jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Bass: Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta solutions aren’t a question of science

From the Delta National Park blog: I mean, how much competent science leading to inconclusive policies needs to be commissioned before smart people admit that this is not a problem of science? Yup.

Will taxpayers bail out delta water exporters?

Jeffrey Michael runs the numbers and suggests the marginal cost of water from a new Peripheral Thingie (canal or tunnel beneath/around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) will be prohibitive for agricultural users asked to foot a share of the bill: According to the draft BDCP, the marginal cost of new water the contractors get out of [...]

Isenberg: you want more storage? who’s gonna pay?

Phil Isenberg, head of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, gets to the heart of the matter in the discussion of the possibility that California needs more water storage capability: The council agrees with Assemblyman Logue that water storage is a critical component of any solution to meet the state’s water supply and environmental needs. Over the [...]

Paying the cost of savings

In southern California, the Metropolitan Water District is cranking up the rate meter, squeezed in the conservation v. cost vice: As more people conserve water, MWD sells less water, and that means revenues go down. But MWD’s costs of delivering that water remain essentially the same: Thus, prices go up.

Who owns the groundwater?

Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Newsha Ajami of the Pacific Institute and groundwater guru John Bredehoeft ask, in relation to the proposed Cadiz aquifer pump-and-sell project in the Mojave Desert, who owns the groundwater? The company plans to extract 2.5 million acre-feet of the water, a public good, over the next 50 years and sell it back [...]

National Research Council on the scarcity value of water

Another tidbit from the National Research Council’s new report on the problems of the California Bay-Delta: By assigning to water a scarcity value of zero, many current policies signal consumers that water is available without limit, even while the limits imposed by scarcity are intensifying. As a result, more water is used than would be [...]

the sharp edge of a knife between wet and dry

I’ve written before about John Van Dyke’s memorable description of the line between a desert river’s ribbon of green and the arid landscape that surrounds it… the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. This holds true when the knife’s edge is [...]

Great moments in western water law: drowning gophers

In 1935, the California Supreme Court ruled in the case of Tulare v. Lindsay-Strathmore that drowning gophers was, self-evidently, not a “beneficial use” of the state’s precious water resources. Also squirrels: Another gave it as his reason for irrigating in winter that “every time we irrigate we kill gophers … the best season of the year [...]

A fevered first reading of the National Research Council’s Bay-Delta Report

I’ve been addled by influenza for the better part of a week, tortured by feverish dreams of men in dark robes (were there robed women too?) in a great white-fronted building holding solemn rituals to try determine whether I might be healed. But it was like Plato’s cave – you couldn’t see the robed tribal [...]

Could Whiskey Spring be fer fightin’ over?

In my continuing effort to milk the not-Twain quote for all it’s worth, there is this – in the mountains north of the well fields of the proposed Cadiz California groundwater project is Whiskey Spring. And of course, one of the big areas of fightin’ in Cadiz is the question of whether the project’s groundwater [...]

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