About a decade ago, New Mexico state Rep. Mimi Stewart introduced legislation to collect a “water resource fee” on all water use in the state – $2 per acre foot for ag, $20 per acre foot for municipal and most other water users. (details in a 2003 talk by Steward here – pdf) The idea …
A lovely fall day in the Rio Grande Valley, on Albuquerque’s west side. The green field in the lower left of this picture is alfalfa. The scraggly brown stuff in the middle and right foreground is a part of the same field left fallow this year. The cottonwoods, God love ’em, suck up water no …
Continue reading ‘Here’s what ag water conservation might look like’ »
I was wrong when I wrote in April that Lake Mead would continue to set “lowest ever for this point in the year” records for all of 2014. As I write this, with a few hours left in October, Mead’s surface elevation is 1,082.79 feet above seal level. That is more than five whole inches above …
Continue reading ‘A Halloween treat: Lake Mead’s not quite as empty as we expected’ »
What economists call “weak sustainability” is the notion that, as you deplete some stock of natural capital, you reinvest in some stock of replacement capital. An example might be taking some of the surplus from extracting oil and gas and investing in solar or wind energy so you’ve still got some supply of energy when …
The case for dumping prior appropriation, the doctrine under which the first water users have the highest priority rights – Travis Stills: The 21st century water-use debate must move past “I got it first,” which children on the playground know is patently unreasonable and unfair.
Jay Famiglietti in Nature Climate Change (paywalled): The irony of groundwater is that despite its critical importance to global water supplies, it attracts insufficient management attention relative to more visible surface water supplies in rivers and reservoirs. In many regions around the world, groundwater is often poorly monitored and managed. In the developing world, oversight …
Continue reading ‘Famiglietti on draining the global groundwater bank’ »
I am endlessly fascinated (and frustrated) by the mess that is societal risk perception. Here (behind a Google survey wall), a look at efforts to regulate septic systems in Bernalillo County, primarily on the kind-of-rural fringes of the Albuquerque metro area: As groundwater contamination problems go, the stuff leaking from septic systems isn’t terribly sexy. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: septic systems and groundwater contamination’ »
Most of the way through October, it’s been a dry start to the 2014-15 “water year”, the season in which we build the snowpack to feed the rivers of the southwestern United States. As Jonathan Overpeck says: + @jfleck if there ever was a water year/ winter when we needed snow in our SW headwaters, …
Continue reading ‘Dry start to southwestern U.S. 2014-15 water year’ »
Contra Porterville in California, where poor farmworkers with few options are running out of water, on the fringes of Tucson it’s those who chose to sprawl onto the edge of a relatively affluent community, beyond municipal utilities and dependent on a marginal aquifer, who are now seeing their wells running dry. Tony Davis: In the …
Continue reading ‘Wells on the fringes of Tucson running dry’ »
Yesterday was the 78th anniversary of the first electric generator go into full operation at Boulder Dam. EDN has the story: Electricity from the dam’s powerhouse was originally sold pursuant to a 50-year contract, authorized by Congress in 1934, which ran from 1937 to 1987. In 1984, Congress passed a new statute which set power …