David Zetland really cares about water policy, and he wants you to think better about it: I confess that I’m not a fan of the “educate the general public” model of water policy problem solving, which might seem odd given my profession as a journalist. That’s an “educate the general public” job, right? But …
tl;dr Everyone on the Colorado River has a legitimate argument that they’ve already sacrificed, and that they have a legal entitlement to what’s left. If everyone digs in their heels on these points, the system will crash. We need to be willing to share the pain. But (scroll to the bottom) there is hope on that …
Continue reading ‘How to solve the Colorado River’s problems, or not’ »
On twitter the other day, I was joking that I’ve adopted a new approach to my book research: when confronted with a problem, I first ask, “Did Elinor Ostrom write about this?” Ostrom won the economics Nobel in 2009 for her work on how communities solve common pool resources problems, work that’s central to the …
From the beginning, it was clear that solving Southern California’s water problems would require “the best talent of the country”: That’s Walter Mendenhall, from a series of U.S. Geological Survey papers published in 1905 inventorying the groundwater resources of the greater Los Angeles Basin’s groundwater resources (before we thought of it as “the greater Los …
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Defining drought is a tricky business, but I think Daniel Griffin and Kevin Anchukaitis have come up with a reasonable one – three years of persistent low soil moisture. By that measure, the drought in Central and Southern California is…. Well, I’ll let them tell it (pdf): We demonstrate that while 3-year periods of persistent below-average …
Continue reading ‘In California, the worst drought in a really long time’ »
Sacramento holds by far the largest body of unmetered water connections in California – about 62,000. These customers are allowed to consume all the water they want and pay only a flat monthly rate of about $41 for an average home. With a few exceptions, all other California communities are entirely served by water meters …
Continue reading ‘Sacramento, gettin’ serious about water’ »
The people of Arizona have come to look upon the officials of California, and particularly those of the Imperial Irrigation District and the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles as diabolical schemers who are dedicated to the robbery of Arizona’s birthright. That’s sometime Arizona political scientist Dean Mann, talking about the 20th century California-Arizona tussle …
A new collaboration among some of the serious names in Colorado River Basin water science and policy today launched a new project, the Colorado River Research Group. If you follow Colorado River issues and western water science policy, it’s a list of names (pdf) you’ll be familiar with and, more importantly, that you’ll want to …
On the new Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey, Brett Walton: The 2013 survey reveals two long-term trends in U.S. agriculture: farms are producing more food while using less water, and farms in the typically rainy East are increasingly investing in irrigation equipment that is more commonly found in the arid West.
The Imperial Irrigation District earlier this month threw down a significant marker in the ongoing struggle to deal back overuse of Colorado River water with a petition to the California State Water Resources Control Board demanding action on restoration of the Salton Sea. The sea’s decline is one of the knock-on effects of efforts to …
Continue reading ‘IID to state of California on Salton Sea restoration: “But you guys promised!”’ »