Archive of posts filed under the water category.

MWD and the case for optimism in western water

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The folks at Montgomery and Associates recently took a look at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as an example of why water management problems, once a region actually confronts shortage, are manageable: MWD’s response demonstrates that supply-demand imbalances can be resolved through active management. In practice, active water management generally means acquiring more …

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making water conservation tougher than we need to

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In the Dallas suburb of Highland Park (media household income $172k), efforts to conserve water by not planting lawns have run into a hiccup, as Melissa Repko reports: A new ordinance, passed on Monday, outlaws artificial turf on front yards. With a town permit, the turf is allowed on side yards and back yards, so …

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A clever argument for reduced flows in the Murray Darling

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There’s a pitched battle underway in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin over how much water humans can take from the system for their own use, and how much should be left for the river-fed ecosystem. One of the corollary arguments here in the states involves the human economic value of instream flows for recreation – river …

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California water’s “grumpy old guy” on BDCP

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Phil Isenberg, California water’s self-described “grumpy old guy”, put down a marker today with a particularly useful, nuanced take (pdf) take on this week’s Bay-Delta Conservation Plan announcement, arguing that it is a bigger deal than some of us have been willing to acknowledge. “Serious public policy people should pay attention,” Isenberg wrote. As I’ve written before, the …

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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Colorado River’s supply-demand problem

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While it’s easy to get caught up in the climate wars rhetoric about the Colorado River, and the effect of anthropogenic warming on the river’s flows, it’s important to remember that’s only one of the variables changing in my region’s water future: With population growth pushing up Colorado River Basin water demand as climate change …

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The Delta as wicked problem

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It’s just geographical coincidence that Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber were at Berkeley in 1973 when they published their Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (pdf), less than 30 miles as the American white pelican flies from Sherman Island at the downstream mouth of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But as we await tomorrow’s unveiling of the …

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The Colorado River. And tubeworms.

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Is this Michelle Nijhuis piece on the Colorado River terrific because she’s willing to go against the grain and argue for an optimistic future? [D]eputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior David Hayes, ecologist Osvel Hinojosa Huerta of the Mexican conservation group Pronatura Noroeste and University of Arizona paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck all described …

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