I’m generally sympathetic to the notion that transboundary water conflicts are overrated, and that they often provide a framework for cooperation. Except when they don’t (from this week’s Economist): The decision by Laos to push ahead with the giant Xayaburi dam makes it the first of what could prove to be a cascade of 11 …
When beetles kill trees, it changes water chemistry for the folks downstream of the hammered watersheds. And not in a good way (DBP is “disinfection by-products”, study area is in Colorado): Results demonstrate higher total organic carbon concentrations along with significantly more DBPs at water-treatment facilities using mountain-pine-beetle-infested source waters when contrasted with those using water …
Continue reading ‘Beetle kill, watersheds and water quality’ »
Bruce Finley in the Denver Post tallies up another western city cutting municipal water use, demonstrating that, for city water users, this is a tractable problem: Water-saving efforts already have dropped metro Denver residents’ overall average daily usage to 85 gallons, down from 104 gallons in 2001. Only one city better than Denver in Finley’s …
The folks on the Inkstain Economics Desk point to an intriguing puzzle, in the form of 22 shipping containers out behind the neighborhood MegaWalMart this morning. We’ve long used the Cheap Shit From China index (CSFC) here at Inkstain as a crude but useful economic barometer. The premise is this: WalMart has better data than …
Regarding my discussion yesterday of the fact that not all water conservation measures are created equal, here’s a nice treatment of the subject by Deborah Brennan at U-T San Diego: “It’s one of the simplest, most common sense things you can do to save money and restore the ecosystem, especially in San Diego where we …
Continue reading ‘Clarity on withdrawal versus consumption, San Diego style’ »
I’d like to sketch out a personal project – something I think needs doing. And, given that this blog’s modest audience includes some other folks who are, like me, involved in public communication on water issues, maybe it’ll serve as a prod for others. There is an important confusion in public discussions over two very …
Continue reading ‘Water: the withdrawal/consumption confusion’ »
At the 2010 census, about 70 percent of the population of Nevada lived in the greater Las Vegas metro area. The comparable Phoenix/Arizona percentage is something on the order of 68 percent. “The west” as a conceptual framework for thinking about those lands beyond the hundredth meridian has some utility. But rather than probing John …
Continue reading ‘Are Phoenix and Las Vegas in “the west”?’ »
Many years ago, when I lived in California, I was walking down the street with a friend, an old Italian-Catholic grandmotherly woman who I knew through her work fighting against the construction of a freeway through our town. I was sharing my fascination with these tenacious little juvenile palm trees that had found a niche …
Jeff Mount from UC Davis: The San Francisco Bay Area business community should be taking notes. This trifecta of high tides, storm surge and intense rain is also a Bay Area scenario. Scientists and a host of government agencies have been warning about such an event for years. It may not appear so on a …
On a quick weekend dash to Ogden earlier this month, I squeezed an hour out of my return trip to the Salt Lake City airport to make the drive out the causeway across the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island. When G.K. Gilbert, under the direction of John Wesley Powell, was trying to sort out …
Continue reading ‘Antelope Island and the notion of climate variability’ »