It’s hard to resist the gunslinger metaphor when reading Henry Brean’s story about Pat Mulroy’s Las Vegas water pipe ultimatum: To shore up support for a controversial project, Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy will ask her board for an “up-or-down vote” on plans to pipe groundwater to Las Vegas from across rural eastern …
David O. Williams highlights what’s likely to be one of the central struggles in managing our twin energy and water problems – the water needed if oil shale is going to be tapped to head off peak oil. Peak water, in other words, collides with peak oil: But numerous studies have indicated full-scale commercial oil …
My friend Andrew told me the story of Hite, Utah, left high and dry as Lake Powell’s levels dropped. Lissa and I went through there on our recent vacation, and I was so struck by the place that I scraped together the details of Hite’s abandonement and turned it into a newspaper story: HITE, UTAH …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: What I Did On My Summer Vacation’ »
Utah State Route 95 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I know that as a 21st century westerner of a certain sort, I’m meant by religious tradition to abhor Utah State Route 95. But dang if it isn’t about the most beautiful highway I’ve ever had the pleasure to drive. Go south a bit, then west out …
Continue reading ‘Notes from the Road: Utah State Route 95’ »
Colorado River at Moab Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. There’s a moment when you’re driving across the deserts of the southwest as the road tops a rise and you get your first view of the ribbon of green along a river. That’s where the towns are, and that’s where the cool is, a break in both …
Some scientists predict that climatic changes could alter historic precipitation patterns, and reduce available water supplies. Carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel combustion, mostly in coal-burning power plants, threatens a significant climate change…. A National Academy of Sciences report estimates that the resulting temperature increase and reduction in precipitation could diminish water …
In light of yesterday’s mediapalooza about the new federal climate report (see my contributions here and here), there’s an interesting on-the-ground reality check today in the Denver Post: Colorado’s peak flow from snowmelt hit a few weeks earlier than normal, causing problems for some recreational users of the state’s rivers and complicating downstream irrigation strategies. …
“The Saudi Arabia of X” is a common new energy meme that has been applied, among many things, to the oil shales of the western United States. But its invocation requires some significant arm-waving over the question of water, as this report by Jeremy Miller points out: But it is water – or more specifically, …
Continue reading ‘“insufficient water to meet needs”, energy edition’ »
Henry Brean has a story in this morning’s Las Vegas Review-Journal on the mess at the upper end of Lake Mead where the Colorado River used to empty out into a lake, dumping its sediment. Now that the lake level’s dropped, the river’s cutting back down through all that deposited glop, creating a new rapids: …
Some of my favorite water people like to point out that we don’t have a problem of water shortage here in the arid West, but rather a problem of water allocation. In the comments, the mysterious DG seems to be in that camp, offering this on what will happen when the Colorado comes up short: …
Continue reading ‘How Much Water Does the Colorado Really Have, Part II’ »