I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money. – Marc Reisner When your vantage point spans a sufficient chunk of landscape, Hoover Dam doesn’t look so big. Is this really the right scale at which to think of it?
The US Bureau of Reclamation this afternoon released its latest pass at quantifying water demand in the Colorado River Basin. Recognizing that there’s no one answer for what the demand curves might look like in the future, the agency looked at a range of six scenarios, based on input from the seven basin states on …
Continue reading ‘About that gap between Colorado River supply and demand….’ »
Wildman and Forde make my last post on this subject look smart, arguing that the supply-demand imbalance on the Colorado River will hit Arizona and Nevada first: We find that initial shortages will be borne only by the cities of Arizona and Nevada and farms in Arizona whereas the other Basin states have no incentive …
In the work I’m doing now on the Colorado River Basin for my book, I’m trying to get beyond simply extrapolating supply and demand curves and then running around with my hair on fire. The hair-on-fire thing is easy to do, because the current supply and demand curves, as the Bureau of Reclamation frankly noted …
Usually rivers get bigger and bigger as you go farther downstream. But the Colorado just keeps getting smaller. That’s Will Stauffer-Norris in the Aspen Times talking about the trip he and Zak Podmore made down the Colorado River, from end to end. In this case, a dusty, had-to-walk kind of end. It’s a a great line …
Continue reading ‘usually rivers get bigger as you go downstream’ »
Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Newsha Ajami of the Pacific Institute and groundwater guru John Bredehoeft ask, in relation to the proposed Cadiz aquifer pump-and-sell project in the Mojave Desert, who owns the groundwater? The company plans to extract 2.5 million acre-feet of the water, a public good, over the next 50 years and sell it back …
In an email last week, Kevin Werner at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center called March 2012 “one of the warmest and driest on record in the Upper Colorado Basin.” The Forecast Center’s April 1 numbers are the ones you can start taking to the bank, with the bulk of the snow accumulation season behind …
What we call here the “water year” runs from October to the end of September. It’s a useful tool, capturing the fall-winter-early spring water collection season, in which snow builds up in the mountains for later use by humans and ecosystem, followed by the water use season. So the end of March is a nice …
Continue reading ‘Halfway through the water year: fear and the attention economy’ »
It’s easy to blame climate change when you’re in DC begging for money to subsidize your water problems. OK, maybe not easy, on account of DC not believing in climate change and stuff. Also not having any money even if it did. But the dynamic in this Steve Tetreault story as Pat Mulroy visits our …
Continue reading ‘You mean we have to pay for our own water?’ »
Is the age of big concrete – the dams to store western water and the canals and pipes to move it – really over? Are the projects now underway – perhaps the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s “third straw” into Lake Mead – the last we’ll ever see built? (I’m working on a piece that in part …