Looks like significant progress toward an Arizona-California deal to slow Lake Mead’s decline, according to a story from the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis: Arizona, California and Nevada negotiators are moving toward a major agreement triggering cuts in Colorado River water deliveries to Southern and Central Arizona to avert much more severe cuts in the …
Continue reading ‘More cuts, sooner, under Lower Colorado deal taking shape’ »
The downside to the remarkable water conservation I’ve been writing about (see yesterday’s Albuquerque numbers, for example) is revenue. Water utilities sell water. If people use less water, water utilities make less money. One option is to shift to more fixed-costs pricing, charging a flat rate for service, but then you lose the behavioral incentive …
Continue reading ‘The struggle with municipal water rates in response to conservation’ »
A trip down the Library of Congress photo archive rabbit hole this afternoon led me to a bold claim: In his 1878 book Picturesque Arizona, Enoch Conklin quotes Dr. A. M. Loryea: “The heat in Arizona, though high, is endurable in consequence of the dryness.” This may be the granddaddy to Arizona’s most quoted weather …
If you care about Colorado River Basin water, it behooves you to pay attention to the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada. It’s an entirely different watershed, but 2015 demonstrated how the interconnections in California’s plumbing have left the two inextricably linked. The tl;dr version of two interrelated points below: California’s drought has put pressure on the Colorado …
Continue reading ‘2015 puts Sierra Nevada-Colorado Basin linkage in stark relief’ »
Water is just water, right? What happened when Sierra Madre, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, switched from local groundwater to imported Colorado River water is a reminder that, well, no: In 2013, Sierra Madre was forced to begin importing water from the Metropolitan Water District. That led to a new problem. The water source …
Arizona cotton acreage this year is the lowest it has been in nearly a century. Cotton is incredibly important in the evolution of western water policy, in Arizona in particular and therefore in the Colorado River Basin in general. In Arizona, it was one of the “Three C’s” that dominated the state’s economy – cattle, …
87 years ago today in Colorado River water management history, water apparently was for fightin’ over: POLICE CALLED TO STOP BATTLE IN STATE HOUSE Affair Outcome of Argument Between Governor and Senator on River LIVELY MELEE HAS MANY PARTICIPANTS Gov. Hunt Declares Blow Received from Opponent Was “Purely Accidental” PHOENIX, Ariz., Nov. 26 – …
An excellent Laura Paskus story this weekend on a new climate water risk study by Justin Mankin at Lamont-Doherty and colleagues, includes some really important comments from Mankin on the implications of the work for water policy. The study helps clarify risks to water supply in the Rio Grande (and elsewhere, notably the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘A plea for more attention to water use demand-side projections’ »
A new paper by Megan Miller and Manoochehr Shirzaei at Arizona State describing subsidence in the Phoenix area offers some interesting new data for thinking about the implications of groundwater management. Subsidence is bad, and groundwater pumping is what causes it. Having the ground surface drop is bad all around, cracking building foundations, messing up roads, and such. …
Continue reading ‘Phoenix subsidence and groundwater pumping’ »
Pulling together some New Mexico water use numbers today for one of my University of New Mexico colleagues, I was reminded of a cool paper from a few years back by Peter H. Gleick and Meena Palaniappan of the Pacific Institute that contained this striking graph: It’s two times series – U.S. gross domestic product and …
Continue reading ‘Decoupling water use from growth: the New Mexico example’ »