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’ »
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
Nearly every time I write a newspaper story about water, and without fail every time I give a talk, I get a question about why we don’t just build a big canal from some wet place and bring the water here to the desert southwest. It just seems so crazy to me – so over-the-top-engineering-costly-we-don’t-do-that-stuff-any-more …
Continue reading ‘Drought? But it’s flooding on the Mississippi!’ »
My new favorite Twitter feed is @jwesleypowell, who is tweeting his trip down the Colorado River into the great unknown: Soon after dinner, we discover the mouth of the San Juan, where we camp. The tweets are drawn from the publicly published version of John Wesley Powell’s journals, which is a ripping good read. But …
A reminder that Northern California’s water problems and the Colorado Basin’s are linked, in this new paper by Paul Miller and Thomas Piechota on snowpack around the West. Miller and Piechota focus primarily on Colorado Basin snowpack (which as we know is declining) but note the relevance of the Sierra Nevada as well: Decreasing snowpack …
Continue reading ‘Sierras and the Colorado Basin: We’re All In This Together’ »
I’m excited to join an “I’m not worthy” sort of group at Stanford’s Lane Center who share a common interest in our changing West. My piece of the problem is water management. My initial contribution touches on my cautious optimism about long term institutional management issues on the Colorado River – some success in recent …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bending the Law of the River’ »
Water’s never really wasted. It always goes somewhere and does something. See, for example, the lining of the Coachella Canal, on the northeast side of the Salton Sea: [L]eakage from the unlined Coachella Canal recharged local aquifers. Wetlands have expanded due to spring discharge below the canal. Wetlands were natural features prior to canal construction, …
A new study out today from the Pacific Institute of municipalities’ water use in the Colorado Basin has some good news and some bad news from a basin-wide perspective. Per capita water consumption in the basin’s cities is down: Almost every one of the water agencies included in the study experienced declines in per capita …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Cities’ water use in the Colorado Basin’ »
This ran last week in the Albuquerque Journal, while I was on the road, sorry for the late bloggage (sub/ad req). From the Natural Resources Law Center’s Navigating the Future of the Colorado River conference, it’s a riff on how this year’s big snowpack buys a bit of time for the hard discussions to come …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere – Buying Time on the Colorado’ »