Friday bird blogging: in which I visit the sewage treatment plant and see nature. (Trying to lighten up the wonkery at the work blog.)
Albuquerque’s water future: in which I invoke Zetland’s argument regarding the western approach to water planning, as it applies to Albuquerque’s mayoral politics.
I haven’t had enough brainshare lately to track energy issues the way I was last spring and summer when thinking about $4 gasoline was such a teachable moment, but on popping in over at the EIA this evening, I note that we New Mexicans are continuing our frugal ways:
New Mexico Monthly Gasoline Consumption
By my quick calculation, consumption in the 12 months ending in May (the most recent month for which data is available) was the lowest since 2001. Year over year, it’s down 10 percent. That seems like a lot, and I can’t vouch for the data without doing some due diligence, but maybe wow.
Kelly Zito has an intriguing look at California water managemente in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, looking at the incredibly disjointed way urban-suburban Northern California’s system is managed as compared to the relatively centralized role of the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California:
Ana Sarver jogs 5 miles along the Contra Costa Canal every day. But water from the 10-foot-wide channel, just a few steps from Sarver’s front door in Pleasant Hill, doesn’t flow through her taps.
Her water comes from the Mokelumne River basin – 100 miles away in the Sierra Nevada.
Confused?
Unlike Southern California, where one giant agency – the Metropolitan Water District – oversees the distribution of water from a few sources across 26 cities from San Diego to Santa Monica, the nine-county Bay Area landscape is a broad patchwork of local, state and federal water systems – with various jurisdictions controlling each.
This line of argument has interesting parallels here in New Mexico, and in particular the Middle Rio Grande. Nominally, the Office of State Engineer and Interstate Stream Commission offer centralized institutional management over the state’s waters. But because the basin isn’t adjudicated, we instead have this strange patchwork of institutional relationships with which the various individual entities sort of muddle through.
Hite, Utah
My friend Andrew told me the story of Hite, Utah, left high and dry as Lake Powell’s levels dropped. Lissa and I went through there on our recent vacation, and I was so struck by the place that I scraped together the details of Hite’s abandonement and turned it into a newspaper story:
HITE, UTAH – The ghostly silence at what used to be Hite Marina, on the shore of Lake Powell, must be what permanent drought sounds like.
Today, a single boat sits behind a fence in a storage lot against the hot red cliffs. A few ramshackle remnants of the marina’s old floating docks sit stranded far above the current water line.
The National Park Service, which runs Glen Canyon Recreation Area, abandoned Hite Marina in 2003 as Lake Powell’s levels dropped. The floating store and gas station that used to sit at the center of a bustling little community were towed down the lake to Bullfrog Marina, leaving behind a boat ramp that, in dry years, is stranded above the water line.
Any more, “dry” seems to be the new normal here where the Colorado River slips past Moab and through the canyon country that leads to Glen Canyon Dam. Flow on the Colorado River system, which supplies water to New Mexico and six other Western states, has been below average seven of the last 10 years.
Earlier in the week, I made fun of those wimpy North Carolinians for going into drought tizzy after a few weeks without rain. But there is no similar fun to be had in Texas, where the red blotches on the weekly drought monitor maps keep growing:
Drought’s a funny thing.
Take North Carolina (hi Dave!), which in general averages about 50 inches (125 cm) of rain per year. To a hardened desert dweller like me, it’s inconceivable that a 40 inch year (the great drought of ’07) could be anything other than a mild inconvenience. But drought is really all about what you’re used to, which is why I’m trying not to laugh too hard at this, from the Citizen-Times in Asheville:
Record rainfall in May pulled Western North Carolina out of years of drought, but a scarcity of precipitation since threatens to again parch portions of the region.
The National Weather Service says most of the western Carolinas and northeast Georgia have received only light rain for at least the third straight week, pushing some areas back into the category of abnormally dry.
I could go all weather data wonk on y’all and point to the latest soil moisture anomaly maps, but really, what’s the point? Drought is what you say it is when you’re in it, I guess.
Doug MacEachern has a fascinataing discussion in today’s Arizona Republic about the canals of Phoenix. I remember being struck the first time I visited Phoenix by these strange concrete waterways. I’d driven up to the north end of town to make a pilgrimage to the (sorta) Frank Lloyd Wright Biltmore, an oasis of a thing built for the rich. It’s green and luxuriant, and then right in front is this big concrete river carrying water past, and the Biltmore’s architecture completely ignores it, like its only relevance was as an obstacle to the entrance road.
A few years back, when Lissa and I visited Phoenix, we spent some time ambling around trying to look at the canals. It was hard. They’re not rivers. They’re plumbing. This picture is the best I could find from our trip, a little diversion structure taking water out of one of the big canals down the hill to a neighborhood of citrus groves:
The actual concrete canal is up to the left, completely ignored by the neighborhoods that surround it – in fact largely inaccessible.
MacEachern writes about a discussion going on now in Phoenix about the possibility of reintegrating the canals into the cityscape, the way they apparently used to be:
Especially during the rapid expansion of the urban Valley after World War II, SRP’s dedication to efficient, effective water delivery rapidly began altering a once-cozy relationship of the Valley’s communities to their canals.
Where a formerly agrarian Valley was once resplendent with tree-lined, earthen canals, the post-war canals were remodeled quickly into . . . something else. The thousands of enormous cottonwoods that once proliferated along the earthen canal banks began disappearing. And the canals themselves, which once provided easy access for swimmers and picnickers, were covered over in steep, foreboding concrete.
It echoes a similar discussion going on now in Albuquerque, regarding the extent to which the network of irrigation ditches criss-crossing the valley floor should be treated more broadly as a network of recreational trails. From Gwyneth Doland:
For years, residents in Albuquerque’s North Valley have been pushing for a formalized system of recreation trails along the irrigation ditches, or acequias, an idea the current board has unanimously rejected. Supporters of the trail plan are hoping that electing new board members will pave the way to change.
The discussion here is a little different. The ditch banks in Albuquerque’s valley are already embraced as informal recreational trails by many, and the argument here is not so much about whether that is a good thing, but about the ways in which it might be formalized.
But in both the Phoenix and Albuquerque cases, it highlights a classic market failure – a positive externality (recreational benefits for all!) that is not internalized in our formal decision-making about the management of our water system.
My Albuquerque Journal colleague Mike Coleman has a post this morning that illustrates the complexity of the science-politics-policy interface surrounding the cap-and-trade legislation now slogging through Congress. It’s about Harry Teague, a newly elected conservative Democrat from New Mexico who represents a very conservative district with a strong oil and gas component to its economy. (A portion of the district overlies the Permian basin, and southeast New Mexico is very “Texas oil patch” in many ways, not at all the sort of Georgia O’Keeffe country that the name “New Mexico” evokes to outsiders.)
The bill’s handlers gave Teague some major concessions involving small oil refineries to win his vote (see Mike’s story for details on the deal). But Teague has apparently been getting beaten up anyway by some of his constituents over the issue, which leads us to this:
Does Rep. Harry Teague think climate change is real?
Yes, he does, Teague’s spokeswoman told me this morning. But the congressman believes the jury is still out on the reasons why it’s happening.
Does solar energy have a water problem? That’s the question I tried to address in this story (sub. req. sorta) over at the day job:
Look at any map of U.S. solar energy resources, and you will see a band stretching from southern New Mexico across Arizona and into California that shows promise.
Solar energy advocates see a strip of clean, green power growing up in the region.
But if you think closely about what the map is saying, as Arizona water expert Chris Brooks points out, you will see something else. The potential for a solar bonanza is happening in the driest part of the nation. And solar energy, in its most cost-effective form, uses water.
“You need to put it someplace where the sun shines, and a lot of those places tend to be dry.” said Brooks, a Tucson hydrologist and lawyer who writes the Watering the Desert blog.
But it turns out not to be as interesting a problem as I think it has been made out to be, for a couple of reasons:
Experts note there is nothing special about this particular version of the energy-water debate. Many other sources of electricity, especially coal and nuclear power, use large quantities of water for power plant cooling, just as the new solar plants do.
In New Mexico, in fact, the biggest water hog on the new energy horizon is a big new coal plant proposed for northwestern New Mexico. Meanwhile, solar advocates point to alternative types of sun-fueled power plants they say can produce electricity while cutting back on the amount of water consumed.
In other words, there’s nothing terribly special about solar energy. It’s just teh one we’re currently talking the most about. And the tradeoffs are relatively straightforward. You can use less water, it just reduces your plant’s efficiency, essentially making it more expensive per kilowatt hour of power.