Here’s a reader quiz. Which headline would be more like to draw your click? “California has about one year of water left.” “California has about one year of reservoir storage and then we must rely even more on groundwater” The first is the headline the Los Angeles Times put atop a Jay Famiglietti op-ed last …
In a twitter discussion this morning, Brian Jordan shared a telling graphic that exposes the problems with Victor Davis Hanson’s recent City Journal essay about California’s water problems. Hanson’s argument is that California abandoned a dam-building program that, had it been pursued, would have provided the necessary storage to meet needs in this year of …
Overheard on the 766 Rapid Ride bus as it pulled into downtown Albuquerque…. Guy standing in the aisle: “Is that a good book?” Guy seated: “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.” Pause. “It’s as old as fuck, though.” I look over to see the guy sitting across the aisle from me has a …
Would I be right to guess that this is the first time tree rings have been in the Rolling Stone? “It was like looking through a telescope into the future to see how forests would respond, and it felt awful,” Williams says. “The result was totally unimaginable: wildfires, bark beetles, a huge reduction in forest …
One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it. That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north: With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight …
Continue reading ‘In California, a new face of water conservation?’ »
There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something. …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that stormwater isn’t free water’ »
The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, …
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly report forecasting Colorado River Basin reservoir operations for the next 24 months (pdf) came out today, and it had some good news and some bad news for people in the Lower Colorado River Basin worried about dropping levels in Lake Mead. Mead ended February at a surface elevation of …
The folks at Montgomery & Associates are publishing a handy new summary of reservoir storage for Arizona, which I’m told will be updated monthly.