I love this bit of business from Charles Fishman’s visit to Angel Park, a Las Vegas golf course, in his book The Big Thirst: By the time a golfer steps up to the first tee, Angel Park has used 2,507 gallons of water to make that round of golf possible, 139 gallons of water for …
Grover’s talking here about raisins, but I think it generalizes.
Four years ago, I stood on Hoover Dam staring down at the receding water line as Lake Mead set what was, at the time, a record low: If you blow this picture up enough, you can probably see pixels of rock that have not been exposed since the 1930s. Or maybe not. The surface elevation …
In his new book Chasing Water, Brian Richter offers an interesting list of the ways in which water governance fails: Insufficient Financial Capacity If the government is not generating enough money from taxes or other means to meet these needs, or if the government simply is not allocating enough of its resources to the governing …
Las Vegas golf course developer selling water rights at $20,000/af (http://t.co/3wP6VliFTm) Lower price than 2012 (http://t.co/S8d4dg8rf6) — Brett Walton (@waltonwater) June 24, 2014 In 2012 The Walters Group, a golf course outfit, offered millions of dollars of water rights at $25,500 per acre foot. Two years later, the going price seems to have dropped: The …
Continue reading ‘Las Vegas water rights not what they used to be’ »
Readers of this blog tend to be self-selected group (I’m looking at you, water nerds), so the fact the bulk of the West’s water goes to farming is not news to you. But my hunch (without any data) is that this is not well understood among the broader public. Which is who I write for …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It’s the farms’ »
Here’s The Nature Conservancy’s Brian Richter, in his new book Chasing Water, describing what the solution space for the Colorado River Basin’s water problems might look like: Even though urban water uses (for domestic, commercial, and industrial purposes) account for only a minor share of total water use in most water-stressed places, urban water …
Continue reading ‘Why it’s not about the Bellagio Fountain redux – a peek into the solution space’ »
I love this picture. E.C. LaRue was a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist who in 1916 assembled the first attempt at a rigorous scientific survey of the water resources of the Colorado River Basin. Water Supply Paper No. 395 will never be mistaken for great literature. LaRue was one of America’s early technocrats, intellectual ancestors of …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River history pic Sunday: If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ »
This is a picture of the downstream side of Morelos Dam, on the U.S. Mexico border west of Yuma, Ariz. I took it in March, when there was water flowing downstream, into Mexico. That is an unusual sight. This is usually the point where the Colorado River ends. It’s not entirely clear to me where …
tl;dr Vegas is an easy target, but Lake Mead’s problems involve far more than Sin City’s profligacy. Longer version: As Lake Mead drops toward a record low some time next month, there’s a temptation to draw a dotted line to the Bellagio Fountain, 30 miles to the west, and point a finger of blame. It’s …