I must admit that when I first heard the idea of a tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California to carry water from the Sacramento River to users to the south, I thought it wacky, on purely engineering grounds. With no evidence or expertise, I thought the whole idea was just batshit crazy. But …
The roadblock to solving western water problems: [T]he understandable tendency of state, local, and federal interests to defer painful concessions in water resource allocation. Indecision persists as long as there is no absolute requirement that problems be solved. Paul L. Bloom, Law of the River: A Critique of an Extraordinary Legal System, in New Courses …
Continue reading ‘Western Water – the Persistent Roadblock’ »
Does it matter whether the current southwestern US drought is caused by anthropogenic climate change? Or, to be slightly more precise, in what ways does it or does it not matter? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think in the comments below. The question arises anew in the context of the …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Southwest Drought – Is It Happening Now?’ »
During family day at the construction site of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s new Lake Mead water intake structure, they let folks sign the tunnel boring machine. My favorite:
From the morning paper, a look at money for the a Navajo Nation water project in the Indian water rights settlement bill the president signed last week: A century of federal investment in dams and canals was built to serve cities and farms — “a long tradition in water politics in which states receive federal …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Navajo Settlement’ »
Update: The papers are all on line here, and seem to be freely available. It stands as a cliché in western water circles to say that John Wesley Powell was right. But yeah, he pretty much was. “Powell’s conclusion in 1876,” John Sabo and his colleagues write this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy …
A month of warm, dry weather left Lakes Mead and Powell with 24.8 million acre feet of water at the end of November, 169,000 acre feet less than had been forecast a month earlier. The crux of the Colorado River Compact lies in Article III (d): The States of the Upper Division will not cause …
Continue reading ‘River Beat Weekly Report: What’s 169,000 Acre Feet Among Friends?’ »
Working today on a piece for the newspaper on Indian water rights, I followed a trail of Google crumbs trying to figure out who was the “Winters” in what’s called “the Winters doctrine”. The doctrine is a pillar of U.S. water law, which grows out of a 1908 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in …
The windmill, using wind to pump water from the ground, is an iconic image of the American west. But the question of the cumulative effect of a bunch of little wells – these days often out behind tract homes powered by electricity rather than the wind – has become one of the central arguments in …
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. When I was visiting Hoover Dam in October, the folks who were showing me the stilling wells inside the dam took me on a side trip out onto the walkway outside the power plants …