Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Quoting Jeff Kightlinger and Jim Lochhead
As the former CEOs of two of the largest water utilities using water from the Colorado River, we have been deeply engaged in interstate and federal negotiations on the river for over 30 years. Those negotiations were tough, but the basin states ultimately reached agreement, including reducing California’s use of water by 800,000 acre-feet and …
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In which my colleagues and I share thoughts on the future of Colorado River governance
It is hard to know where to begin. The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River draft environmental impact statement, and the deep questions it raises, is an “everything including the kitchen sink” sort of process. But at its root, the question it raises is simple: Tell us what you’re going to do. It is …
Pitchers and catchers report
The best Albuquerque baseball stories I heard are both about Willie Mays. The first is that time at the old Tingley Field where, as a friend put it, “Willie Mays once broke a lady’s car windshield with a foul ball.” We’ll have to take my friend’s word for this, but he says he straight up …
My career as an energy economics journalist in two figures
But the peak will inevitably come, perhaps later this decade, perhaps now. The signs Gerth wrote about Feb. 24 may be the first signal that it is starting. “We simply don’t know,” Goodstein said. This is a problem New Mexico oil and gas producers have thought about a lot. Here, production peaked in 1969 and …
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Colorado River news isn’t all bad!
I’ve been pretty successfully checked out of Colorado River work while I put the finishing touches on the new book (pre-order now!) but my colleagues are on it with a new post looking at the over-winter storage at the big reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams: This feels like good news, or least not …
Craig Mod on Books
That’s what we’re here for. The books. Nothing we do is more durable or meaningful. I believe this more and more with all my heart. The weirder the world gets, the less meaning there seems to be in public discourse, the more I feel: BOOOOOOOOOOOKS. Printed, hefty suckers, immutable and offline. Moar. I trust books as a medium. …
Quoting Rolf Schmidt-Petersen on water management in New Mexico in 2002
2002 snowpack and runoff were terrible on the Rio Grande and San Juan. Think the San Juan Chama Project diverted about 6,000 acre-feet into the Rio Grande that year (normal would be between 80,0000 and 120,000 acre-feet. Heck, for Colorado on the mainstem Rio Grande, we had to negotiate a new delivery by Colorado to …
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Quoting Brandon Sanderson
In the end of it all, you are the art. The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. – Brandon Sanderson, via Simon Willison
Colorado River Assigned Water: Quoting Sorensen et al
For more than a century of development, Colorado River governance has lived under atension between individual communities’ desires to use more water and the collectiveneed to balance basin-scale supply and use for the benefit of the region as a whole.Incentives favoring individual communities at the expense of the collective good havebrought us to the edge …
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