Another example that the old New West development model isn’t working: Next spring, water bills will rise to help pay the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s mounting debt used to fund some $3.3 billion in pumps, pipes and intakes installed over the past several years. The fee, which comes on top of other recent increases, is …
Solving the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance is easy. There are lots of ways to do it. stop farming the Imperial Valley get rid of all those Phoenix lawns get rid of Phoenix! give all the water to the Indians (they were here first, after all) and let them parcel it out Solar powered desal! OK, …
FYI, I’ll be at the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting in Las Vegas next week, if any of the water wonks out there will also be in attendance and wanna get together, maybe go throw rocks in the Bellagio Fountain or something?
When I was thinking about how to write a book about climate science for kids, measuring the weather made sense to me. As a journalist, it’s my favorite science to write about because of the opportunities to tie science to everyday experience. And any kid can set up a thermometer and rain gauge in their …
Thanks to Controversy (the Journalist’s Best Friend), the subject of salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin-San Francisco Bay Delta system has received more attention of late than is usually attached to such arcane topics. But I did not realize how old this issue is. It was salinity and fish science that caused federal Judge Oliver Wanger …
The folks working on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study last week published a striking new graph (figure 2 in this pdf) pointing out our dilemma: It’s an attempt to splice together the latest version of the Bureau’s now-ubiquitous graph of historical supply and demand with the latest projections from …
Continue reading ‘Yo! Over here! Not much water in the Colorado River! What should we do?’ »
In New Mexico, we make our snowmen out of the materials at hand: (updated with a link to the video because I can’t figure out how to embed it right)
It might seem obvious that the more water you have available, the less vulnerable you are to drought. Or not so obvious? Comparing counties over the Ogallala with nearby similar counties, groundwater access increased irrigation intensity and initially reduced the impact of droughts. Over time, land-use adjusted toward water-intensive crops and drought-sensitivity increased; conversely, farmers …
Continue reading ‘Does access to water make you more vulnerable to drought?’ »
The Arizona Republic had a very smart editorial today about the Colorado River. The premise: what happens in California matters a great deal to Arizona. The back story is a struggle in California about how to meet the terms of a deal in the early ’00s to cut back to its 4.4 million acre foot …
When it comes to water, we westerners seem to be a distrustful lot: Water politics in Colorado and in western Wyoming have long been driven by this one, nagging fear: that California was getting something to which it was not entitled – and might get accustomed to it. Squatter rights, if you will, bolstered by …
Continue reading ‘Dipping more drinking straws into the Colorado River’ »