I don’t want to get out ahead of things, because we’re still trying to understand what the current gonzo El Niño means for global weather, but the monthly outlook from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center now has the odds at 50-50 that we’ll be in La Niña by fall: Most models indicate that El Niño …
The Pacific Institute and others have published a useful new study on “Incentive-based Instruments for Freshwater Management” which raises some interesting issues about the language we use to describe water policy instruments. Deep in Abrahm Lustgarten’s excellent new piece about water markets in the West is this description of the arrangement by which the Metropolitan …
Continue reading ‘On Bard and the language of water “markets” and “incentives”’ »
Via Brett Walton at Circle of Blue: Per capita water use declined 30 percent from 2000 to 2015, and total water consumption within the metro Atlanta area declined over 10 percent despite a 20 percent increase in population. That’s from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (pdf). As Brett notes, “Georgia now says it does …
Continue reading ‘In Atlanta, another water use decoupling’ »
In the gift shop at Hoover Dam, I found this: It’s actually an artist’s rendering of the new bridge, done sometime before 2007. By the time the bridge was actually finished in 2010, Lake Mead was kinda empty and the white bathtub ring was kinda big. Mead hasn’t been this full since the late 1990s.
In his keynote at last week’s Law of the Colorado River conference in Las Vegas, Metropolitan Water District General Manager Jeff Kightlinger pointed out something that’s not gotten a lot of attention in discussions of California’s drought – the extraordinary decline in that state’s acreage of cotton. Cotton’s gotten a bad rap in irrigation circles, because …
Continue reading ‘The decline in California’s cotton acreage’ »
Ry Rivard in Voice of San Diego: As San Diego benefits from its new supplies of water, its customers are cutting their water use. That means San Diego now has more water than it needs. This is what I’m talking about Friday at the Law of the Colorado River conference. It’s the core of the …
Continue reading ‘The great water decoupling, San Diego edition’ »
The tamarisk beetle, introduced in 2001 as a strategy to control “invasive” tamarisk trees in the United States, is “expected to spread throughout the entire (Colorado River Basin), and tamarisk presence, distribution and abundance will likely decline as a result,” according to a new report (pdf). “Tamarisk beetle in the Colorado River basin”, written by Ben Bloodworth of …
Continue reading ‘Tamarisk and its beetle are here to stay’ »
I’ve begun putting scare quotes around “done”, but we just passed a major milestone deserving of the word – done – with my upcoming book on the problems facing the Colorado River Basin and what I think solutions might look like. The book is now fully edited and entering the production process at Island Press. And …
In freshman college physics, a common conceit to simplify the study of velocity and momentum is the air table (think air hockey), which allows you to reduce the friction on a moving object to negligible levels. “Imagine,” the professor explains, “a frictionless plane.” And then sketches out on the chalkboard the equations for velocity and …
Continue reading ‘Pushback on the export of Palo Verde alfalfa’ »
While we were blathering on mindlessly in a comment thread about the water exported form California via alfalfa exports, Peter Gleick helpfully jumped in with come actual data: California’s total water footprint is an estimated 64 million acre-feet of water. That’s more than double the amount of water that flows down both of the state’s …