It’s only Tuesday, but I think I can call the Quote of the Week already. Chris Brooks, on who will end up bearing the cost of the externality that is the drying Salton Sea: What typically happens is that the costs are imposed on a large, disinterested constituency – i.e. all the taxpayers of Calif. …
Shaun McKinnon’s great reader piece on the retirement of Larry Dozier after 42 years working western water issues has an interesting coda. The story’s drama is the great tale of Glen Canyon Dam and the 1983 flood. (I like to call it “the year they nearly lost Glen Canyon Dam”, though that’s perhaps a bit …
Economists have a useful framework for thinking about effects of an economic transaction that extend beyond the actors involved in the transaction. They call them “externalities”. They can be good or bad (benefits/costs enjoyed/borne by those not involved), but mostly the conversation revolves around the bad ones. The good ones we tend to take for …
Continue reading ‘California Water: Pricing the Externalities’ »
The Carlsbad Current-Argus yesterday morning had a story saying this: Officials at the National Weather Service in Midland, Texas, say their weather data shows the drought in Eddy County and the surrounding region is on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Eddy County has not had any measurable rain since Sept. 25, and …
Now that I’ve got this “largest artificial watershed in the world” hammer, everything’s beginning to look like a nail. The “hammer” involves the notion that the vast artificial plumbing system we’ve built across the west has linked our water management fates in a way that did not exist when water tended to spend its human- …
More art from the hard drive reorganization. This is the headwaters of the Little Colorado River from another Lissa-John road trip (we road trip well) through Arizona. It’s just outside Springerville, and yes, it’s green, and flowing. (The Little Colorado is more famous for brown, and its relative lack of flowing.) The development of the …
Watching California’s water argument from afar, I can’t help but see what looks like a remarkable failure to develop a process for juggling competing interests in the management of a classic common pool resource. From yesterday’s political theater drama House field hearing, here’s Mike Connor’s explanation of why it’s not a simple matter of just …
Since apparently all the cool kids love data, here’s some of mine. This is total storage in Lake Mead (blue), Lake Powell (reddish) and combined (orangey), updated with the 2011 end-of-year numbers as estimated by the USBR’s latest 24-month study (pdf). Note that if the numbers hold up, this will be the second time since …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Estimated Storage in Mead, Powell’ »
I’ve a chance to get out to California later this year and do some reporting on water issues, so I’ve been doing some reading, trying to get a better feel for where to focus my attention. This is in part driven by my belief that the West’s water issues have become inextricably linked, and to …
Continue reading ‘California Water Governance: Some Questions’ »
I’ve been spending a lot of my work days of late in a blow-by-blow rundown of the growing drought conditions in New Mexico: An already dismal forecast for spring runoff in New Mexico’s rivers has gotten worse, after a dry, windy March sapped the state’s snowpack. Spring and summer flow on the Rio Grande into …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande’ »