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.
New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission yesterday formally approved the creation of a “New Mexico Central Arizona Project Entity,” a governance gizmo needed to move forward with a proposal to divert Colorado River tributary water from the Gila River in New Mexico: Interstate Stream Commission members have approved a resolution designating a 14-member unit to design …
Continue reading ‘Gila River water governance gizmo built. Sort of.’ »
University of California researchers have a novel idea: what if we dump more water on alfalfa and use that to recharge aquifers? Over a six-week period in February, March and April, Dahlke oversaw a test in Siskiyou County in which 140 acre-feet of water were applied to 10 acres of alfalfa. That’s well over twice …
On the first of May, the official forecast for the 2015 water year on the Colorado River was 6.4 million acre feet. The July mid-month forecast is up to 10.2 million acre feet (pdf). That’s been enough to prevent the need for a Lower Basin shortage declaration (which would have forced water curtailment in Arizona) …
Continue reading ‘Ten amazing weeks in the Colorado River Basin’ »
I joined the Albuquerque Journal in 1990 in what I now think of as “the golden age of journalism”. That’s shorthand for reliable access to expense account travel, but something more. If, as it often was, the story happened to be at a nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, or at an Air Force …