Even with a dose of bonus water transferred from the Upper Colorado River Basin’s storage account to the Lower Colorado River Basin’s storage account, Lake Mead is forecast to drop another five feet between now and the end of September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s first forecast of the 2015-16 water year. We’re …
Continue reading ‘Lake Mead forecast to drop another 5 feet in the coming year’ »
We’re Approaching Global Warming All Wrong & How To Use Conspiracy Theories To Fix It — Thinkpiece Bot (@thinkpiecebot) October 13, 2015 Sometime yesterday afternoon, my “grandbotchild” @thinkpiecebot passed a milestone: my daughter Nora Reed’s digital art now has more Twitter followers than I do. The bot is a thousand lines of code that is …
Continue reading ‘It’s hard to explain my daughter’s art, except that she’s good at it’ »
In the latest High Country News, Stephen Elliott reports on the tribulations of the Paradox Valley desal unit run by the Bureau of Reclamation to help reduce salt load on the Colorado River: Without the unit’s deep injection, the salt that covers the desert valley floor at Paradox, and the thousands of tons of it …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River salinity program showing its age’ »
Jay Lund, Dr. Water at UC Davis, asks a provocative question that gets to this gnarly question of the status of water saved by conservation measures – what if municipal water users could direct how the savings from their conservation efforts are used? Albuquerque has done extraordinarily well in the last two decades. Per capita …
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., had a go at Deputy Interior Secretary Mike Connor during a Senate hearing last week, looking for assurances that if his state left unused water in Lake Mead as part of a Colorado River Basin conservation effort, the Interior Department wouldn’t just kype it and give it to someone else (mumble …
Continue reading ‘Arizona, water conservation, and the tragedy of the “paracommons”’ »
I’ll be yammering on about “New Mexico’s Rio Grande: Fate of a 21st Century River“, Oct. 31, 10 a.m., at the Albuquerque Open Space Visitor’s Center. We tried to schedule it for a time when the sandhill cranes had arrived. You’ve already heard me, but the OSVC is one of the best places in town …
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Matt Weiser takes us into the strange world of California municipal water infrastructure finance, where costs are relatively fixed and vendors are trying to sell less of their product: [M]any water agencies are feeling the strain because they had already delayed imposing rate increases for a number of years due to the drought and a …
Continue reading ‘Conservation and the municipal water finance dilemma’ »
This image depicting a years’ worth of Colorado River water use, from an emailer I got from the Southern Nevada Water Authority:
Some thoughts after today’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on federal western California New Mexico etc. drought legislation…. On Congressional process We currently have two “California drought bills” – H.R. 2898 developed by California House Republicans and S. 1894. They are very different. As a matter of process, the details of the difference don’t …
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on federal drought legislation circa October 2015’ »
In response to reader feedback, here’s my depressing graph of current Lake Mead storage, adapted to be readable on your mobile phone. Yes, there are people now who prefer their bad news on the go! More background here.