When I install a low-flow toilet, I use less water each time I flush. In the arid West, this is a good thing, right? Maybe. Maybe not. In Albuquerque, essentially every gallon I flush, after treatment at our sewage plant, ends up in the river, available for downstream users. It’s called “return flow credit”, and …
The New York Times story about hyperlocal news offers a reminder of the mistake we’ve been making in the news biz: And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Remember the railroad metaphor. The discussion suggests the continued mistake of thinking we’re in the news business. We’ve been extraordinarily successful in delivering …
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IMG_0252 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. That’s the Rio Grande you see there – the entire Rio Grande, as it leaves Cochiti Dam 40 river miles north of Albuquerque. It was flowing at about 1,000 cubic feet per second today when Lissa and I drove by during a Sunday wander. Cochiti, completed in the early 1970s, …
Aaron Million and his Wyoming-Colorado water pipeline idea have been around a while. They’re still here. I’m not inclined to pay a whole lot of credence to his idea of piping gobs of water from Wyoming to meet the demand in growing Front Range cities. But he’s still at it, having persuaded the feds to …
A bunch of stuff over at the place where I get paid on Energy Secretary Steve Chu’s visit to New Mexico this week. The bottom line: nuclear weapons remain important, lots of other missions for the labs, happy talk, no specifics. the bottom line (start here if you want to just skip to the meat, …
Via a tweet from Janet Stemwedel yesterday, a brilliant new business model has emerged. Here’s what she said: @jfleck Did you not get the memo? The internet is killing print media. (And, I presume, making it harder to wrap fish and line cages.) We’ve beent thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been mistakenly thinking we …
In a parallel to previous discussion of resistance to state-leve cap-and-trade measures, Kate Galbraith has a roundup of failures to increase gasoline taxes at the state level: One by one, the state-level proposals to boost the gas tax — which I wrote about in January — are, well, running out of gas. The latest casualty …
Nothing like a little George Will action to draw traffic to one’s wonky disquisitions. The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Consensus remains number 1 on the AMS web site for the second month in a row, edging out such big hits as “A Surrogate Ensemble Study of Climate Reconstruction Methods: Stochasticity and Robustness,” and …
One of our great difficulties, whether the subject is climate change or the economy, is the problem of decision-making in the face of uncertainty. We want to know the right answer, and the lack of one makes us uncomfortable. But, as Win Quigley points out, sometimes that’s just the way it is: Every economist and …