One of the most important findings of environmental economics in recent decades is what is called the “environmental Kuznets curve”, a finding that as a community’s affluence rises, environmental “bads” – think air and water pollution, for example – decline. Could what has happened in Flint, Michigan, be evidence that this phenomenon is bi-directional – …
Continue reading ‘Is Flint a reverse “environmental Kuznets curve”?’ »
It’s increasingly clear that the lessons we’re learning from California’s drought are not those we expected. Far from the doom of so much of the rhetoric, Californians are adapting to scarcity with remarkable aplomb. The latest data point, from Phillip Reese and Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, may be the most interesting yet: California’s …
Continue reading ‘Despite drought, California agriculture adds 30,000 jobs’ »
Brett Walton wrote a smart piece about the relationship between poverty, income inequality, and decaying US water infrastructure: Affordable water requires an all-in effort that cuts across the political spectrum, a mix of redirected spending priorities, tax policy, social programs, and engineering assessments at the local, state, and federal levels. The urgency, experts assert, will …
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I’ve recently become acquainted with interesting research by Texas A&M geographer Wendy Jepson, who has studied household water insecurity along the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s a tendency to look for a technological fix (“Look at this cool new filter we invented!”), but Jepson found this less than effective (“HWS” is “household water security”): We evaluated the efficacy …
Continue reading ‘Water insecurity: think poverty, not climate’ »
Tara Lohan at Water Deeply had a great interview last week with Tom Ash of Southern California’s Inland Empire Water Agencies about the problem of water revenue in a time of conservation and drought: Tom Ash: What I learned is that it doesn’t matter where in the world – China, Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Israel …
Continue reading ‘Flawed rate structures cost California water utilities half a billion dollars’ »
The Pacific Institute and others have published a useful new study on “Incentive-based Instruments for Freshwater Management” which raises some interesting issues about the language we use to describe water policy instruments. Deep in Abrahm Lustgarten’s excellent new piece about water markets in the West is this description of the arrangement by which the Metropolitan …
Continue reading ‘On Bard and the language of water “markets” and “incentives”’ »
In his keynote at last week’s Law of the Colorado River conference in Las Vegas, Metropolitan Water District General Manager Jeff Kightlinger pointed out something that’s not gotten a lot of attention in discussions of California’s drought – the extraordinary decline in that state’s acreage of cotton. Cotton’s gotten a bad rap in irrigation circles, because …
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In freshman college physics, a common conceit to simplify the study of velocity and momentum is the air table (think air hockey), which allows you to reduce the friction on a moving object to negligible levels. “Imagine,” the professor explains, “a frictionless plane.” And then sketches out on the chalkboard the equations for velocity and …
Continue reading ‘Pushback on the export of Palo Verde alfalfa’ »
The downside to the remarkable water conservation I’ve been writing about (see yesterday’s Albuquerque numbers, for example) is revenue. Water utilities sell water. If people use less water, water utilities make less money. One option is to shift to more fixed-costs pricing, charging a flat rate for service, but then you lose the behavioral incentive …
Continue reading ‘The struggle with municipal water rates in response to conservation’ »
Note to self: remember that El Niño isn’t just about enjoying a growing southwestern U.S. snowpack and pondering its implications on our 2016 water supply. Across the horn of Africa (and many places around the world) people go hungry as a result. From SciDev.Net, a portal for global development issues: The consequences of a lack of …