I’m going to make up a story. I’d like to think it might be true. There’s an impromptu path I like to walk along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque that follows a narrow high spot of riverbank for something between a quarter and a half a mile. As you head north, the river’s on your …
Keith Kloor had a nice riff the other day on the question of how we should decide what “nature” is supposed to look like, now that we’re kinda in charge: It’s not my job to say what nature should mean in a world shaped primarily by humans–I’m still working it out, myself–but I know others …
I get it. Albuquerque is not a wet place. With an average of 9.71 inches (24.7 cm) per year of precipitation at the PRISM pixel for my house, I live in a desert, a hair beneath the arbitrary 10 inch (25 cm) definitional cutoff. But this is f’ing ridiculous. With January done, I’ve received 0.44 …
2013 has the potential here in New Mexico to be a great laboratory for exploring the question of specifically where and when water supply shortages actually play out during a drought year. I took a crack in this morning’s paper at setting up the problem, highlighting what I see as the four key New Meixco …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: where the water will run out’ »
I often don’t know what to make of California, despite it being the state of my birth and a source of endless study and fascination. Jerry Brown was the governor when I was a teenager, and I respect him as one of the nation’s great politicians. I mean something specific and respectful by the term …
Via Realtor.com, we find this lovely 7,000-square foot home in Boulder City, Nev., with a swimming pool plus a great view of the bathtub ring on a dwindling Lake Mead, where the pool water came from: Yours for just $1.9m.
My current water policy obsession is the question of what actually happens – agency by agency, water user by user – when the water starts to run out. Much of the “OMG, we’re running out of water!” discussion plays out in the form of graphs of the future that extend projected supply and demand curves, …
I confronted a litany of drought when I was making the rounds on my newspaper beat this morning. No doubt this has happened before and I’ve just not noticed it, but the current forecasts are dry at all the basic time scales I watch closely. I lined ’em all up so you could share New …
Continue reading ‘Running the table: dry at all relevant time scales’ »
Based on the latest federal forecasts (pdf from USBR here), we can expect Lake Powell to drop 20 feet this year and Lake Mead to drop 10 feet. That’s the midpoint forecast. Could be better if it snows. Could be worse. So far the trend based on the first half of January leans toward worse. …
Continue reading ‘Draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs, 2013 edition’ »
There’s a rich, historical elegance to the tradition of state-v-state lawsuits over interstate compacts. Because each of the US states is constitutionally sovereign, when they sue one another over water flowing down a river from one state to the next, the legal action begins and ends before the US Supreme Court – the court of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction’ »