How much water does the Colorado really have?

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Compare and contrast. Tim Barnett, in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal:

The Colorado River won’t have enough water to meet the West’s needs at least three out of every five years by mid-century if we do not move now to reduce our usage, according to a new study being published this week.

“Current conditions are unsustainable,” said Tim Barnett, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

Speaking in Fort Collins, Aaron Million, who’s trying a major Front Range water transfer:

Million said his graduate thesis work at Colorado State University four years ago showed there’s a surplus of water in the Colorado River system, and his project is the fruit of efforts to get at it.

“We’ve been looking at ways to bring an environmentally sound, new water resource into the state,” he said.


Albuquerque Water Rates

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Sean Olson this morning discusses a proposal to raise (sort of) our water rates (warning: complex ad wall if you click):

For the households that keep the taps running 24-7, now might be the time to start tucking more money under the mattress.

The city-county water authority is proposing a new rate structure that would crack down on Albuquerque’s highest water users to the tune of up to several thousand dollars a year, while providing a slight discount to the water conscious.

Water authority officials said Monday that the rate plan would provide an incentive to use less, as opposed to just penalizing customers with high usage.

Gas Prices Creeping Up, Demand Still Down

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I have the typical attention span of a journalist, and once the gas price spike turned into whatever the opposite of a spike is, I rushed off to the next front page thought, but really, gas prices have remained interesting:

Gasoline Prices

Gasoline Prices

But for full context, also this:

Gasoline Consumption

Gasoline Consumption

Sorta hard to see without referring to the underlying data, but year over year, current consumption is lower right now in the United States than it’s been since 2003, if I’m reading the numbers right.

Colorado River Dry

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More when I have time, but for now, since this is a blog and we’re supposed to be on top of things, some stuff I wrote elsewhere:

The Colorado River will be too small to meet the needs of its users three years out of five, or more, by mid-century, according to new research. Some 27 million westerners depend on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, including Albuquerque. But our use of the river’s water is “unsustainable,” according to Tim Barnett, a research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Barnett and colleague David Pierce took climate situations showing average annual reductions of 10 to 30 percent in the river’s flow.

Getting Buy-in

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From today’s newspaper, a look at Jeff Bingaman’s approach to climate legislation:

[A]s we sat down for lunch last week to talk climate and energy policy, the first thing out of Bingaman’s mouth was an explanation of “the Byrd rule.” The topic helps illustrate the delicate way Bingaman prefers to play the legislative game. The arcane Byrd rule helps ensure policy measures cannot be slipped into the budget bill to skirt the Senate requirement of 60 votes to pass important legislation.

The Incredible Shrinking Lake Mead

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Lake Mead

Lake Mead

Henry Brean, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, caught something remarkable in the latest monthly reservoir operations plan published by the Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado River region office. By next month, Lake Mead will drop below 1,100 feet above sea level in surface elevation – the first time it has dropped below that level since the mid-1960s. Brean writes:

And the decline won’t stop there. By July, the reservoir on the Nevada-Arizona border is projected to shrink more than 13 feet from its current level of 1,105 feet above sea level.

That’s more than 8 feet lower than forecasters were predicting just one month ago. The news has water managers and marina operators scrambling to deal with the immediate effects and bracing for what could come next if drought conditions don’t improve along the Colorado River.

“We have to hope we have a decent spring. Otherwise we’re headed for uncharted territory,” said J.C. Davis, spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Click through on the graph above (which comes from the Bureau) to see the history. For most of the last five decades, the lake level was either climbing, or was topped at nearly full. But since about 1999-2000, there has been a steady decline.

I just got a box in the mail yesterday with the big fat book versions of the environmental analysis done for the 2007 “interim guidelines,” which attempt to set out operational plans for shortage sharing. As Brean notes, the first trigger comes 30 feet below the current levels on Lake Mead. The current 24-month operating plan suggests Mead will still be 15 feet above the trigger level at the end of the current water year. I wonder what next winter will be like?

Southern California Cutbacks: A Market Mechanism

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I only know what I read in the paper these days about the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s giant water wholesaler. But it sure looks from this LA Times story as though the Met is trying to use market mechanisms to impose a 10 percent reduction in deliveries:

The Metropolitan Water District, which imports water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta and the Colorado River and sells it to local water districts, will achieve the reductions by imposing penalty rates. Local utilities that use more than their allocation will have to pay more.

Am I understanding this correctly, David?

Easter

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My newspaper colleagues Marla Brose and Olivier Uyttebrouck did a lovely package over the weekend about a group of Franciscans here in Albuquerque celebrating Easter. Especially check out Marla’s slide show (story’s also linked from that page.)