Albuquerque talk next week on Flint water crisis
For the home town crowd, the University of New Mexico School of Law’s new environmental law professor, Cliff Villa, is talking next week about Flint: The law school’s at 1117 Stanford Dr NE.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
The struggle with municipal water rates in response to conservation
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’ »
Albuquerque at 127 gallons per person per day – how low can cities go?
I’m giving a talk next week at the CLE Law of the River conference in Las Vegas about what I think is one of the two most important trends in western water management. The first, which we hear a lot about, is the pressure posed by climate change and drought. The second, which I don’t think …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque at 127 gallons per person per day – how low can cities go?’ »
El Niño and global food stress
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 …
Groundwater success in the San Luis Valley
From the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, Rio Grande headwaters, more evidence that ag communities can overcome the groundwater tragedy of the commons: ALAMOSA — For the second year in a row, water officials have seen a recovery in one of the aquifers that farmers lean on heavily in the San Luis Valley. The …
Continue reading ‘Groundwater success in the San Luis Valley’ »
It’s a dry heat.
A trip down the Library of Congress photo archive rabbit hole this afternoon led me to a bold claim: In his 1878 book Picturesque Arizona, Enoch Conklin quotes Dr. A. M. Loryea: “The heat in Arizona, though high, is endurable in consequence of the dryness.” This may be the granddaddy to Arizona’s most quoted weather …
A note on alfalfa export data
There’s a letter to the editor in the latest High Country News (it’s in the paper edition, can’t link yet) that repeats a California water myth that’s just flat wrong – the California Supergiant Alfalfa Water Use Export Myth. Alfalfa alone is using more water than all the other water uses combined, and most of …
A correction: re new Vegas casino, the word I was looking for was “pond”
A correction: last night I posted about the new Resorts World Las Vegas, to be built at the north end of the strip. I said it would have a 29,350-square-foot lake. That is not a “lake”. That is half the size of a football field. That is a “pond”. I apologize and stand corrected.
Odds favor wet late winter, spring across Colorado River Basin
With the current snowpack in the Colorado Basin watersheds above Lake Powell at 93 percent of average (source: CBRFC), we’re entering the critical time for the 2015-16 water year on the Colorado River. Today’s forecast from the federal government’s Climate Prediction Center has the odds tipped toward a wet later winter and spring, but not …
Continue reading ‘Odds favor wet late winter, spring across Colorado River Basin’ »
Coming soon to Las Vegas, a lake
The new Resorts World Las Vegas, on the north end of the strip: According to county documents, the arena will be part of a later phase but a 29,350-square-foot lake that is part of a Chinese garden, and other water features, is part of the initial development.