YUMA, ARIZ – There’s not much Colorado River left by the time it gets to Yuma, on the U.S.-Mexico border. But the folks here seem to embrace it, modest though it may be. Warm summer evening, and people are out floating, barbecuing, swimming and generally acting like they feel comfortable with their river:
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| From Colorado River, spring 2010 |
HOLBROOK, ARIZ – I grew up entranced by radio. There was something about the magic of the disembodied voice, always deep-throated, speaking to me from a world I could only imagine. It was Vin Scully calling a baseball game, or the mystery of hockey play by play (imagine a kid lying in the dark with his little radio who had never seen a hockey game in his life, trying to construct a reality of blue lines and iced pucks).
Courtesy Library of Congress
One of my favorite movies is Vanishing Point, a cheesy muscle car odyssey circa 1971 in which a cat called Kowalski blasts across the country in a white Dodge Challenger with the cops on his tail. The reason I love the film is Super Soul, the blind radio DJ played by Cleavon Little whose patter forms the film’s backdrop:
And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west!
When I grew up, I used to love road trips on long dark highways in the West, picking up the big 50,000 watt AM giants up and down the west coast, listening to late night talk radio. Art Bell. Wack job radio.
Now that I’m old and slow and tire more easily, the road trips rarely last past sunset. My days of 24-hour beelines from Seattle to California are long gone. But I got a late start this afternoon, and ended up passing through Gallup around sunset, where I picked up a local disc jockey doing some fabulous soul and funk, real DJ music love stuff, and I was Kowalski there in my Honda Civic for 50 miles or so before KGLP faded into the desert.
So I switched over to AM and started hitting the scan button, and I found a station playing honest to God old Art Bell episodes from the ’90s, UFO sighting and abduction tales, vintage stuff, the magic of late night AM radio.
When I first started to seriously cover Colorado River water, I kept going around to smart water people asking the same question: when we finally hit the wall, and there is less water in the Upper Colorado River Basin than needed to meet the states’ needs – a “call”, in the legal lingo – how will the shortage determinations be made?
I’m a bit slow on the uptake, and it took a while for it to sink in that no one really knows. (It’s often questions I assume have obvious answers, but which don’t, that prove the most journalistically fruitful.)
Jennifer Pitt of the Environmental Defense Fund, in her testimony last week at the House Natural Resources Water and Power Subcommittee hearing in Las Vegas, made an important point about the implication of that legal uncertainty:
At present, without well-articulated agreements for how a “call” on the 1922 Compact would be administered among states of the Upper Basin, there appears to be a race among the states to develop the next big use of water, because for water users who don’t get their straw into the system first, their risk of curtailment increases. This ‘race to develop’ increases risk for many water users in the basin. It would be better to slow down on new developments and first work out interstate agreements on what happens in the event of a call on the Compact.
There was nothing geographically special about the farmlands surrounding the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. It was an accident of history that Gettysburg was the place where Union and Confederate armies met in the summer of 1863.
The metaphor isn’t perfect, but the epic political struggle over health care is similar. If it wasn’t health care, the partisan warriors would have found another field on which to have their battle.
Well, the warriors are not done, and John Kemp has a nice piece of analysis suggesting the dangers of energy and climate legislation becoming the next field of action. California and other Western Climate Initiative states are seeing the first skirmishes:
In California, Meg Whitman, the Republican Party’s likely candidate for governor in this year’s election has indicated she would delay implementation of the state’s own trading scheme for at least a year to study its likely economic impact. Whitman currently has a narrow poll lead over likely Democratic rival Jerry Brown.
Now the New York Times reports independent oil refiners Valero Energy Corp and Tesoro Corp are backing a petition drive organised by the California Jobs Initiative (CJI), which is trying to collect enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot in November suspending the state’s climate change law.
Delving into the roots of the California opposition, Kemp argues that climate legislation is rapidly being reframed into the larger anti-government narrative that threatened to overwhelm the details of health care reform efforts:
Cap-and-trade was originally framed as market-based and business-friendly. The contrast with traditional command-and-control approaches was its main attraction. But it is rapidly being reframed by opponents as another example of big government intrusion into the economy.
The more it becomes embroiled in a wider debate over big government and regulation the more difficult it will be to achieve action at any level in the United States — especially in the current climate, where anti-incumbent sentiment is running high and the Democratic Party looks likely to lose ground in both chambers of Congress as well as in state houses across the country in the forthcoming election cycle.
Rural areas like ours have their own plans for the future growth and development of their respective regions. Transfer too much water and you destroy your ability to grow the local economy. In Imperial County, renewable energy holds great promise for economic expansion. The county is already the second leading generator of geothermal energy in the nation and is poised to double that generation in the next five years. Having a firm supply of industrial water for these and other renewable energy projects was the impetus for IID to adopt an interim industrial water supply policy that dedicates 25,000 acre-feet for this purpose over the next decade.
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at China’s race to capture the global renewable energy market (sub/ad req):
If you want to see how green is done these days, China is where the action is.
With a voracious appetite for fuels to power its rapidly growing economy, China’s energy sector is booming, and nowhere is that more evident than the Asian giant’s pursuit of green energy.
But this is about more than just meeting China’s internal needs, according to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. China sees green energy — wind, solar and the like — as the global growth industry of the 21st century. And it aims to dominate this new global market.
“The Chinese government has determined that this is an area of substantial opportunity for them,” said Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, in an interview last week after returning from a week-long fact-finding trip to learn more about what the Chinese are up to.
If the United States does not respond, we risk losing out on a major global economic growth opportunity, Bingaman said.
The Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River operations 24-month study (pdf) is out this afternoon, formally confirming what has been clear for some time: that this year’s release from Lake Powell will be 8.23 million acre feet, the minimum under current operating rules.
Based on the current modeling (see page 11 of the pdf), this means that, by the end of September, the reservoir surface will drop to 1,082.96 feet above sea level. If the models hold, this means that, for the first time in history, Mead’s levels will be below the levels of the drought of the 1950s (specifically March 1956, when it dropped to 1,083.57 feet).
That would be the lowest Mead has been since May, 1937, when the reservoir was first being filled.
(Sorry, I know this is my obsession, and may be boring you, but I think it’s historic. Plus, Yulsman is egging me on.)
April 1 Lake Powell inflow forecast, courtesy Colorado Basin River Forecast Center
With the Colorado River forecasts out this week, I’m ready to call it: there won’t be enough water in the river for an extra water release this year from Lake Powell to help bolster the levels in the shrinking Lake Mead. Those declining red dots, month by month in the graph above, tell the story.
The official word won’t come until Friday at the earliest, when the Bureau of Reclamation releases its April “24-month study”. But the forecast data from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center shows a median inflow into Lake Powell of just 63 percent of normal for the April-July period.
Under the river’s operating rules, if there is extra water in Lake Powell, it can be released downstream to bolster levels in Lake Mead. But 63 percent doesn’t leave any extra. The decision on this year’s releases is done now, based on the best forecast of what Powell’s levels will be at on Sept. 30.
As I’ve written previously, this means that come June, Lake Mead could unequivocally drop to its lowest levels since the it was first filled in the 1930s. I think I’ll plan a trip out that way, to see it for myself.
Slim Pickens rides the bomg=b
If you follow nuclear weapons policy, the last thing you need at this point is another analysis of yesterday’s Nuclear Posture Review rollout. But I did have something to say in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req) that represents what I think is an important and underappreciated piece of the debate.
Here in New Mexico, home to two nuclear weapons design labs, we see the system from the bottom up. And as I wrote this morning, the bottom-up perspective get’s a unique airing in the document:
The new review includes an unprecedented emphasis on the work done by the labs and nuclear weapons manufacturing plants, according to sources familiar with past Nuclear Posture Reviews, which were largely classified….
Arsenal reductions place greater emphasis on the maintenance of the weapons that remain, officials said. The problem, according to the review, is that the complex of labs and plants needed to do the work “has fallen into neglect.”
The document calls for:
• A multibillion-dollar replacement for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research building, a six-decades-old plutonium research complex at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Plutonium is one of the two main radioactive materials at the heart of nuclear weapons.
• A similar multibillion dollar uranium complex at the Y-12 weapons plant in Tennessee. Uranium is the other main radioactive material used in nuclear weapons.
A by deeply embedded historical tradition, there is a military-civilian split between the civilians who design and build the nukes (a job now done by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration) and the warfighters who would drop the resulting devices on commies (the Department of Defense). There were good reasons for the split, but an unfortunate side effect has been a diffusion of responsibility for the complex of labs and plants responsible for nuclear weapon design and maintenance.
Past Nuclear Posture Reviews, and past nuclear weapon policy more broadly, as been focused on the warfighters and the diplomats, with the infrastructure needed to supply the tools of Armageddon a bit of an afterthought. “Oh, yeah, y’all please take care of these warheads for us, will ya?” The infrastructure presents thorny problems of its own, especially maintenance of the very expensive buildings needed to work with icky materials like uranium and plutonium. Without central attention from the senior national security leadership, that infrastructure has been allowed to atrophy to an embarrassing extent.
To be clear, there are two decision paths here. One could be for the national leadership to say we no longer need that infrastructure, because of a de-emphasis on nuclear weapons, and to shut it down. But instead the national leadership has continued to argue for the importance of maintaining an arsenal, but has left the infrastructure piece of the job undone.
Yesterday’s NPR appears to restore the centrality of that boring but essential infrastructure. We’ll see how well actions over the next few years support the document’s assertions.
A friend called me out on this morning’s column, a piece about Cathy Plesko, a Los Alamos scientist working on the asteroid mitigation problem (sub/ad req). He said he’d gotten all the way to the end before he realized it was really a column about global warming.
Kaching!
Back in the ’90s, I wrote a lot about asteroids. The LINEAR asteroid search project is based here in New Mexico, which gave me an easy local angle because they were finding all the cool objects. Their automated survey techniques, originally developed to track commie spy satellites, were revolutionary. It was a fun story, but I have a relatively short attention span, and hadn’t really thought much about the asteroid threat for years when I recently heard about Plesko’s work.
She’s doing modeling work on mitigation techniques – essentially what happens when you touch off a nuke to deflect asteroid:
If we ever need to use Los Alamos scientist Cathy Plesko’s research, we’re in nail-biting trouble. But at that moment we’re likely to be very glad she did it.
Plesko is trying to figure out how to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
“You hope you never need it, but you know, you hope you never need car insurance,” said the 29-year-old researcher.
The technical part of the work is fascinating – trying to constrain the uncertainties associated with a bet-the-planet decision. But the really interesting thing to me was the questions the work raises about how we might go about incorporating the sort of science she does into the political and policy process if/when we really have to face up to The Big One:
We’re a long way from knowing enough about the problem to actually deflect an asteroid, Plesko said. But the research raises interesting questions about how society might go about using information developed by scientists like Plesko to make bet-the-planet decisions.
On the surface, it looks like a simple problem — get the scientists’ best advice, then act on it. But cases where we end up arguing about what really counts as their “best advice” are legion, from nuclear waste disposal to genetically modified foods to climate change.
No matter how precise the calculations, there will be uncertainties attached. Rather than deflecting Apophis completely, would the nudge merely shift its path so it hits in the mid-Pacific, saving Costa Rica but creating a towering tsunami that destroys coastal California?
Dan Sarewitz, an Arizona State University researcher who studies what happens at the interface of science and societal decision-making, thinks the asteroid problem would be easier to act on than something like climate change or nuclear waste disposal.
If and when we discover an asteroid actually headed toward Earth, “There will be very little argument about whether that’s a serious problem,” Sarewitz said.