Cynthia Koehler, writing in the Sacramento Bee last week, offers another example California water’s wicked problem. While all the attention is focused on the Sacramento Delta, are the critical headwaters of the state’s great river systems being given short shrift? California’s farms, commerce, industry and 38 million residents rely in large part on water that …
I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability. My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers: Woods Houghton, the …
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 …
Continue reading ‘MWD and the case for optimism in western water’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘making water conservation tougher than we need to’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘A clever argument for reduced flows in the Murray Darling’ »
Center-pivot irrigation in Garden City, Kansas – 1972 on the left, 2011 on the right Courtesy NASA: h/t Andy Revkin
One of the smartest comments on last week’s Cal-Fed announcement about the California Bay-Delta system came in a blog comment from UC Davis’s Jay Lund: The Delta has always been about hostage taking – traditionally with local interests using Delta salinity as a hostage on the big water export projects, and water export users using …
One of the hidden constituencies for forest health is downstream water users. Western wildfires can really muck up a watershed, creating problems when bad fire happens and therefore significant incentives to try to keep it from happening. Today’s case in point, from my colleague Rene Romo, is the Little Bear fire in southern New Mexico: …
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 …
Continue reading ‘California water’s “grumpy old guy” on BDCP’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Colorado River’s supply-demand problem’ »