If you’re interested in western (US) water, you almost certainly already read Emily Green. If you’re not, you must:
“DOES anyone think Southern Nevada [Water Authority] is going to build a $15 billion pipeline and then let somebody turn it off?” — Snake Valley rancher Cecil Garland, pictured above center.
Oil industry behind “energy citizens rallies”
The U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying organization is behind a series of “energy citizens rallies” against pending climate change legislation, including two in New Mexico later this month, according to a memo obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace.
“We don’t want critics to know our game plan,” American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard said in the internal memo, which Greenpeace provided to the Journal. A spokeswoman for the institute confirmed the memo’s authenticity.
When U.S. Army Lt. J.C. Ives explored the lower reaches of the Colorado River in 1857-58, he made careful efforts to record as much of what he saw and learned as possible, “it being doubtful whether any party will ever again pursue the same line of travel.”
From J.C. Ives' "Report upon the Colorado River of the West"
Ives wrote:
The region explored after leaving the navigable portion of the Colorado—though, in a scientific point of view, of the highest interest, and presenting natural features whose strange sublimity is perhaps unparalleled in any part of the world—is not of much value. Most of it is uninhabitable, and a great deal of it is impassable.
Pioneering Colorado River hydrologist E.C. LaRue, shown here in 1923 measuring the discharge on Nankoweap Creek. Courtesy USGS
I was interviewing a local flood control engineer recently about the lovely little wetland that’s grown up in a retention pond up near my work. It’s located just off one of the channels that carries flood flows down through the city, and its primary purpose is to catch and hold water for a while to reduce contaminant load that gets to the Rio Grande in flash flood events.
When I described it as a “wetland,” the engineer cautioned me about a linguistic subtlety. Its purpose, he explained, is not wildlife habitat, and to call it a “wetland” is to move it into a bureaucratic category for which it was not intended. So while it’s developed a lovely cattail marsh, with redwing blackbirds and grackels and all manner of travelling water fowl, it’s not a wildlife habitat site. Call that a happy accident.
That issue writ large is the situation at two much more famous western water sites I’ve been reading about lately: the Cienega de Santa Clara in the Colorado River Delta, and Owens Lake.
Courtesy NASA, the Colorado River Delta, with Cienega de Santa Clara in the upper right
The Cienega is at the end of the Welton-Mohawk drain, which was built to drain off brackish ag runoff from the Yuma area, to keep it from sullying the Colorado River. Where the drain ends in Mexico, a remarkable wetland has developed which has become one of the best wildlife habitats in the Lower Colorado.
Similarly, nature has apparently gone gangbusters in the Owens Valley as a result of a project that was nominally about adding enough water to keep down dust left after LA began siphoning away water a century ago for urban use, according to this KABC story:
The wind and dust made Owens Lake the largest single source of air pollution in the United States. However, that changed over the last ten years. Huge pipes, hundreds of smaller bubblers and thousands of tiny drippers, allow water to spread out across the vast expanse of Owens Lake. As a result, acres of green grass have sprouted on the lakebed and migratory birds have returned to the ponds. But all the water, roads and dikes are used for the sole purpose of keeping the dust down.
There are some really interesting water policy issues entangled here. In the Lower Colorado, a rich debate is underway about how to keep the Cienega alive given a plan to put the brackish water now flowing its way to other use. The Bureau of Reclamation has plans to restart the Yuma Desalting Plant and cleaning up said brackish water to put to what are considered, in U.S. water law, “beneficial uses”. That means drinking and growing food. In-stream flows and habitat are not considered “beneficial” under the law.
I’ll have more on the Cienega in coming months. I’m hoping to get down there for a writing project I’m working on, to visit both the Cienega itself and also the farms on both sides of the border that put water to what we more traditionally call “beneficial use.” In the meantime, I’m hoping to sneak off at lunch to the little pond by my office and check out the redwing blackbirds.
I don’t know if anyone else reads this stuff, or if we’re just talking to one another, but a quartet of the waterbloggers piled on a today on the Vegas (Nev.) water situation. The back story involves Southern Nevada water impresario Pat Mulroy, who wants to bring water across the state to feed her growing city’s growingness.
First there’s Zetland:
Why didn’t she raise prices and balance supply and demand in Vegas? Because she’s pro-growth (developers), pro-engineering (the third straw into Lake Mead and pipeline will cost ratepayers a LOT), and pro-power (for herself).
If she raised prices 5 years ago, her job would have been boring. No headlines. Just quiet competence.
Emily Green, who has the history, riffs off of Zetland:
But from the beginning, Mulroy has argued doom for Southern Nevada if her pipeline isn’t built. “You’re going to live Amman, Jordan. You’re going to get water once a week,” was the latest outburst, made in demanding that her board at the Southern Nevada Water Authority give her an up or down vote on the project next week.
“I”ve been to Amman — it DOES have water in the fire hydrants and 24/7 water pressure, so she’s full of sh*t,” writes Zetland.
Over at the work blog, I’m acting all relieved that New Mexico is upstream from Vegas:
Brad Udall, who does western water policy research out of the University of Colorado, likes to quote an old western water saying: “I’d rather be upstream with a shovel and a ditch than downstream with a decree.”
At times like these, we New Mexicans can be glad we’re upstream from Las Vegas, Nevada. Next week, the board of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which provides Vegas with water, has been asked to take an up-or-down vote on whether to build a massive pipeline to important groundwater from a rural area area 300 miles away.
To sum it all up, the scholarly Michael Campana.
For you down-in-the-weeds water wonks, the Central Arizona Project is now posting its monthly delivery reports.
A couple of new papers out this week use a clever technique to quantify what looks like extraordinary groundwater mining going on in India.
Groundwater pumping is a classic “tragedy of the commons.” In the long run, it’s best not to mine groundwater, to pump it in a modest and therefore sustainable fashion. But any one individual has no incentive to hold back, given the fact that his or her neighbor can just suck the aquifer dry anyway.
That appears to be what’s happening in India, according to a paper in tomorrow’s Nature. This is not climate change or drought or any such “natural” calamity. This is humans overusing a resource, author Matthew Roddell and his colleagues report:
If measures are not taken soon to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, the consequences for the 114,000,000 residents of the region may include a reduction of agricultural output and shortages of potable water, leading to extensive socioeconomic stresses.
The scientists calculated gravity anomalies using satellite data to track the missing water. There’s a second paper out in GRL that comes to similar conclusions. Quirin Shiermeier has a news story in Nature, and Richard Kerr wrote it up for Science.
From this morning’s newspaper, UNM ecologist Jim Brown sketches out dire scenarios:
On one hand, Brown wrote in his 1995 book “Macroecology,” humans are just one of the millions of species that inhabit Earth, “formed by the same processes that produced all other species, and our abundance and distribution are governed by the same natural laws that affect all living things.”
And yet, he wrote, our ability to reshape our environment and impose our dominance on other living things is unprecedented.
When Brown wrote that, there were an estimated 5.5 billion humans on Earth. Today, there are an estimated 6.8 billion. But while our numbers are rising fast, our energy usage is rising even faster.
That is, at the core, what makes humans different from all the other species on Earth: our ability to leverage oil and coal and other sources of energy to go beyond what pristine ecosystems offer. It has resulted in our rich standard of living. Today, the rising energy consumption in part is a reflection of more people in the developing world leveraging the same energy sources to raise their own standards of living.
Now, Brown argues, those trends in growing population and increasing energy use are hurtling headlong toward fundamental global limits. If we do not reduce our population growth and our per capita energy consumption, we’ll burn through the last of our fossil fuels, triggering devastating climate change and, when the fuels run out, societal collapse.
I’ve been out of the loop for much of the last week, and at this point it’s likely that everyone who follows western water issues has already seen Emily Green’s post on the Cadiz groundwater project. If you haven’t, I recommend it. Cadiz is the proposal to do something that is a bit murky with groundwater from the Mojave Desert – either aquifer storage of surplus Colorado River water, or groundwater mining, or some possibility of bits of both, to meet Southern California supply needs.
It is worth remembering here that California is already the 800 pound gorilla on the Colorado River, having won rights to 4.4 million acre feet per year of the river’s water. In the recent past, when there was extra, it ended up doing some real ecosystem good down in the river’s nearly non-existent delta. The Cadiz story is too murky at this point to make clear whether skimming some of that surplus (which happens quite rarely at this point given the current status of lakes Mead and Powell) is the plan, or whether we’re just gonna see another aquifer mined.
Emily’s gone back through the federal NEPA analysis done on an earlier version of the project and his raising some substantive questions.