I claim no direct journalistic expertise in the California Bay-Delta water policy discussions currently underway. But in looking at it with my “institutional framework” hammer in hand (everything looks like a nail to me), it sure looks like a process doomed to failure. Take Mark Grossi’s latest in the Fresno Bee on Westlands’ decision to …
Continue reading ‘California Bay-Delta – Doomed to Failure?’ »
For more than a decade, I’ve written about arguments over whether the United States is building, or could, or should build “new” nuclear weapons. They are frequently silly arguments. The “newness” debate was engaged in earnest in the late 1990s when the weaponeers fielded a nuclear bomb called the “B61 Mod 11”. The B61 is …
Continue reading ‘Apparently I’m Supposed to Write a Blog Post About This’ »
Steve Hannon tells the dramatic story of what nearly happened to Glen Canyon Dam during the great El Niño year of 1983, when heavy winter snows, then rain on that snow, caused Lake Powell to rise rapidly and exposed problems in Glen Canyon Dam’s spillways: The spillways had only operated for a few days when …
Arizona’s on the hunt for new water, and it won’t be cheap. Tony Davis covered this week’s meeting of the folks working on the program with one of my all time favorite government acronyms – Project ADD Water (that’s Acquisition, Development and Delivery). It’s the planning effort among Central Arizona Project players to find new …
You folks have already seen most of this, but for readers of what we call “the print product”, I pulled together today some of my thoughts about the draining of Lake Mead and its implications for New Mexico. I did this (perhaps not coincidentally) as I’ve been pulling together some thoughts to speak tonight at …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: My Visit to Lake Mead’ »
As I’ve mentioned before (and to remind that, despite my recent rant, I really do like a lot of David Zetland’s ideas!), the cost of coastal desalination represents one of the important boundary conditions on water supply in the western United States. In that regard, Sandra Dibble reports this week on four proposals in various …
A friend recently described a New Mexico water rights battle currently underway as a “water lawyers stimulus act.” I was reminded of that reading Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps describing John Wesley Powell’s thinking regarding the division of the West’s water: Powell’s warning at an irrigation congress in 1883 seems particularly prescient: “Gentlemen, you are …
There have been a series of helpful exchanges, in the comments here as well as elsewhere on the web, between economist David Zetland and Francis, a veteran of California’s water policy world. Zetland is a bright and articulate advocate for the use of market mechanisms to solve the thorny problem of water distribution under conditions …
Continue reading ‘On the Difficulty of Fixing Water Problems’ »
In Colossus, Michael Hiltzik makes nice use of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dedication address 75 years ago atop Hoover Dam. Inspired, I went back and found a copy of the text to pull a quote for a newspaper column. Roosevelt said this: We are here to celebrate the completion of the greatest dam in the world, …
It’s still early in the season, so this doesn’t mean a lot, but it at least means a little (click to blow it up big enough to read – blue line is average, red line is last year, green line is this year to date): This is a handy graph from the Colorado Basin River …