A bit of history – when US Colorado River water users feared Mexico
There’s a tangent in Henry Brean’s Las Vegas Review-Journal story about desalination and Las Vegas this morning that provides a reminder of just how far we’ve come in the power structure surrounding the management of the Colorado River in the last century. The main thrust of the story is a discussion of the possibility of [...]
Species by species, system by system
Dennis Wyatt, in the Manteca Bulletin, points to some intriguing language in the California Delta Protection Commission’s recent draft Economic Sustainability Plan (linked here) regarding my current hobby horse – the shortcomings of the Endangered Species Act as an environmental protection tool/water management tool: While a $12 billion investment in isolated conveyance may allow for [...]
Imperial Valley – What’s Plan B?
Tony Perry has a nice take-out in the Los Angeles Times this weekend outlining the state of play in discussions over the fate of the Quantification Settlement Agreement and the water deal contained therein between the Imperial Irrigation District and San Diego. It does a good job of highlighting the dilemma – San Diego has [...]
My desk
Test
On futurologists, water closets and jet packs
The Telegraph’s “science correspondent”, Richard Gray, wrote a story over the weekend about the wonders that await in the the bathrooms of our future. The details are unimportant – click if you are curious about your toileting future. What matters more is the methodology. Because it turns out to have been based on a “report”: [...]
Q: What’s behind the Bay Delta Conservation Plan process?
A: The Endangered Species Act A useful question came up on the Twitter last week about California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan that’s nicely answered by a state legislative analysis I read this afternoon. The BDCP is a key part of process underway now in California that seems to be headed toward creation of a Peripheral [...]
On the nature of nature
We spent Saturday at the Bosque del Apache, a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque. It’s early in the season for the well-known sandhill crane wintering grounds, but in addition to cranes we saw mobs of pintails, a cormorant, a family of grebes (I’m reasonably certain they were westerns, though they’re tough to tell at a [...]
The measurement problem
In a worth-reading piece today in the New York Times, Robert Crease uses this example to illustrate the disconnect between our ability to measure things and our ability to effectively use our ability to measure things: Is the ability to measure tiny levels of toxins making us safer, or leading us to spend enormous sums [...]
the end of an era of good fortune?
From Jim Hamilton’s new look at the risks of an oil production plateau: Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting [...]
the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal
From the inbox: I would like to know if you are interested in purchasing the domain name removingwinestains.com. Based on your contact information I see that you own inkstain.net, correct? Yes, I do own inkstain.net. No, I’m not interested in branching out into the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal.
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