When the US government’s Board of Commissioners on the Irrigation of the San Joaquin, Tulare, and Sacramento Valleys of the State of California duly reported to Congress in 1874, its members issued a warning. If a plan for irrigating the rich but arid lands of California’s great Central Valley is not worked out with care the …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta: “an intricacy of endless legal troubles”’ »
Here’s a cool map for folks thinking about California’s current discussions about building some sort of Peripheral Thingie to carry water around (through? beneath?) the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta: That’s the vote thirty years ago on a ballot initiative asking voters whether the state might build a Peripheral Canal to do the same thing. The red …
When I posted a couple of weeks back on the fact that land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is subsiding faster than sea level is rising, a smart reader asked privately, “Yeah, so what’s the point?” My reader’s observation was, in essence, that it doesn’t really matter much in terms of policy response whether the …
Barry Nelson had an insightful post today comparing and contrasting the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta systems. There are important similarities – crashing (or crashed) ecosystems and water supplies for human systems that are stretched beyond the point of sustainability. But the institutional frameworks for addressing those problems and the prospect of …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River – a comparison’ »
The risk from sea level rise to California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta system is frequently discussed. As sea level rises, the argument goes, the risk of failing levees increases. With a substantial share of California’s farmland and population depending on water supplies that flow through the delta, failed levees is an enormous risk. Levee failures, as …
Continue reading ‘Sacramento Delta sinking faster than sea level is rising’ »
From the Delta National Park blog: I mean, how much competent science leading to inconclusive policies needs to be commissioned before smart people admit that this is not a problem of science? Yup.
Jeffrey Michael runs the numbers and suggests the marginal cost of water from a new Peripheral Thingie (canal or tunnel beneath/around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) will be prohibitive for agricultural users asked to foot a share of the bill: According to the draft BDCP, the marginal cost of new water the contractors get out of …
Continue reading ‘Will taxpayers bail out delta water exporters?’ »
Phil Isenberg, head of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, gets to the heart of the matter in the discussion of the possibility that California needs more water storage capability: The council agrees with Assemblyman Logue that water storage is a critical component of any solution to meet the state’s water supply and environmental needs. Over the …
Continue reading ‘Isenberg: you want more storage? who’s gonna pay?’ »
In southern California, the Metropolitan Water District is cranking up the rate meter, squeezed in the conservation v. cost vice: As more people conserve water, MWD sells less water, and that means revenues go down. But MWD’s costs of delivering that water remain essentially the same: Thus, prices go up.
Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Newsha Ajami of the Pacific Institute and groundwater guru John Bredehoeft ask, in relation to the proposed Cadiz aquifer pump-and-sell project in the Mojave Desert, who owns the groundwater? The company plans to extract 2.5 million acre-feet of the water, a public good, over the next 50 years and sell it back …