It’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll see history this summer, of the dry, unpleasant sort, on Lake Mead. With a meager snowpack in the Upper Green and Upper Colorado, the chances of a water surplus in the Upper Colorado River Basin that would allow an extra dollop of the wet stuff for Lake Mead have …
Continue reading ‘How Low Can Mead Go? Let’s Talk Come June’ »
Another example of the conflicts that occur when we move water from one basin to another, this one from here in New Mexico: Stella Davis in the Carlsbad Current-Argus talks about the negative reaction from folks in the Pecos River Basin to a proposal to build a pipeline to ship groundwater from the Fort Sumner …
In 1879, one John Codman published, as was the fancy of the day, the journals of his travels “Round Trip By Way of Panama through California, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and Colorado.” His travels took him across the lower Colorado River desert, and he seems not to have liked it much: This is the great …
This is a graph of the declining construction employment in Nevada, not the declining water levels in Lake Mead. In fact, if we were statistically clever enough, we could no doubt find a negative correlation between the two. As construction booms, more houses are built, and our friends in Vegas consume more water. Construction up, …
Continue reading ‘This is not a graph of the water level in Lake Mead’ »
As Emily Green likes to point out, low is bad when it comes to flow and water storage on the Colorado, and it’s increasingly clear that low is what we’ll get this year: According to the forecast out today, flow into Lake Powell on the Upper Colorado, which is the key point on the western …
This whole Up Front thing we’re doing at the Journal, with a rotating cast of writers doing front page columns on pretty much whatever amuses or intrigues them, is a bit of an experiment. My entry today was more experimental than usual, not sure if it worked entirely, but it was fun. The back story: …
From this morning’s newspaper, a piece about the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program (sub/ad req). I’ve been hearing great things about BEMP for ages, and finally did what I should have done years ago, which is call up Dan Shaw, one of the program’s directors, and ask if I could come hang out and do a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Teaching About Nature Around Us’ »
How seriously do Westerners take their water conflicts? Arizona Sen. John McCain brought it up yesterday during the White House health care debate. From the Washington Post’s transcript: There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One’s called California, the other called — called Texas. I won’t talk about California, because …
Continue reading ‘Western Water in the Health Care Debate?’ »
Because some things should be printed on paper and thrown on people’s driveways, in this morning’s paper I revisit Dianne Feisntein’s comments on the Rio Grande silvery minnow: Rio Grande silvery minnow, meet California’s delta smelt. Y’all have a lot in common. But perhaps not as much as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have Californians …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More on Feinstein and the Minnow’ »
The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy. Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the …