Las Vegas, NV
Weird shit, well lit
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
A drought of the Lower Colorado River Basin’s own making
For better or worse, my decision to not pay the $15 a day for an internet connection at Caeser’s Palace has left me with a bow wave of things to write about after a week spent in an around the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Let’s start with Lake …
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Grand Canyon
Standing at the Grand Canyon’s south rim this evening at sunset, I saw a woman walk up clutching her luggage, spellbound. “Oh my God,” she said. The look on her face said everything. She was seeing it for the first time. She’d come to celebrate an “important birthday”, and said she wanted to spend it …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: New Mexico water law needs to catch up with reality
Thrown on driveways ’round town last week: The New Mexico Court of Appeals has turned into the state’s chief water policy nag. Three times in a little more than a year, most recently last week, the court issued rulings tinged with exasperation at the need to apply 20th century New Mexico water law to 21st …
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A change in the Vegas business model
Another example that the old New West development model isn’t working: Next spring, water bills will rise to help pay the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s mounting debt used to fund some $3.3 billion in pumps, pipes and intakes installed over the past several years. The fee, which comes on top of other recent increases, is …
Colorado Basin Institutions
Solving the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance is easy. There are lots of ways to do it. stop farming the Imperial Valley get rid of all those Phoenix lawns get rid of Phoenix! give all the water to the Indians (they were here first, after all) and let them parcel it out Solar powered desal! OK, …
CRWUA
FYI, I’ll be at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas next week, if any of the water wonks out there will also be in attendance and wanna get together, maybe go throw rocks in the Bellagio Fountain or something?
Measuring the snow
When I was thinking about how to write a book about climate science for kids, measuring the weather made sense to me. As a journalist, it’s my favorite science to write about because of the opportunities to tie science to everyday experience. And any kid can set up a thermometer and rain gauge in their …
Bay-Delta salinity – a brief history
Thanks to Controversy (the Journalist’s Best Friend), the subject of salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin-San Francisco Bay Delta system has received more attention of late than is usually attached to such arcane topics. But I did not realize how old this issue is. It was salinity and fish science that caused federal Judge Oliver Wanger …
Yo! Over here! Not much water in the Colorado River! What should we do?
The folks working on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study last week published a striking new graph (figure 2 in this pdf) pointing out our dilemma: It’s an attempt to splice together the latest version of the Bureau’s now-ubiquitous graph of historical supply and demand with the latest projections from …
Continue reading ‘Yo! Over here! Not much water in the Colorado River! What should we do?’ »