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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River Assigned Water: Quoting Sorensen et al’ »
Via Eric Kuhn, the snowpack above Lake Powell is miserable. 2002 was the lowest year on record for unregulated April-July inflow into Lake Powell. This year is starting off even worse.
If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more. As long as we keep polishing those …
A guest post by Friend of Inkstain Michael Cohen…. By Michael Cohen, Senior Fellow, Pacific Institute December 15, 2025 Key Takeaways Missing Deadlines Way back at the end of the last century, at the annual Colorado River conference in Vegas, Marc Reisner repeated the Margaret Thatcher quote that consensus is the absence of leadership. On …
I don’t envy Secretary Burgum the position that he’s in, but we do need federal leadership. Secretary Burgum already reached out to convene a meeting. He invited the governors and the chief negotiators to DC earlier [last] week. That meeting didn’t happen because three of the four Upper Basin governors weren’t willing to go. [Nevada …
Continue reading ‘Quoting Katie Hobbs on Colorado River Negotiations’ »
Ten years after I handed in the manuscript for my book Water is For Fighting Over, about the governance past, present, and future of the Colorado River, my Utton Center colleague Rin Tara and I took a look back at the book on our Water Matters podcast. Writing it changed my life, reading it changed …
Continue reading ‘Water is For Fighting Over, ten years on’ »
Bonnie Colby and Zoey Reed-Spitzer: Access to water, a concern around the globe, is constrained in many areas of the Colorado River Basin (CRB) by water scarcity, pollution and lack of delivery and treatment infrastructure. These constraints disproportionately affect the basin’s Native American, Hispanic and Black populations, groups which often have lower access to resources …
By Jack Schmidt | December 3, 2025 Autumn Rains Delay Basin-wide Reservoir Depletion In BriefUnusually wet conditions in the Basin in October and November 2025, combined with reduced releases from some reservoirs, led to a basin-wide increase in storage for the two-month period. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased during the …
Continue reading ‘Autumn Rains Delay Colorado River Basin-wide Reservoir Depletion’ »
California’s projected use of Colorado River water this year, 3.76 million acre feet as of Reclamation’s Oct. 29 modeling runs, would be, as near as I can tell, the state’s lowest use since 1949. Also notable: Nevada’s 197,280 acre feet would be the lowest since 1992. The two lowest years in Imperial Irrigation District’s history …