One of the problems with courts deciding important political or policy questions on procedural grounds is that the substantive issues remain unresolved. Instead, we get more process. Such, it seems, is the case with today’s decision by the Nevada Supreme Court to invalidate Las Vegas’s applications for rights to fill its urban pipeline with rural …
Reading slides from a presentation by Colorado River Water Conservation District general counsel Peter Fleming, I ran across a rule of thumb governing water politics there, the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the water is west of the continental divide, and 20 percent is east. For population, the numbers are reversed. This seems a useful …
You know you’ve reached a milestone in a western water war of words when the aggrieved party invokes the name of William Mulholland. Such is the case today in discussions over a proposal to pipe a gobzillion acre feet of water across the continental divide to the growing cities in Colorado’s front range. And it’s …
Continue reading ‘Cue Mulholland Reference: Trash-Talking Water on the Upper Colorado’ »
From today’s newspaper, the U.S. House has approved legislation ratifying the settlement of two longstanding northern New Mexico water rights cases (sub/ad req.): The U.S. House of Representatives approved two northern New Mexico water agreements Thursday, a step toward allocating the region’s water rights and providing nearly $300 million in federal funding for water projects …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Northern NM Water Deal Advances’ »
From the work blog, a quick look at how the Storms of the Decade have been playing out in terms of western snowpack. In short: it’s raining like hell where all the people live, but the upper Colorado Basin, which feeds Lake Powell, has been pretty much left out with the exception of a blast …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Storms, the Snowpack’ »
I grew up in Upland, in the suburbs east of Los Angeles, in the foothills beneath Cucamonga Peak. Southern California’s storms this week have been a pleasant reminder of my childhood. A little cross referencing of family memory and old weather records pinned it down to January of 1969. It was my sister Lisa’s 12th …
The current situation in Venezuela, with drought leading to a shortage of hydropower, is a great example of a problem with the word “drought.” A reminder of Kelly Redmond’s handy definition: Most concepts of drought involve a water balance. This implies that both supply and demand must be considered, as well as the question of …
Continue reading ‘Is Venezuela Having a Demand-Side Drought?’ »
Rio Grande, Alameda New Mexico, Jan. 17, 2010 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Like much about New Mexico, the Rio Grande is modest, but it has its charms. The bike is a great tool for the study of geography, because it allows you to cover sufficient ground to make generalizations, but at a sufficiently slow speed …
Here in the southwestern United States, we’re gearing up for a big blast of El Nino weather, with some areas in California expecting a pounding. But as we desert dwellers dig through closets looking for our underused umbrellas, it’s worth remembering how dry it’s been. That’s percent of normal precip since Oct. 1, courtesy NOAA:
The folks at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have crunched the numbers on how the latest 2010 Colorado River runoff forecast will affect the river’s major storage reservoirs, and the news is not good for Lake Mead. At this point, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, there is just a one in five chance that …
Continue reading ‘Chances of Extra Water for Mead Diminish’ »