From the Joe Mozingo at the LA Times:
The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, dispersed poisons and pesticides, drained streams and polluted watersheds.
If one allows mining of a nonrenewable source, it is disingenuous to argue that the source should never be polluted if the economic activity causing the pollution is necessary to sustain employment. Suppose that two individuals proposed to extract water from a nonrenewable aquifer. The first agreed he would farm and by doing so dry up the aquifer. This use would generate 100 jobs over 45 years. Suppose the latter agreed he would utilize the water for industrial purposes, consume none of it, and reinject it into the ground after he was done. This use of the water would generate 4,500 jobs over 45 years. When reinjected into the aquifer, however, the water would be mildly toxic and, given current technology, unusable for other purposes. In which case is the public welfare best served? The debate over nondegradation versus measured rates of degradation rages on….
From DuMars and Minnis, New Mexico Water Law: Determining Public Welfare Values in Water Rights Allocation, 31 Ariz. L. Rev. 817 (1989).
California had one of its memorable (and important for water supply) “atmospheric river” storms earlier this month. The folks at NASA have posted a particularly beautiful image of one of the results:
Sediment from the Eel River, courtesy NASA
That’s a huge blast of sediment flowing out the mouth of the Eel River in northern California following the storm.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about University of Colorado law school professor Doug Kenney’s argument that the states of the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (UB) faced a very real risk under climate change – that to the extent the river shrinks across the 21st century, the Upper Basin states will have the eat the shortfall:
If there are shortages on the river, New Mexico and the other states of the upper basin could be forced to curtail their water use, passing the water downstream for Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
“For a state like New Mexico, it means that satisfying current uses might be impractical, let alone thinking about new uses,” Kenney told me.
After I argued in a post yesterday that the new Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study suggests the real vulnerability to shortfalls is in the Lower Basin, Doug sent me this (posted with permission):
Even if the UB is able to meet its delivery obligation, that is very different from suggesting the UB is not experiencing any sort of shortage. Rather, making the delivery obligation ensures the UB is in a state of perpetual shortage (to the extent they never get their “half”). Thus, to the extent that the flow of the river is somehow enhanced, that could have UB benefits. In the short term, thus, this is a Lower Basin problem, but long term (especially under a severe climate change scenario), it is primarily an Upper Basin problem. The Lower Basin has some belt tightening to do, but it is a modest, predictable, and stable amount of belt tightening, whereas the problem for the UB just grows and grows.
One of the points Steven Solomon’s book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
So I’ve been watching and trying to learn from the drought in the upper midwest, with its implications for shipping on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. I get water for farms cities and the rivers themselves for environmental purposes. Adding transportation adds an additional layer of complexity that’s fascinating. Here’s Alan Bjerga at Bloomberg:
Shippers and carriers still want Missouri River water. “There is the real chance that navigation could at best be severely impaired, and at worst effectively shut down, for an extended period of time if necessary actions are not taken immediately,” American Waterways Operators President Tom Allegretti said in a statement on Dec. 7. A closing would imperil farm exports and fertilizer shipments needed by February for U.S. spring planting, he said.
The setback for shipping interests is a shift from river- management priorities that dominated the 20th century, said Robert Kelley Schneiders, an environmental consultant at EcoInTheKnow in Boulder, Colorado, who has written books about the Missouri.
As far back as the 1800s, the barge industry has always held powerful sway over river use, he said. The current dam system itself was created to promote shipping along the lower Missouri, which has never been realized, Schneiders said.
The full article is worth reading.
Last week’s release of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study was a headline-grabbing event – “Colorado River water supply to fall short of demand, study says“, to cite but one of a zillion examples of the core message getting big play. Barry Nelson argued the study “has the potential to mark a new era in the management of the West’s largest river basin.”
Lee’s Ferry
We will see. As with most massive undertakings of this nature, the angels and devils are in the Basin Study’s details. And a separate, routine little US Bureau of Reclamation report that came out last week helps illustrate the point.
There were two big talking points. The first, the supply-demand gap, comes as no surprise to anyone involved in Colorado River management. To the extent this a big deal, its importance is the way the Basin Study loudly points out something that’s been painfully obvious for some time.
The second point, a bit more surprising to some (and also worth loudly pointing out), is that plain old water conservation is far more cost-effective, and quicker to implement, than big engineering solutions like building a pipeline to the Missouri. I chose to highlight these two points with the precious few words available for my newspaper story about the study.
But there’s something deeper in the Basin Study that’s worth exploring. (click through for wonky details) Continue reading ‘With the Basin Study done, we can get back to draining Lake Mead’ »
As I’ve written previously, the Colorado Basin Study suggests that augmenting water supply in the region is the most expensive and least quick approach to closing the supply-demand gap. But if folks do want to pursue augmentation, Juliet McKenna is asking the right questions:
The consequences of implementing any water supply augmentation plan need to be considered in terms of not only economics, but also in terms of where and how the water would be used. For example:
1. An additional 600,000 AF/year of water in the basin could support 1 million people. Will this supply be used to plug a supply gap or will it double the population living in eastern Colorado? Which outcome is desirable?
2. Would the cost (billions of dollars) be shared by all uses – people, industry, and agriculture? Or would only a subset of users, or new users have to pay?
So, as I think the authors of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study would agree, its time to start talking.
If you’re not already following Juliet, a water professional down in Tucson, I recommend bookmarking/RSSing.
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, my distillation of the Colorado River Basin Study’s key message:
Towing icebergs from Alaska or building a giant pipeline from the Missouri River won’t bail out the western United States from its growing water supply crisis, federal officials said Wednesday.
Instead, conservation by the region’s farms and cities offers the quickest and most cost-effective way for New Mexico and the other states of the Colorado River Basin to close the growing gap between water demand and supply, according to a new study done jointly by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the seven Colorado River Basin states.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin is due out tomorrow, and already it’s been getting a lot of attention. Bruce Finley at the Denver Post and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times have both highlighted the study’s consideration of the “pipeline to the Missouri” option, one of a host of water augmentation possibilities submitted by stakeholders and the public which has gotten some analysis over the course of the two year study.
The PTM option has some legs, because people in the non-water world can grasp it. But it’s an unfortunate framing for the release of this very important study, a piece of the puzzle that rightly ought to be confined to fine print along with towing icebergs down from the north (another idea that gets its due).
Most of the study’s findings are already public – the Bureau’s been releasing them steadily in a series of data dumps over the last year. What they show is a growing gap between supply and demand in the basin (with some legitimate argument over whether the Bureau let the states use pre-housing crash trajectories to high-ball their growth projections, making the gap look larger than it should). At whatever size it is, though, the study also shows that various types of “magic water” (icebergs! PTM!) can’t fix this problem. If you read carefully, it’s there in Barringer’s story:
It is unclear how much such a pipeline project would cost, though estimates run into the billions of dollars. That does not include the cost of the new electric power that would be needed (along with the construction of new generating capacity) to pump the water uphill from Leavenworth, Kan., to the front range reservoirs serving Denver, about a mile above sea level, according to Sharlene Leurig, an expert on water-project financing at Ceres, a nonprofit group based in Boston that works with investors to promote sustainability….
Ms. Leurig noted that local taxpayers and utility customers would be shouldering most of the expense of such a venture through their tax and water bills, which would make conservation a more palatable alternative.
What it shows, if I may be so humble as to generalize, is that the basin’s water users need to learn to live within their means. I’m confident they can, even if they’d rather just have the feds build them another pipe.
New Mexico’s 2012 weather feels increasingly like a teachable moment, though the lessons must be handled with care. As the folks in the local media-weather complex went into stormpocalypse mode over the possibility that it might actually snow this weekend, I took pause in Saturday’s paper to look back:
The storm comes as New Mexico withers through the second year of drought, with fears of a third. Federal water managers warned major irrigation and municipal water agencies this week to be prepared for shortfalls in 2013. After two dry years, water storage in most of the state’s reservoirs has been drained and current snowpack in the state’s northern mountains is less than a quarter of normal for this time of year.
The first 11 months of 2012 have been more than 2.5 degrees warmer than the long-term average, according to the National Climatic Data Center — the warmest in records going back to 1895. It is the latest warm year in a long-term trend that scientists attribute to increasing greenhouse gases. The 24 months ending Nov. 30 are also the driest such period on record, Polasko noted, with less precipitation than the worst two-year stretch during the drought of the 1950s.
See also here for more of my journalistic whining about how warm and dry it’s been.
So as I sit here on an early Sunday evening watching it not snow at our house, I’ve been finishing up my November WS Form B-91 to send in to the Albuquerque Weather Service office’s Citynet program. Final tally: 0.08 inch (0.2 cm) precip in November, 22 percent of my long term average. For the first 11 months of 2012, I’ve had 4.89 inches (12.4 cm) of precipitation, 55 percent of my mean (data back to 2000). Nine of the 11 months so far this year have been below average:
2012 precip, Heineman-Fleck house