At Least We’re Not Nevada

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My colleague Mike Murphy’s story last week about New Mexico’s historic unemployment rate (sub/ad might be req, I can never tell) got me thinking about how we measure our economic ills, and how we compare to others around us. A couple graphs. In both cases I’ve chosen Nevada (red) as our comparison state because I’m headed there next month to learn some more about their water situation, so I’m all about trying to understand Nevada better.

First, unemployment:

Nevada and New Mexico unemployment, courtesy St. Louis Fed

Nevada and New Mexico unemployment, courtesy St. Louis Fed

In other words, it could be a lot worse.

Second up, same two states, an indicator called “coincident economic activity,” which bundles up a bunch of separate economic measures into a single index to help track state-by-state comparisons. (More on what’s in the number here.)

Nevada, New Mexico coincident economic index, courtesy St. Louis Fed

Nevada, New Mexico coincident economic index, courtesy St. Louis Fed

I guess if you don’t go up so much, you don’t have as far to fall, or something.

Pivoting Into Spring

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Rio Grande, Albuquerque, March 13, 2010I noticed the lilacs starting to leaf out in our backyard this afternoon. We moved the weather station last week, so I’m not sure what 65F (18C) means, but that’s what the thermometer says. (Anthony Watts would no doubt disapprove of its current location in the corner by the back wall, but my old cotton region shelter is more garden art than science.) More meaningful than the number is the fact that I was sitting in the back yard wearing shorts.

Lissa and I spent the morning down by the river (see photo at right). The Rio Grande is beginning its spring rise. It’s up near 900 cubic feet per second right now through town. At the Rio Grande Nature Center, a great gathering place for water birds, we saw our first cinnamon teal of the year, a lovely duck that is a frequent spring visitor. We ran into one of my bird friends, who told us about a great horned owl out by the river – “Stand on the bridge over the minnow channel looking north, it’s in a cottonwood on the west bank, living in a cooper’s hawk’s nest.” I was a little worried about whether we’d be able to find it, but the clump of birders standing beneath the next looking up made it easy.

Another of my bird friends, Judy, was in the clump, and after we gawked at the gorgeous owl for a while, we wandered out to the river bank and listened to the water slipping quietly by. The Rio Grande is a modest affair, but Some wigeons and gadwalls picked in the shallows for their brunch, and it was about as lovely as an Albuquerque spring morning could be.

If Wishes Were Horses…

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Daniel Sarewitz had a piece in Slate today arguing that science is not going to settle the current political fight over greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Michael Tobis thinks Sarewitz is wrong.

I agree with Sarewitz. Here is why.

The core of Sarewitz’s argument is that the contest over the science serves to mask the values at stake, as each side seeks to gain the high ground in the scientific debate, believing that by winning the science argument their preferred political/policy approach will of necessity follow.

Sarewitz argues that this is a general characteristic of what he has called “scientized” debates. (See his 2004 paper “How science makes environmental controversies worse” – pdf – for a fuller explication of the argument.)

Solutions come, Sarewitz argues, not when science compels them, but when the solutions align with the perceived values and interests of the actors involved.

Tobis believes it is a failure of the particular actors and institutions involved rather than a general characteristic, that Sarewitz has “confuse(d) a problem with an insurmountable principle.”

“The problem,” Tobis writes, “is not that reason fails. The problem is that politics fails to be reasonable.”

When I entered the profession of journalism nearly three decades ago, it was with the idea that it gave me a chance to help civic processes by helping the body politic better understand hard or complex issues,  so political/policy decisions could be based on the best available information.

At every city council meeting, the training ground of many young reporters, technical experts deliver to decision makers their best available data on issues such as traffic engineering. Week after week, I saw political actors seek out their own alternatives to what I reasonably viewed as the best available data when that data conflicted with their values. In the years since, I have seen this happen across scales, from issues as local as whether to install stop signs or speed humps, to regional and state issues like the water supply in New Mexico, to national issues like the appropriate disposal path for various types of nuclear waste, to the current global discussion we’re all so engaged in regarding greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

I have seen liberals side with what I regarded as the best available data on some issues, conservatives on others. In some cases, environmentalists have had what seemed to me the best available data on their side, while in other cases industry has. At the local scale, I saw many issues that didn’t break down on any sort of liberal-conservative spectrum, but instead fell along geographic lines (rural/urban, this neighborhood v. that one, etc.).

My experience with the pattern is sufficiently consistent that I believe Sarewitz has correctly described not a specific problem found in specific situations, but a general principle.

Michael might wish it were not so, but my decades of experience in the midst of political fights large and small suggests otherwise.

How Low Can Mead Go? Let’s Talk Come June

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It’s looking increasingly likely that we’ll see history this summer, of the dry, unpleasant sort, on Lake Mead.

Storage in lakes Powell and Mead

Storage in lakes Powell and 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 essentially vanished. The latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation 24-month Colorado River System Operating Plan (pdf) puts the chances at just 3 percent that we’ll get a big enough blast of snow between now and April 1 to permit extra releases this year from Lake Powell down through the Grand Canyon to lift the levels of a dwindling Mead.

These numbers have been floating around in USBR forecasts for a couple of months, so what I’m telling you here isn’t new. But people in the water management community have cautioned me for years not to pay too much attention to forecasts until March. So now I’m paying attention.

According to the March USBR forecast for Lake Mead, out this week, the elevation of the reservoir’s surface by the end of June will have dropped to 1086.25 feet above sea level. If that number holds up, it will be the lowest Mead has been since May 1937, when it was first being filled.

I’ve written about this a bit loosely in the past, using total storage as my measure of “lowest since whenever“, but there’s been some ambiguity because most people use reservoir surface elevation. It’s a less meaningful measure in terms of water supply, but a quantity that can be more accurately measured. By that measure, Mead’s levels were lower in the winter of 1964-65, when Mead dropped to a surface elevation of 1088.14.

If the forecast holds up, all ambiguity about which measure we choose will be gone by his summer. And by Oct. 1, the end of our “water year”, Mead’s contents will have dropped below 10 million acre feet of water for the first time since it was filled in the ’30s.

Giant Scissors, an Update

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courtesy Great Big Stuff

courtesy Great Big Stuff

Longtime Inkstain readers will know of my interest in giant scissors (see here and here, for example). I’m happy to report that Stuff Journalists Like has advanced this important story with an exploration of its close relationship with really giant fake checks:

The giant check screams: “Giving anonymously is for suckas.” Journalists wonder how much did it cost to make that worthless check compared to the amount donated. When journalists see those giant scissors, for once, they wish someone would run with them.

When the stars align, journalists might find themselves at an event that contains both a giant check and giant scissors. This is when journalists ask themselves where they went wrong and began fantasizing about working at the Jersey Pike tollbooth.

Energy, Meet Climate

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Emily Pierce has a story in Roll Call that illustrates the dilemma facing those who advocate greenhouse gas reductions.

Action on climate change has become politically toxic, while action on energy legislation has not:

Dorgan was upset that the so-far failed efforts of Kerry and Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to craft a bipartisan global warming bill were needlessly delaying action on a separate, bipartisan measure that includes many “green energy” initiatives that Kerry and Boxer want to attach to a climate bill. Bingaman, who wants to move on climate change, was more concerned that a failure to do a broader global warming bill would prevent the Senate from passing the targeted energy bill separately. The committee approved that narrower measure last year.

This hits at the core issue Ted Nordhaus was talking about in an interview I did last week, which ran in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req):

The notion that governments will voluntarily jack up energy prices today to benefit future generations seems like a nonstarter to Nordhaus. The fact that the public, faced with government imposition of rising energy costs, will suddenly find reasons to question the underlying science of climate change is exactly what the 44-year-old pollster and political activist says we should expect.

Moving Water, New Mexico Edition

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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 area (along the Pecos in eastern New Mexico) to Santa Fe, which is across the divide in the Rio Grande Basin:

The Carlsbad flume, circa 1903, which carries irrigation water over the Carlsbad River to Pecos River valley farmers. Courtesy National Park Service

The Carlsbad flume, circa 1903, which carries irrigation water over the Carlsbad River to Pecos River valley farmers. Courtesy National Park Service

Carlsbad Irrigation District Manager Dudley Jones said his agency is concerned that the withdrawal of large amounts of water from Berrendo’s wells could impact the water table and the river, which is the life-blood for farmers in Carlsbad who receive irrigation water from the CID’s storage reservoirs located in Fort Sumner and Santa Rosa.

The water is brought down via the Pecos River during the irrigation season and stored at Brantley reservoir, located about 12 miles north of Carlsbad.

“The amount they want to transfer may not seem like much, but it is going to have an impact on the river,” Jones said. “Our concern is that if this application is approved by the State Engineer, it will result in a basin-to-basin water transfer — from the Pecos River Basin to the Rio Grande Basin. Our biggest concern is that the adjudication of the CID is completed, as is the Settlement Agreement and how we (the state) are going to meet our water obligation to Texas. The company will be taking water out of the system (Pecos River), which is already over-appropriated.”

On the surface, this has a very similar feel to the larger Southern Nevada Water Authority pipeline deal, though it is different in important ways. Santa Fe, like Las Vegas, Nev., has bumped up against its water limits, but the folks in Santa Fe have gone much farther than the gambling mecca in reducing local per capita water consumption. In addition, the pipeline is a commercial venture, with the folks putting the project together hoping to sell the water to Santa Fe. I haven’t done any serious journalism on this, so I could be wrong, but from the discussions I’ve heard at water meetings, it’s not clear that Santa Fe is an enthusiastic buyer, which could scuttle the whole deal. That’s very different from the situation in Nevada, where it is the metro area government itself that is leading the effort.

If I May Brag

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In which my daughter makes an appearance in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req):

Nora Heineman-Fleck, social networking liaison for the University of New Mexico and a frequent user of online networks, has learned to tailor her personal networks like Facebook to make them more useful.

“I very rarely actually ‘unfriend’ people,” she says. “I usually just take them out of my feed. I can still communicate with them. I just don’t want to see every time they update something I don’t care about.”

People who pay attention to everything their friends post will likely have trouble keeping up with more than 100 people, she says.

Networks also fill with people who aren’t really friends. Heineman-Fleck points to a 2007 article, “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-workers Will Kill Facebook,” by Canadian blogger Cory Doctorow. She agrees with his premise — people flee networks not because of the networks’ features but because of awkward situations like not being able to ignore friend requests. Social networks that let users limit social awkwardness are most successful, she says.

Plus, if I may also brag a bit about the work of a colleague, Amanda Schoenberg took the topic beyond “OMG Twitter What I Had For Breakfast” to provide a thoughtful look at the nature of human social networks, and the way electronic media fits into the stuff we’ve done as a species all along:

What exactly is a social network? Simply put, it is a set of people and their relationships, says James Fowler, co-author with Nicholas Christakis of the book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.”

“We have always had family members, and we’ve always had friends,” Fowler writes in an e-mail from San Diego, where he is an associate professor at the University of California-San Diego. “So online social networks — where we communicate with people via the Internet — are really just the latest version of the networks we’ve always had.”

The Insanity of Lettuce

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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.”

Fishing an irrigation canal, Imperial Valley, 1904-05, courtesy San Diego Historical Society/Calisphere

Fishing an irrigation canal, Imperial Valley, 1904-05, courtesy San Diego Historical Society/Calisphere

His travels took him across the lower Colorado River desert, and he seems not to have liked it much:

This is the great American Sahara, which, although mostly in the limits of California, is called the “Colorado Desert,” and has become familiar to the public through the proposition of Dr. Wozencraft. That enthusiastic gentleman has long been endeavoring to persuade Congress to give the company he represents a right to turn the Colorado River into the desert for the purpose of irrigating a few million acres, and making them profitable as farming lands. I have not heard a single individual who has crossed this plain characterize this scheme as anything but insane, and now that we have seen it, I am fully of that opinion.

Dr. Wozencraft’s idea, as we have discussed previously, was to take advantage of the fact that the fertile bottomlands of the Salton Sink are below the grade of the Colorado River, using gravity to bring water and make the desert bloom.

Wozencraft died before his dream could come to fruition, but chances are good that if you ate lettuce today, it came from the Salton Sink, since renamed “Imperial Valley”.

This is not a graph of the water level in Lake Mead

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Construction employment in Nevada. Source: St. Louis Fed

Construction employment in Nevada. Source: St. Louis Fed

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, Mead down? OK, that’s rhetorically cheap, because the numerical picture is far more complex, but the underlying concept makes sense.

But does the construction collapse presage a different future trajectory for Vegas, and therefore for Nevada’s water consumption? That’s the implication of an insightful analysis by Emily Green of the Nevada legislature’s failure in its recent special session to rewrite the state’s water laws in favor of the gambling mecca’s pursuit of rural groundwater rights.

Green argues that the Nevada legislature, grappling with budget shortfalls that resulted from the collapse of the Vegas casino-construction Ponzi scheme, was in no mood to help prop back up via water law what is essentially a failed enterprise:

As legislators faced sacking teachers and shutting down social services, sending in lobbyists from the casino and construction industry to take the corner of the Southern Nevada Water Authority and unfettered growth in Las Vegas was about as clever tactically as offering scotch to someone waiting for a liver transplant.

Who in their right mind would have passed legislation designed to resume the boom while neck high in the rubble of such a spectacular bust?