From the Joe Mozingo at the LA Times: The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, …
If one allows mining of a nonrenewable source, it is disingenuous to argue that the source should never be polluted if the economic activity causing the pollution is necessary to sustain employment. Suppose that two individuals proposed to extract water from a nonrenewable aquifer. The first agreed he would farm and by doing so dry up the aquifer. …
California had one of its memorable (and important for water supply) “atmospheric river” storms earlier this month. The folks at NASA have posted a particularly beautiful image of one of the results: That’s a huge blast of sediment flowing out the mouth of the Eel River in northern California following the storm.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about University of Colorado law school professor Doug Kenney’s argument that the states of the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (UB) faced a very real risk under climate change – that to the extent the river shrinks across the 21st century, the Upper Basin states will have the eat …
Continue reading ‘Is the Upper Basin more vulnerable than I thought?’ »
One of the points Steven Solomon’s book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization hammered home for me is water’s importance in providing transportation routes. Here in the western United States, it’s not something I’ve had to think of too much (see rivers without water to understand the cognitive dissonance). So I’ve been …
Last week’s release of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study was a headline-grabbing event – “Colorado River water supply to fall short of demand, study says“, to cite but one of a zillion examples of the core message getting big play. Barry Nelson argued the study “has the potential to mark a new era in the …
Continue reading ‘With the Basin Study done, we can get back to draining Lake Mead’ »
As I’ve written previously, the Colorado Basin Study suggests that augmenting water supply in the region is the most expensive and least quick approach to closing the supply-demand gap. But if folks do want to pursue augmentation, Juliet McKenna is asking the right questions: The consequences of implementing any water supply augmentation plan need to …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, my distillation of the Colorado River Basin Study’s key message: Towing icebergs from Alaska or building a giant pipeline from the Missouri River won’t bail out the western United States from its growing water supply crisis, federal officials said Wednesday. Instead, conservation by the region’s farms and cities offers the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Basin Study – it’s conservation for now’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin is due out tomorrow, and already it’s been getting a lot of attention. Bruce Finley at the Denver Post and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times have both highlighted the study’s consideration of the “pipeline to the Missouri” option, one of …
Continue reading ‘Why the Basin Study is not about a pipeline to the Missouri’ »
New Mexico’s 2012 weather feels increasingly like a teachable moment, though the lessons must be handled with care. As the folks in the local media-weather complex went into stormpocalypse mode over the possibility that it might actually snow this weekend, I took pause in Saturday’s paper to look back: The storm comes as New Mexico …