Standing at the Grand Canyon’s south rim this evening at sunset, I saw a woman walk up clutching her luggage, spellbound. “Oh my God,” she said. The look on her face said everything. She was seeing it for the first time. She’d come to celebrate an “important birthday”, and said she wanted to spend it …
Another example that the old New West development model isn’t working: Next spring, water bills will rise to help pay the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s mounting debt used to fund some $3.3 billion in pumps, pipes and intakes installed over the past several years. The fee, which comes on top of other recent increases, is …
Solving the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance is easy. There are lots of ways to do it. stop farming the Imperial Valley get rid of all those Phoenix lawns get rid of Phoenix! give all the water to the Indians (they were here first, after all) and let them parcel it out Solar powered desal! OK, …
FYI, I’ll be at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas next week, if any of the water wonks out there will also be in attendance and wanna get together, maybe go throw rocks in the Bellagio Fountain or something?
The folks working on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study last week published a striking new graph (figure 2 in this pdf) pointing out our dilemma: It’s an attempt to splice together the latest version of the Bureau’s now-ubiquitous graph of historical supply and demand with the latest projections from …
Continue reading ‘Yo! Over here! Not much water in the Colorado River! What should we do?’ »
The Arizona Republic had a very smart editorial today about the Colorado River. The premise: what happens in California matters a great deal to Arizona. The back story is a struggle in California about how to meet the terms of a deal in the early ’00s to cut back to its 4.4 million acre foot …
When it comes to water, we westerners seem to be a distrustful lot: Water politics in Colorado and in western Wyoming have long been driven by this one, nagging fear: that California was getting something to which it was not entitled – and might get accustomed to it. Squatter rights, if you will, bolstered by …
Continue reading ‘Dipping more drinking straws into the Colorado River’ »
In the western United States, water use and water rights questions associated with Native American communities are a major factor in the region’s future. Under federal law, these communities are entitled to substantial but often unquantified amounts of water. Planning for the future often gets tangled up in these questions. For example: Not all tribes …
Back in the 1950s, the Colorado River, at least a bit of it, used to regularly reach the “Southern International Boundary” – the river bed near San Luis where it stops being the US-Mexico border and travels solely in Mexico. Even during the driest bits, when Lake Mead was dropping during the late ’50s, at …
Those pesky tree ring scientists are at it again, spoiling a perfectly good party. Stephen Gray and colleagues have taken a dig into runoff over the last 1,000 years on three major Colorado River tributaries, adding a new level of granular detail to something that already seemed apparent: Runoff during the 20th century, when we …