Pat Mulroy in the Las Vegas Sun on the interconnected west-wide artificial watershed we’ve built for ourselves, and why efforts to solve the Sacramento Delta’s problems matter to the rest of us: From the vantage point of Sacramento, the Colorado River may seem distant and disconnected to the challenges in the delta. Yet, the two …
Continue reading ‘Mulroy: We’ve built one giant watershed’ »
Tom Philpott, who through his Mother Jones pieces has aimed aimed his considerable knowledge of our food system at California’s water problems, sets his sights this week on the Imperial Valley of southeastern California where, as he notes, “Imperial Valley’s farms gets 3.1 million acre-feet annually—more than half of California’s total allotment and more than …
OtPR today offers a list of generally poor rural communities that have seen domestic wells go dry as relatively affluent almond farms pump down regional aquifers to keep their orchards alive during the drought. It’s not hard to see why this is wrong: This economic model, in which powerful outsiders come in, displace the natives …
Continue reading ‘An example of why groundwater regulation is hard’ »
update: Jeff Lukas, in the comments, notes that I missed something important, which is the distinction between statewide averages and the east-west precip divide. As he correctly points out, that statewide blob of wet-looking Colorado hides the fact that it’s been extremely wet to the east, and relatively dry west of the continental divide. Here’s …
Continue reading ‘Warm in the West, but not as dry as you might have thought’ »
One of my happy new discoveries among people writing about water in this time of drought is a guy named Dan Macon, who raises grass-fed lambs in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Mason’s one of those people who depend on water from the sky rather than irrigation water from a canal or groundwater pump, …
March – July snowmelt runoff on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande, which provides the bulk of the river’s water, is forecast to be 44 percent of the 1981-2010 average, according to a federal forecast out this morning. The measurement point for that number is the Otowi Bridge, which is on the road from Santa Fe to …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande runoff forecast: 44 percent at Otowi’ »
Nathanael Johnson at Grist continues his excellent work digging past the noise to try to help us understand what’s really going on with California’s drought. Today it’s a deep dive into water markets, which includes this great explanation of why they’re so hard in practice: It’s tricky to show that the water you’re selling is …
Continue reading ‘Why water markets are hard – what economists call “transaction costs”’ »
Arizona lawyer Grady Gammage, a member of that state’s water establishment, opened a conference I attended last week with an explanation of why he became so engrossed in trying to understand “the Law of the River,” that bundle of laws and customs that govern the management and distribution of the waters of the Colorado River. …
Continue reading ‘The Code of the Pirates and the Law of the River’ »
The National Park Service with a warning for Lake Mead boaters as the big reservoir, a recreational favorite outside Las Vegas, drops to record lows: From the Park Service’s Lake Mead facebook page