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’ »
I’ve got a piece over at Water Deeply on Arizona’s latest latest self-destructive Colorado River Basin outburst and the clash between state-by-state domestic politics and the realities of management at the Colorado River Basin scale.
“Regulatory arbitrage” is the business practice of shifting one’s operations to exploit differences in regulatory regimes. This often involves a geographical change, such as moving a factory to a place where environmental regulations are less stringent. That seems to be what’s going on in southeastern Arizona, where California nut farmers are moving into the San …
Continue reading ‘Regulatory arbitrage and Arizona’s growing nuts’ »
Brett Walton has done us all a great service with a thorough look at the issues surrounding Native American water rights in the Colorado River Basin. Importantly, he’s looking at it not just as a problem, but as an example of what the solution space can look like. The stuff from Kathryn Sorensen, Phoenix’s water …
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In this morning’s Arizona Star, Tucson journalist Tony Davis asks, “Is California trying to take our water?” In journalism, there’s a joke known as “Betteridge’s Law“: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” As Tony’s story strongly suggests, the notion making the rounds these days in some Arizona political …
Our big wet May looks to have all but eliminated the possibility of a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage in 2016, and it now looks like a better than 50-50 chance we won’t have one in 2017 either, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly outlook, published this afternoon (pdf). A shortage is triggered if …
Continue reading ‘Lower Colorado shortage now unlikely in 2016, maybe not in 2017’ »
Tony Davis asked Arizona officials if they had any actual evidence that California was trying to steal their water. Their official statement: “ADWR is not aware of any California efforts intended to take a portion of Arizona’s water supply directly. However, any changes to Colorado River operations could affect everyone who relies on the River. …
In the fall of 1934, Arizona Gov. Benjamin Moeur dispatched the Arizona National Guard to the banks of the Colorado River near its junction with the Bill Williams to try to block efforts to build what would eventually become Parker Dam. Their fear: that the Colorado River Aqueduct, which would tap into the new reservoir, …
Continue reading ‘Arizona – a century of fear that California wants to steal its water’ »
As Lake Mead drops toward a Lower Colorado River Basin shortage declaration, a group of UC Santa Barbara students have done an excellent analysis (pdf of their summary results) that shows where the real vulnerabilities are. They conclude that Las Vegas and the municipal areas of Central Arizona are on solid ground. Arizona farmers won’t …
Continue reading ‘As Lake Mead drops, who is really vulnerable?’ »
Kathleen Ferris explaining the new ordinance in Chandler, Ariz., creating a linkage between land use and water use as the city builds out its last vacant acreage: Chandler’s new ordinance helps the city make decisions about land use and water use simultaneously. The new ordinance allots water to new businesses based on the square-footage and …
Continue reading ‘Chandler builds a land use-water use widget’ »