Living in Imperial County, California, means putting up with a near-constant, rotten-egg-like stench. The odor comes from the Salton Sea, an accidental lake formed by a Colorado River overflow in the early 1900s. Though it boomed as a resort destination in the 1950s, tourism has long since dried up, and decades of farm runoff have loaded what’s left of the shrinking lake with lead, chromium, and legacy DDT.
Since 2018, diverted water supplies and climate change-fueled drought have accelerated the salty lake’s evaporation, exposing more and more of the dry lake bed and all the chemicals it contains. The strong winds the region is known for then blow that toxic dust directly into surrounding Latino farmworker and Indigenous communities, where one in four children now suffers from asthma, and pediatric hospitalization rates are twice as high as the state average.
“The Salton Sea has always been part of our region’s identity,” said Luis Olmedo, executive director of Comite Civico del Valle, a local environmental justice group in Imperial County. Over the years, he has watched the shoreline recede and the dust blow. “For families dealing with asthma and other respiratory conditions, these environmental issues are part of everyday life.”
But the Salton Sea also sits atop one of the world’s largest reserves of geothermal energy. The super-heated brine thousands of feet beneath the lakebed contains critical minerals such as battery-grade lithium, earning it the nickname “Lithium Valley.” Three major development projects to extract geothermal power and lithium in the area are currently moving from proposals to active construction, with full-scale production targeted in the coming years.
A proposed permitting reform bill may soon fast track that development. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act aims to streamline both clean energy and fossil fuel projects by cutting red tape. The proposed overhaul of the federal environmental review process threatens to rewrite how local industrial development is vetted, litigated and monitored in frontline communities across the country.
The Salton Sea exemplifies a central dilemma surrounding permitting reform: Building clean energy may accelerate climate solutions nationally but doing so without just environmental safeguards risks leaving frontline residents to bear the health burden.
Comite Civico del Valle, which installed air-monitoring networks around the Salton Sea community, supports a permitting reform that advances clean energy “but not at the expense of public health, environmental protections, or community participation,” Olmedo told High Country News in an email. “Clean energy should improve people’s lives, not repeat past mistakes.”
“Clean energy should improve people’s lives, not repeat past mistakes.”
BOTH LITHIUM AND GEOTHERMAL POWER are needed for the clean energy transition, but advocates warn that without environmental safeguards, their development will compound the existing health crises for the area’s roughly 180,000 residents as well as escalate ecological threats on the nearby lakebed. These industrial operations would require vast quantities of overallocated Colorado River water — the sole source of drinking water and irrigation for the valley. Every gallon diverted into industrial cooling towers needed for these operations or conserved to meet regional climate change-fueled drought cutbacks is a gallon that never reaches the lakebed, accelerating shoreline retreat and exposing residents to even higher concentrations of airborne toxins.
By 2030, without restoration efforts, the lake is projected to drop roughly 20 feet from its early-2000s levels and lose 60% of its volume, exposing an additional 100 square miles of dry lakebed to the wind.
“This is not about symptoms on a dusty day — it raises concerns about children’s respiratory health for years to come,” said Jill Johnston, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of California, Irvine, whose research links more dust events with slower lung function growth, especially among children living closest to the Salton Sea. “The concern is how pollution from future industrial development could add to existing exposures and affect respiratory health.”
The permitting reform bill, currently being debated in the Senate ahead of a mid-November vote, would shorten environmental review timelines and public comment periods and weaken environmental protections under landmark laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, National Historic Preservation Act and Clean Air and Water Acts. If a project’s permitting review reaches the federal level, residents and advocacy groups like Comite Civico del Valle will have little time to give public input and take legal action if the project harms the community.
To environmental justice advocates like Olmedo, the ultimate question facing permitting reform is not whether clean energy matters to vulnerable populations — it does. The question is whether federal acceleration of projects will break from a historic legacy of environmental harm or leave those same communities — some of the poorest in California — behind to pay the price once again.
“Despite revisions [to the bill], we remain concerned about provisions that could weaken environmental review, limit legal challenges and reduce accountability,” Olmedo said. “Permitting reform should eliminate unnecessary delays, not weaken the protections communities depend on.”
“Permitting reform should eliminate unnecessary delays, not weaken the protections communities depend on.”
If enacted, the legislation could undercut the few legal tools the community currently has to protect its air and water. The proposed federal bill includes provisions that would essentially lock in existing federal permits, making it nearly impossible for a future president or court to undo – even when new scientific data emerges.
Although a last-minute change to the bill added an exception to allow agency intervention for immediate threats to “human health” or “the environment,” legal experts note the bar is set exceptionally high, requiring proof of urgent proximate harm to override a permit freeze.
THAT KIND OF FEDERAL OVERRIDE threatens to compound issues already gripping Salton Sea communities, according to Aaron Mintzes, deputy policy director for Earthworks, which filed a lawsuit with Comite Civico del Valle in 2024 to demand that developers comply with environmental laws. The case was appealed in 2025 and could return to the California Superior Court.
One proposed geothermal power plant near the southeastern shore of the Salton Sea named Hell’s Kitchen is currently navigating state and federal environmental review processes. Final federal approvals are slated for May 2027, nearly a decade after the site was initially secured. Despite community pushback and legal turbulence, county officials have already approved the project’s primary permits under the California Environmental Quality Act, moving the remaining state-level air and water permits into their final review stages.
“For the Salton Sea, the bill would lock in the Army Corps of Engineers Clean Water Act permit, effectively preventing California or Imperial County from ever changing the permit,” Mintzes said. Under the legislation, state environmental regulators and county officials would be barred from imposing stricter rules down the line even if regional air and water quality deteriorates over time.
“Were there ever a problem,” he added, “no one could make changes unless they can meet a high evidentiary burden.”
THAT EROSION OF REGULATORY RECOURSE also extends to tribal sovereignty. Although last-minute amendments to the legislation stripped out language that made tribal consultations optional, legal experts warn the current text still undercuts meaningful, two-way engagement between tribes and federal agencies.
In the Salton Sea region, Indigenous tribes including the Cahuilla, Kwaaymii, Kamia, Kumeyaay, and Quechan peoples have repeatedly sought formal inclusion in development talks, warning that sprawling energy projects threaten ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites. The National Historic Preservation Act mandates that federal agencies consult tribes to identify and protect culturally significant landscapes before issuing permits. Diluting that mandate removes one of the few statutory shields protecting sacred grounds and other cultural sites — a pattern tribal communities are seeing across the West from Chaco Canyon’s oil and gas leasing battles to uranium mining near Mount Taylor and foreign mining claims in New Mexico’s Pecos River basin.
“There are just so few levers out there that enable us to be part of the discussion, the consultation, upfront discussion before projects are built,” Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said in a briefing on Nov. 6. “When things get cynically packaged like this and purport to be this greater good for a policy in the United States to help affordability and help green energy and things like that, that’s when things get dangerous for us.”
As votes to open the bill for debate echoed through the Senate chamber on Nov. 9, the policy deliberation over legal hurdles and permit timelines gave way to a much simpler reality back in California’s Imperial Valley. For those living around the drying Salton Sea, the potential passage of the Senate bill signals a fundamental shift in who bears the risk of America’s energy transition. The lithium beneath the lakebed promises a clean energy future, but Imperial Valley residents will continue to pay for it with chronic headaches, sudden nosebleeds, and high rates of pediatric asthma, which they, along with health experts including Johnston, attribute to the toxic dust coming from the lake.
“Imperial Valley can help lead the clean energy transition, but development must include environmental accountability and lasting community benefits,” Olmedo said. “Our community should not have to choose between economic development and environmental protection. We deserve both.”
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