Headed toward the river on my bike yesterday, I ended up riding for a while with an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a while. I mentioned I was working on a Colorado River book (it’s my standard excuse for “not having a lot of miles in my legs”, as the cyclists say) and talk turned …
Continue reading ‘Is it about the alfalfa? Thinking Like a River Basin…’ »
Shaun McKinnon’s great reader piece on the retirement of Larry Dozier after 42 years working western water issues has an interesting coda. The story’s drama is the great tale of Glen Canyon Dam and the 1983 flood. (I like to call it “the year they nearly lost Glen Canyon Dam”, though that’s perhaps a bit …
Economists have a useful framework for thinking about effects of an economic transaction that extend beyond the actors involved in the transaction. They call them “externalities”. They can be good or bad (benefits/costs enjoyed/borne by those not involved), but mostly the conversation revolves around the bad ones. The good ones we tend to take for …
Continue reading ‘California Water: Pricing the Externalities’ »
Now that I’ve got this “largest artificial watershed in the world” hammer, everything’s beginning to look like a nail. The “hammer” involves the notion that the vast artificial plumbing system we’ve built across the west has linked our water management fates in a way that did not exist when water tended to spend its human- …
More art from the hard drive reorganization. This is the headwaters of the Little Colorado River from another Lissa-John road trip (we road trip well) through Arizona. It’s just outside Springerville, and yes, it’s green, and flowing. (The Little Colorado is more famous for brown, and its relative lack of flowing.) The development of the …
Since apparently all the cool kids love data, here’s some of mine. This is total storage in Lake Mead (blue), Lake Powell (reddish) and combined (orangey), updated with the 2011 end-of-year numbers as estimated by the USBR’s latest 24-month study (pdf). Note that if the numbers hold up, this will be the second time since …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Estimated Storage in Mead, Powell’ »
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf): The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the …
If you’re in Albuquerque, I invite you to come hear my latest thinking on the stuff I write about here – “Chasing Water: Climate Change, Drought and the Implications of the Disappearing Lake Mead.” April meeting of my friends at New Mexicans for Science and Reason, Wed., April 13, Rm 2402, UNM Law School.
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …