Colorado River Quote of the Week
Some scientists predict that climatic changes could alter historic precipitation patterns, and reduce available water supplies. Carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel combustion, mostly in coal-burning power plants, threatens a significant climate change…. A National Academy of Sciences report estimates that the resulting temperature increase and reduction in precipitation could diminish water supplies by almost forty percent in the Upper Colorado Region.
David Getches, Competing Demands for the Colorado River, University of Colorado Law Review, 1984
OK, that was a few weeks ago, but you get my point. People have been talking about this for a very long time.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Drought Edition
Runoff Timing
In light of yesterday’s mediapalooza about the new federal climate report (see my contributions here and here), there’s an interesting on-the-ground reality check today in the Denver Post:
Colorado’s peak flow from snowmelt hit a few weeks earlier than normal, causing problems for some recreational users of the state’s rivers and complicating downstream irrigation strategies.
A dozen late-winter windstorms coated high mountain snow with dust, causing the snow to melt earlier than usual. Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Erin Curtis said the peak occurred in late May.
BLM is especially worried about flows on the Colorado River in the western part of the state, where the so-called flat water is running especially cold and fast, at a flow now about five times what it will be later this summer….
Water storage may also be an issue, said Andy Barrett of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder.
Little Victories
I just got a new cell phone. When I unplugged it after its first charge, the phone’s screen displayed a message reminding me to unplug the charger to save energy when not in use.
Yes!
Groundwater Recharge in California
A lazyweb question for any of the Calfornia water geeks in the audience….
My old employer, the Pasadena Star-News, had an editorial over the weekend that raised the question of groundwater recharge in the following backhanded way:
During a recent dust-up over city of Pasadena water rates, two of the conservation skeptics wrote an essay for our Perspectives page with an entirely new twist on the anti-conservation point of view. When homeowners and businesses with large plots of landscaping don’t water very much, they argue, there’s a lot less water going back into the underground aquifers from which many cities and water companies still get plenty of well water. In other words, conserving could be counter-productive.
Is this right? I know that the answer to the question here in Albuquerque is a complex function of where the lawn is located, so there’s probably no easy answer to this. But in general, in Southern California, how much recharge from municipal watering occurs?
Will Canada and the U.S. go to war over water?
No.
But a story by Mark Hume in the Globe and Mail illustrates the delicacies of transboundary water questions, and by coincidence is one of two interesting examples of the problem that scrolled across my monitor this morning.
Hume’s story details objections by residents of British Columbia to a dam being contemplated in Washington state that has the potential to back up water across the border to the north:
The Shanker’s Bend project, proposed by the Okanogan County Public Utility District, would dam the Similkameen River just a few kilometres south of the B.C. border.
The project would provide increased water storage and hydro generation for the town of Oroville, in north central Washington, but it would also back up water deep into the Similkameen Valley – flooding the habitat of endangered species in an area that has been proposed as a national park.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Iraq’s minister of water resources complains that Turkey is failing to live up to its commitments to allow water to flow down the Euphrates:
“Because of the reservoirs and dams which are built in Turkey, our share of water has decreased drastically,” Rashid explained. “The middle and south of Iraq are suffering a severe drought, and now it is the season of agriculture, but we don’t have sufficient water to have our agriculture plans implemented.”
The flow from the Euphrates River to Iraq is currently 230 cubic meters per second, and the agreement with Turkey stipulated an increase in flow of up to 360 cubic meters per second.
If one was obsessed with economic principles and the notion of market failures in everything, one might note that we have two examples here of externalities, complicated by the transboundary separation of the economic actors who benefit from a particular water infrastructure, and the economic actors who are harmed.
What a Housing Bubble Looks Like
Here’s what a housing bubble looks like. Housing prices. Red is Arizona, green is Nevada, blue is us here in New Mexico. The three states track together since the 1970s (off to the left of what’s displayed in this graph). Prices in Arizona and Nevada shoot up beginning around 2004, then collapse pretty dramatically. Click through for larger image. Data from St. Louis Fed.
“insufficient water to meet needs”, energy edition
“The Saudi Arabia of X” is a common new energy meme that has been applied, among many things, to the oil shales of the western United States. But its invocation requires some significant arm-waving over the question of water, as this report by Jeremy Miller points out:
But it is water – or more specifically, its scarcity – that is likely to be shale oil’s greatest stumbling block in the arid West.
The United States Geological Survey recently estimated that there may be as many as 1.525 trillion barrels of oil trapped in the rock of Colorado’s Piceance Basin, the region’s richest shale field. And a report released in March by the non-profit Western Resource Advocates, an environmental group based in Boulder, Colo., suggested that oil companies have acquired water rights at hundreds of locations in the upper Colorado River basin, which could be used for future oil shale production.
“There is this theoretical idea that if you could somehow extract all of the oil” from the Piceance Basin, said David Abelson, an author of the report, “you would have more oil than Saudi Arabia.”
The W.R.A. report, citing figures from the Bureau of Land Management and RAND Corporation, argued that increased water use for oil shale development could hamper urban growth in the Rocky Mountain Front Range, threaten agriculture and critical habitat for endangered fish and increase likelihood that Lower Basin states like Nevada, Arizona and California would issue a “call” — a legal decree that forces junior upstream water rights holders to reduce, or eliminate altogether, water use until senior downstream rights are met.
“insufficient water to meet needs”
I’ve repeatedly leaned over the years on Kelly Redmond’s definition of drought: “insufficient water to meet needs”.
I was reminded of same today when a friend who lives in Massachusetts sent me a story about water shortages there:
With lawn watering season just getting underway, the state says there are 160 rivers and streams in the state that already suffer from low flows or water levels. Some, like parts of the Jones River in Kingston, run bone dry some summers.
And a new state Department of Fish & Game report shows river fish are disap pearing from many Massachusetts waterways – including the upper Charles and Blackstone rivers – in part because too much water is being taken from them. Brook trout, a local favorite, have all but disappeared from the parched upper Ipswich River. The stock of native bait fish such as common shiners have plummeted in the Blackstone.
Overwatering is to blame for much of the excess demand, local officials say.