Jeff Michael did a pithy job Thursday of untangling the snag of old fishing line that is “regulatory assurance”, the Endangered Species Act and the proposal to build giant tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to get water from California’s wet north to its thirsty south with, it is hoped, minimal disruption to the delta …
Continue reading ‘On “regulatory assurance” in the Sacramento Delta’ »
Matt Grubs talked to Laura Paskus and I on last night’s In Focus on local public telly. It perhaps goes without saying that we talked about water.
Lissa and I took a drive Sunday up State Route 4 through the Jemez to look at the big Las Conchas burn one year later. A couple of points worth noting: Miles of forest that has not burned Lots of forest that burned healthy (sprouting aspen on the forest floor) Elk grazing in the Valle …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Las Conchas and a search for optimism about wildfire’ »
The conventional wisdom about the US Clean Water Act (which I’ve always believed) is that it’s been a great success. Maybe not? On the fortieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act this paper reports the first quantitative assessment of the aggregate trends in water quality in the U.S. using a single standard over the years …
Continue reading ‘Checking the conventional wisdom on the Clean Water Act’ »
In the past, I’ve used the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant as a sort of benchmark for measuring who’s the most desperate for water in the Lower Colorado River Basin, and the level of that desperation. Tony Davis had an excellent look at the project this past week in the Arizona Daily Star, and …
Two very different responses to climate change: In London, England, local borough councils are utilizing land use regulations to stop Londoners from removing their front gardens. Nearly 6,000 miles away in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the United States, municipal authorities such as the Southern Nevada Water Authority are doing the exact opposite—offering monetary incentives for landowners to tear …
Continue reading ‘Two very different responses to climate change’ »
It’s all relative, I guess. I just finished my June backyard rain sheet for the National Weather Service, and realize I’ve had 8 times as much precipitation in the first six months of 2012 as I did over the same period last year – 2.21 inches (5.61 cm) compared to 0.27 inch (0.69 cm) last …
Some months ago, I complained in the newspaper about water consumption in Palm Springs: Today … customers of the Desert Water Agency, which serves Palm Springs, consume an average of 540 gallons of water per person per day. Having just visited Palm Springs on a desert vacation, I had that number in mind last week …
The greatest beneficiaries of the Colorado River’s bounty, in terms of irrigation water for agriculture, are at the bottom end of the system – in California’s Imperial Valley and across the border in Yuma County. But the community payoff for all that liquid wealth seems limited. From today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly unemployment report: …