Archive of entries posted by jfleck

It’s not like California hasn’t had the time to get in front of this problem

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California is entering its fourth drought in as many decades. Yet even now, some communities lack water meters to track how much water people are using and to charge them accordingly. Many of those households don’t even receive monthly water bills. They pay for water through yearly assessments attached to their property taxes, which may …

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Parade crowd size watch: Seattle 12th person edition

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So yeah, Seattle won the big pointyball game, and lots of people came out for a parade to celebrate. But are we surprised to learn that parade organizers overestimated the crowd size? “There is civic pride that goes into estimating these numbers. They tend to be overstated wildly,” says Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: headed toward ESA litigation on the Rio Grande

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From this morning’s newspaper, we appear to be headed toward Endangered Species Act litigation this year on the Rio Grande: Human water diversions have left the Rio Grande ecosystem with too little water to maintain the minnow and other species that depend on the river’s flow, including the valley’s iconic cottonwoods, said Jen Pelz, Wild …

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If the plagiarism is inaccurate, is it still plagiarism?

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A fresh-looking piece of Colorado River journalism made the rounds this week, by Frances Weaver at The Week, about the Colorado River’s current decadal-scale drought. But some of the language had a familiar ring to it. Here’s Weaver: The most immediate cause is 14 years of drought unrivaled in 1,250 years. Here’s Michael Wines in …

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When there’s a drought, you pump groundwater, until you can’t

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Best line about water management I ever wrote: Wet years have a way of covering up a multitude of water management sins. Drought exposes them for all to see. It also helps to expose those sins, apparently, if you have satellites. Here’s Jay Famiglietti, talking about what the GRACE satellites show about groundwater depletion in …

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A lot of birds

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One more from yesterday’s road trip to the Bosque del Apache, the National Wildlife Refuge 90 minutes’ drive south of Albuquerque. As I’ve written before, snow goose overpopulation is an ecological disaster. But when they take flight? Yowza.

Puzzling over water and agricultural economics

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I do not understand this. Not being rhetorical or coy. I really do not understand this. I’ve observed before that Yuma and Imperial counties, the two farm regions that have benefitted from enormous allocations of Colorado River water and the support of the federal government that goes with it, have some of the highest unemployment …

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Mulroy on growth, supply and water pricing

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There’s so much rich material in Henry Brean’s exit interview of Pat Mulroy, the outgoing head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, that I barely know where to begin, but let’s start with water pricing. Mulroy makes clear (as she always has) that she viewed it as her responsibility to deliver the water the community …

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