The premise of a piece I wrote recently over at the Lane Center was that folks in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin are all elbowing up to the front of the line to try to get the next straw slurping water out of the big river before it’s too late. The focus was on the …
In honor of World Rivers Day, I rode my bike down to check out the Rio Grande through Albuquerque this morning. That’s really a bit of a cheat. Most weekends I end up riding my bike down to check out the Rio Grande at least once, but it’s World Rivers Day, and water nerds are …
In a hard-hitting exposé, the Desert Sun earlier this month seems to have conclusively cleared the Salton Sea of charges that it smells really bad: The smell seemed to be everywhere — except the place where people usually think it comes from. A pungent, sewer-like odor in the air was noted Friday morning by people …
Continue reading ‘Newspaper exonerates Salton Sea of charges it stinks. Or does it?’ »
Climate change and the resulting changes in rivers flows pose significant problems for transboundary water management agreements. But a new paper by Heather Cooley and Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute finds a hopeful model in recent tweaks adding flexibility in the face of drought to the “Law of the River” governing distribution of water …
Continue reading ‘The Law of the River as a model for dealing with the loss of stationarity’ »
One of my new tricks when looking at western water problems is to pose the question: “What is the failure mode?” It’s clear that on many scales, both temporal and geographic, we’ve got supply-demand imbalances. It’s easy to point that out and call the system unsustainable, to point out that we’re headed for a crash. …
From NASA’s Earth Observatory, Lake Powell at Hite this month compared to a year ago: h/t David Appell
Over at the Lane Center, a look at what the extra water on the Colorado River means: While Colorado Basin water users had survived 11 years of drought without suffering shortages, simply by draining their two big reservoirs, US Bureau of Reclamation calculations raised the clear possibility that by next year, the first ever shortage …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bonus Water on the Colorado’ »
Because you can never have too many pretty pictures of the Colorado River:
When I was a young reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, I wrote a lot about the municipal budget, reasoning that budgets are where governments most explicitly establish and act on their priorities. But it was frustrating, because I just had one budget – no real points of comparison. So I set out one year to …
Continue reading ‘Why I’m optimistic about Colorado River water (California? not so much)’ »
Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, the NRDC’s Doug Obegi makes the central point about the linkage between water problems across the west. Responding to Victor Davis Hanson’s argument in favor of giving farmers more water from the Sacramento Delta, Obegi makes the salient point that there isn’t the water to give: The …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River and Sacramento Delta limits’ »