Over at the Lane Center, a look at what the extra water on the Colorado River means: While Colorado Basin water users had survived 11 years of drought without suffering shortages, simply by draining their two big reservoirs, US Bureau of Reclamation calculations raised the clear possibility that by next year, the first ever shortage …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Bonus Water on the Colorado’ »
I was really struck by something in this video. Not the PR message, though I’ve no doubt San Franciscan water the cleanest water in the whole world! No, it’s the remarkable beauty of water.
Water conservation poses a dilemma. Let’s say you’re an American city that’s running into a serious drought problem. I don’t know, say for example you’re Galveston, Texas: Authorities have banned outdoor watering in most Galveston County municipalities as Texas continues to grapple with its record drought. In a letter this week, the Texas Commission on …
Continue reading ‘Drought, outdoor landscaping, and the benefit of being a bit wasteful’ »
Headed out on my bike ride this morning, I spotted our neighbor, Farmer John, in the front yard working on his food patch, and rolled up on the sidewalk to chat. It’s a lovely little garden – big robust tomatoes, some melons and a couple of rows of big, healthy-looking corn. Lissa and I have …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, urban agriculture edition’ »
When I was a young reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, I wrote a lot about the municipal budget, reasoning that budgets are where governments most explicitly establish and act on their priorities. But it was frustrating, because I just had one budget – no real points of comparison. So I set out one year to …
Continue reading ‘Why I’m optimistic about Colorado River water (California? not so much)’ »
Writing this week in the Los Angeles Times, the NRDC’s Doug Obegi makes the central point about the linkage between water problems across the west. Responding to Victor Davis Hanson’s argument in favor of giving farmers more water from the Sacramento Delta, Obegi makes the salient point that there isn’t the water to give: The …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River and Sacramento Delta limits’ »
Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …
Shaun McKinnon has some numbers on this year’s Arizona runoff, and they aren’t pretty: La Niña did a number on runoff down the Salt and Verde rivers this year — a low number, according to Salt River Project, which has released the final report on winter’s water yield. For the 2011 runoff season, the two …
update: A previous version of this post had what I though was a picture of Carl Rasch. Upon inquiry, I think it was a black-and-white picture of some other old dude with a great mustache. In answer to a question that came up in conversation on Twitter today, herewith an abbreviated version of the story …
Continue reading ‘Who Was Carl Rasch? The lawyer behind the Winters Doctrine’ »
Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like …
Continue reading ‘You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers’ »