The coal-Central Arizona Project link always seemed a bit of a Rube Goldberg policy apparatus to me. Its Goldbergness seems about to unravel. Felicia Fonseca at the AP reports today on the potential costs of a retrofit to the Navajo Generating Station, up the hill from Glen Canyon Dam. The plant is part of a …
Continue reading ‘Arizona’s cost of moving water could be about to go up’ »
From the morning paper, the US Bureau of Reclamation has taken a big step toward construction of the Navajo-Gallup Pipeline, which is a big deal around these parts: Jason John, head of the [Navajo] nation’s Water Management Branch, called the request for bids on the pipeline “a huge milestone” in bringing water supplies to the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: first steps for Navajo-Gallup pipeline’ »
Elephant Butte Dam was one of the first big concrete dam’s in America. It currently doesn’t have much water behind it. My column: An enthusiastic crowd wandered the top of Elephant Butte Dam on Jan. 7, celebrating, with good reason, the structure’s role in New Mexico history. But it must have been hard to ignore …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Elephant Butte’ »
Hey lazyweb – anybody know if someone’s looked rigorously at the question of greywater use in the context of a Jevons-like paradox? Putting together some notes for a talk this weekend to the Xeriscape Garden Club of Albuquerque (Sat. 10 a.m. at the Garden Center if you’re in town), I’ve been thinking anew about the question …
In response to the latest abuse of the Twain whiskey/water non-quote*, this: * Breitler 2011
A couple of notes from Las Vegas, NV, the front line of the housing collapse, that have significant implications for the region’s long term water future: New home sales in 2011 were one tenth the number at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. The Las Vegas Review Journal quoted Pat Mulroy the other …
It’s all fun and games until you actually have to measure snow. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first 2012 Colorado Basin reservoir forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf) projects a decline in total storage in lakes Mead and Powell, the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoirs, of 844,000 acre feet, or 2.76 percent. There are two ways …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: a forecast for decline on the Colorado again this year’ »
While archaeological metaphor can be instructive, I think we make more progress in understanding the fate of the Southwest under conditions of aridity and water scarcity by looking at what’s happening now, in the places that are really running short of water. What are people actually doing today? Which is why the Imperial Valley of …
Continue reading ‘Amid uncertainty, IID bumps up fallowing $’s’ »
One of the most promising strategies for water conservation in the arid west involves fallowing of agricultural lands. Done badly, it has earned the pejorative nickname “buy and dry”, as cities buy up ag water rights, take the land out of production and shift the water to urban toilets and taps. But done right – …
Continue reading ‘Commodity prices and the economics of fallowing’ »