The coal-Central Arizona Project link always seemed a bit of a Rube Goldberg policy apparatus to me. Its Goldbergness seems about to unravel. Felicia Fonseca at the AP reports today on the potential costs of a retrofit to the Navajo Generating Station, up the hill from Glen Canyon Dam. The plant is part of a …
Continue reading ‘Arizona’s cost of moving water could be about to go up’ »
A couple of notes from Las Vegas, NV, the front line of the housing collapse, that have significant implications for the region’s long term water future: New home sales in 2011 were one tenth the number at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. The Las Vegas Review Journal quoted Pat Mulroy the other …
It’s all fun and games until you actually have to measure snow. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first 2012 Colorado Basin reservoir forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf) projects a decline in total storage in lakes Mead and Powell, the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoirs, of 844,000 acre feet, or 2.76 percent. There are two ways …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: a forecast for decline on the Colorado again this year’ »
While archaeological metaphor can be instructive, I think we make more progress in understanding the fate of the Southwest under conditions of aridity and water scarcity by looking at what’s happening now, in the places that are really running short of water. What are people actually doing today? Which is why the Imperial Valley of …
Continue reading ‘Amid uncertainty, IID bumps up fallowing $’s’ »
I’m a fan of NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. Here’s an example of why. In working on my book, I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin – how much precipitation falls, and where, and when. The CBRFC has great data and great tools to help. Last …
Continue reading ‘In praise of the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’ »
Mark Lubbell at UC Davis makes the case for abandoning the Mark Twain “whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’ over” quote, and not just because Twain didn’t say it: Unfortunately, perpetuating water wars and the language of conflict will never solve California’s water problems. Water wars are equivalent to the “tragedy” aspect of managing common-pool …
Well that was fun while it lasted, eh? Looks like it’s back to draining reservoirs on the Colorado! 2011, a big sloppy wet kiss of a water year, pumped up total storage in the reservoirs behind Glen Canyon and Hoover dams by some 5 million acre feet. But the first forecast of the year suggests …
Continue reading ‘2012: back to draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs?’ »
When I was writing this, the working title was “optimism”. It’s a piece for Stanford’s Lane Center, based on work I’ve been doing on Colorado River Water management. It was spawned by a conversation last summer with Jon Christensen, the Lane Center’s executive director. I was talking about my optimism about our problem-solving ability, and …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: What seven states can agree to do’ »
Elizabeth Varin had an interesting story this morning about the latest Imperial Irrigation District discussions about the Quantification Settlement Agreement*, the Byzantine** water deal that provided a path for California to go on a Colorado River diet (reducing its use to its legally allotted 4.4 million acre feet per year). The deal has two key …
It’s not clear to me whether the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study is a tool for developing solutions to the long term supply-demand imbalance on the river, or a process for the states and other interests to stake out their turf. Probably some of both. Witness, for example, …