Desert Cadillac
In Scottsdale, AZ, there’s a business called Desert Cadillac. It sells cars, apparently without irony.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River
tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is …
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Peak water, Arizona style
Does this simply represent hardening of demand – the result of low-hanging conservation fruit being mostly all plucked? Or does this suggest arid Arizona is not headed toward the big water-driven economic collapse some people fear?
River restoration – it’s all about the groundwater
I’m looking forward to Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River, a forthcoming University of Arizona Press book by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt and colleagues. While we spend a lot of time talking about how to return water to rivers in the arid southwestern United States, this group of authors …
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What is nature, striped bass edition
Can the decline of an “invasive” species be taken as a sign of an ecosystem’s declining health? That’s the question raised by an interesting Alastair Bland article in the East Bay Express on the latest numbers for striped bass in the Sacramento-San Joaquin-San Francisco Bay Delta system: Scientists say the existing population may be as …
Owens Valley and the 100th anniversary of the LA Aqueduct: Chinatown was just a movie
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, economist Gary Libecap’s take on “The Myth of Owens Valley“: The allegations are that Owens Valley water was stolen from farmers by a rapacious Los Angeles and, once it was shipped out of the valley through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the agricultural economy …
When streams reclaim flood plains in a human-altered world
Electa Draper in the Denver Post over the weekend on what happens when streams reclaim their flood plains in a human-altered world: Before Colorado was settled, its narrow canyons were river channel from wall to wall. Humans added roads and buildings in these tight spots and confined the channel. In one week in September, the …
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The new political economics of moving water
The politics-economics interface is what fascinates me about this new idea kicking around to replenish the rapidly draining Ogallala Aquifer by moving water across Kansas from the Missouri River. As Brett Walton explained last month in Circle of Blue, it’s a modest study at this point, with costs split between the state and federal government. …
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Our first snow of 2013-14
A storm blew through Santa Fe last night. Lissa and I drove up into the Sangres to see the snow:
The Cold War “dam gap”
Circa 1958, a unique argument in favor of the development of the next wave of dams in the Colorado River Basin. At the time, the Eisenhower administration had failed to include any “new starts” for U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects in its Fiscal Year 1959 budget. Sen. James E. Murray, D-Montana, was alarmed: Your attention …