One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it. That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north: With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight …
Continue reading ‘In California, a new face of water conservation?’ »
There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something. …
Continue reading ‘A reminder that stormwater isn’t free water’ »
The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, …
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly report forecasting Colorado River Basin reservoir operations for the next 24 months (pdf) came out today, and it had some good news and some bad news for people in the Lower Colorado River Basin worried about dropping levels in Lake Mead. Mead ended February at a surface elevation of …
The folks at Montgomery & Associates are publishing a handy new summary of reservoir storage for Arizona, which I’m told will be updated monthly.
Our interest in “water”, as measured by the frequency with which we type it into Google, follows a seasonal cycle, peaking in July and bottoming out in December:
Article VII of the Rio Grande Compact is one of the keys to allocating the river’s supply among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas: Neither Colorado nor New Mexico shall increase the amount of water in storage in reservoirs constructed after 1929 whenever there is less than 400,000 acre feet of usable water in project storage…. …
OtPR the other day suggested compensation as drought mitigation: If the goal is drought resilience, we could use money instead of water to keep farm communities intact until a wet year. If it is important that farm workers in Mendota live decent lives during droughts, we don’t have to find non-existent water for their employers’ farms. We …
Continue reading ‘In Brazil’s drought, compensating the poor’ »
I’ve long dismissed the “pipeline to the Missouri River” (PTM? “canal from the Missouri”? CFM?) and other similar large-scale water importation schemes as vastly impractical distractions from serious water policy (see for example here and here). The argument, which I get regularly from well-meaning readers, points to the big network of oil and gas pipelines spidering across …
OtPR: The range of public water discourse is very narrow; it is all incremental change from how we do things now.