David Dayen brawley, california – A giant cloud had formed a wall, enveloping the horizon in darkness. They call it a haboob, a collapsed thunderstorm that stirs up silt and clay after plummeting to Earth. The dust tornado sat between me and my hotel, and once I started down the country road, which ran along a cow feedlot that stretched for (I counted) three miles, visibility dropped to maybe a couple of feet. Not even 30 minutes earlier, it had been a normal afternoon in southeastern California’s Sonoran Desert, under a blazing sun and cloudless sky. But first the rain came down in buckets, and then the haboob. I’d have thought at least the former would be welcomed, after seeing billboards throughout the area urging water conservation due to “La sequía”—the drought. But the ground is so dry that it can’t absorb condensation, which bounces off and slides wherever the land slopes downward.
20 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2022
Within minutes, my phone beeped: first for a flash flood warning, then a dust storm warning that said “Pull Aside, Stay Alive … Infants, the elderly and those with respiratory issues urged to take precautions.” I didn’t pull aside, but my pace was slow as I hugged the edge of what I hoped was still the road. When I finally reached the hotel, there was a thin film of dust over everything. The clerk gave me the key, and a disclaimer: “There may be some dirt in the room. I can’t control the weather, even though everyone thinks I can.” Embedded within that dust is more than a century of policy mismanagement, environmental disaster, and regional despair. The recent fortunes of Imperial County, along the U.S.-Mexico border, have risen and fallen with water levels at the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland lake. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was a travel destination,