Joel Gay gives Albuquerque water rates a good, hard look: “You hit ’em where it hurts — in the wallet,” said Armando Ortega, customer service manager in Alamogordo, which has among the highest water rates in the state. Since adopting a conservation-oriented rate structure in 2003, Alamogordo’s water use has dropped by 40 percent, he …
Bloomberg has an interesting story about the business of squeezing the most out of that last drop of water. Talk about having skin in the arid land survival game! Today, some 300 Israeli companies make equipment to deliver water or purify it with lasers or diffusion, putting them in a position to profit as climate …
Continue reading ‘If You Want to Know How to Maximize Your Water, Ask the Israelis’ »
One of the quirks of western water law is the variety of ways the different states treat groundwater. In New Mexico, for example, the law recognizes that groundwater and surface water are inextricably linked. This is merely a recognition of hydrological reality. Pump groundwater, and eventually surface water soaks down to replace it, depleting a …
Some stuff I wrote elsewhere about a potentially huge New Mexico water law court decision: A state court this week threw out New Mexicans’ longstanding legal right to drill a domestic water well without having to worry about whether it would leave less water for their neighbors. The ruling is a victory for activists who …
My ABQJournal colleague Sean Olson has a story on the front page of this morning’s paper about the rise this year in water conservation in Albuquerque: Albuquerque has used about 16.4 billion gallons thus far in 2008, up from about 15.6 billion gallons through the same period in 2007, according to water authority statistics. The …
This hardly seems sustainable (“tankers” in this case contain water): Every day for the next six months two tankers will leave the port of Elefsina near Athens, bound for Cyprus. After four years with no substantial winter rainfall, Cypriot water reserves are at their lowest since 1908. h/t Adam in the comments
Rudolfo Carillo elaborates (delightfully) on the lack of water in the desert: By the time we finally moved to Burque, I remember standing at the edge of the Rio Grande, staring. When I asked my father about this utterly strange phenomenon, a river that flowed, he would say that the world was a watery place, …
getting paid to float down a boat on a river: But among the river people there also is some nervousness about the future. Much of the funding for bosque habitat restoration work has come courtesy of Pete Domenici, who is retiring at the end of his current term. Love or hate those dreaded pork barrel …
I wrote a piece in Sunday’s newspaper about new work by Ben Cook at NASA Goddard and his colleagues about the role of dust in the Dust Bowl drought. As the name implies, we knew the Dust Bowl was dusty. The new bit here is a much more clear understanding of the role of dust …
That I can sit here in the comfort of my own home, idly curious about irrigation in California’s Imperial Valley, and look up the 1950 Census of Agriculture’s California county-by-county data. 503,686 Q: How has irrigation in California’s Imperial Valley changed over the years? A: Great question, John! In 1950, there were 532,543 acres under …
Continue reading ‘What I Love About the Internet, Episode XIV’ »