I’ve got a piece over at Water Deeply on Arizona’s latest latest self-destructive Colorado River Basin outburst and the clash between state-by-state domestic politics and the realities of management at the Colorado River Basin scale.
What does the growing El Niño oceanic pattern mean for the Colorado River Basin? Best to just shrug, and say the statistics are too small to say much of anything conclusive. In the nine El Niño years since the 1960s, three have been wet, three have been in the middle, and three have been dry. Here’s a …
Continue reading ‘What does El Niño mean for the Colorado River Basin?’ »
Those unfamiliar with the volcanoes on Albuquerque’s west side will have to take me at my word when I assert that they are not normally this green:
I would say “warm climate” is a fair description of the Imperial Valley in California’s southeastern corner. It’s 109 degrees there this afternoon (43C). Below is a great addition to my collection of adverts as the real estate boosters tried to lure folks to the desert during that oddly magical time when waves of immigrants …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley, circa 1903: “an unlimited amount of water”’ »
Our remarkably rainy spring and summer in New Mexico and southern Colorado has increased the allocation of San Juan-Chama Project water, which brings some of New Mexico’s Colorado River Basin water to the central part of the state. After a bad start to the year, flows have been above average basically continuously since the first …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s 2015 San Juan-Chama Project allocation goes up’ »
For grins, here’s some data on golf water use for selected Colorado River Basin counties: Some notes: Data source: USGS Water Use in the United States People who fly into desert cities often look down out of the airplane on approach and comment on golf courses. I have nothing against golf. If I had …
Continue reading ‘Nine Colorado River Basin counties that use water for golf’ »
“Regulatory arbitrage” is the business practice of shifting one’s operations to exploit differences in regulatory regimes. This often involves a geographical change, such as moving a factory to a place where environmental regulations are less stringent. That seems to be what’s going on in southeastern Arizona, where California nut farmers are moving into the San …
Continue reading ‘Regulatory arbitrage and Arizona’s growing nuts’ »
Updating my Colorado River reservoir storage spreadsheet today to make a graph for a friend was a pretty discouraging exercise. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the system’s two massive reservoirs on which 9 states and a gazillion people and farm acres depend, are at their lowest combined level since 1967, when they were filling Powell …
Continue reading ‘Coase’s reservoirs: how transaction costs are emptying Lake Mead’ »
From the newly released archive of British Movietone newsreels, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in October 1938 hits the button to open the gates on Imperial Dam, diverting the first Colorado River water into the All-American Canal and on its way to irrigate the farms of the Imperial Valley: The newsreel makes …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley, 1938: “a million parched acres awaiting for irrigation”’ »
Some things I learned from the late Richard Pipes.