Here’s a reader quiz. Which headline would be more like to draw your click? “California has about one year of water left.” “California has about one year of reservoir storage and then we must rely even more on groundwater” The first is the headline the Los Angeles Times put atop a Jay Famiglietti op-ed last …
In a twitter discussion this morning, Brian Jordan shared a telling graphic that exposes the problems with Victor Davis Hanson’s recent City Journal essay about California’s water problems. Hanson’s argument is that California abandoned a dam-building program that, had it been pursued, would have provided the necessary storage to meet needs in this year of …
One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it. That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north: With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight …
Continue reading ‘In California, a new face of water conservation?’ »
OtPR: The range of public water discourse is very narrow; it is all incremental change from how we do things now.
Precipitation this winter at Crater Lake, in northern California southern Oregon, is a tad above normal. Snowpack is at record lows: On Friday morning, the snow level was at 32 inches, tying the Feb. 27 record for low snow. However, snow was falling Friday from a new storm system bringing rain to the Rogue Valley …
Continue reading ‘In the mountains of southern Oregon, what used to be snow turns to rain’ »
From yesterday’s New York Times: The problem with using ocean water to replenish the lake is that current agricultural runoff adds three million to four million tons of salt per year, Mr. Shintaku said. The same amount of ocean water would add about 10 times as much salt. As the water evaporates, the salt would …
Continue reading ‘Why pumping ocean water into the Salton Sea wouldn’t work’ »
Interesting tidbit out of California’s San Joaquin Valley: Pasture owners around Oakdale willing to go without water will be paid for fallowing their land this year, Oakdale Irrigation District directors decided Tuesday. The water saved by idling fields will be sold to thirsty out-of-county water agencies. OID landowners volunteering for the deal could collect millions …
Lest our city shrivel and die, we must have more water, we must built a great new aqueduct to the Colorado. William Mulholland, Los Angeles, 1925, as quoted in Vincent Ostrom’s Water and Politics
In the Colorado River Basin, I’ve been arguing that if you want to think hard about water policy, you have to be thinking hard about alfalfa. Out in California’s Central Valley, as Felicity Barringer explained last week in her last story for the New York Times (sad face), you’ve got to be thinking about almonds: …
Continue reading ‘Almonds, water policy and cropping decisions’ »
John Van Dyke, in his epic visit to the deserts of western North America a century ago, wrote harshly of their springs: Occasionally one meets with a little stream where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from below forces up some of the water; but these springs are of very rare occurrence. And …
Continue reading ‘the dwindling of California’s “wretched little mud-holes”’ »