Anthony Downs at Brookings, from “What’s Wrong With American Housing“: Even before the dramatic collapse of housing starts after 2005, it should have been obvious to home building firms that they were in for a downward ride after starts surpassed two million in both 2004 and 2005. Those years of peak production led to an oversupply in …
Let me suggest a positive narrative to the story of Texas’ great drought of 2011. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality today released its latest list of communities whose water supplies are threatened as a result of the driest year on record. Topping the list is tiny Groesbeck, between Dallas and Houston, where a line …
There’s a tradition in newspaper journalism of the heartwarming front page story on Christmas morn. Here’s mine: If you could look straight down 538 feet beneath the La Cueva High School neighborhood in Albuquerque’s far Northeast Heights, you would see water returning to the metro area’s depleted aquifer. The water table in the area had …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: a water wonk’s Christmas greeting’ »
I’ve not been writing much about energy for the last couple of years, and only following it shallowly, so the fact that New Mexico’s oil production has reached the highest level since 1998 kinda snuck up on me. But what’s going on here is child’s play. Look at North Dakota: John McChesney’s done some good …
Elizabeth Varin had an interesting story this morning about the latest Imperial Irrigation District discussions about the Quantification Settlement Agreement*, the Byzantine** water deal that provided a path for California to go on a Colorado River diet (reducing its use to its legally allotted 4.4 million acre feet per year). The deal has two key …
It’s not clear to me whether the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study is a tool for developing solutions to the long term supply-demand imbalance on the river, or a process for the states and other interests to stake out their turf. Probably some of both. Witness, for example, …
In Colossus, Michael Hiltzik talks about the way Hoover Dam, during its construction, became a tourist spectacle. When Lissa and I were in Boulder City last week, I found this in the museum-y hallway at the Boulder Dam Brewing Company (which has a lovely collection of similar memorabilia), a poster hawking tours: THE MAKING OF …
Not being up in Colorado, I don’t have a good feel for how seriously to take Aaron Million’s Flaming Gorge pipeline proposal. My hallway conversations at CRWUA left me with the feeling that not a lot of people in the basin take it very seriously, but I don’t know water issues in the state of …
Some more odds and ends from last week’s Colorado River Water Users Association meeting Yuma Desalting Plant The trial run of the Yuma Desalting Plant “went well,” according to Terry Fulp, head of the USBR Lower Colorado office. YPD was built in the early 1990s to clean up icky agricultural drain water to meet US …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Water Users, odds and ends’ »