From today’s business section (adwalled):
“There is no bigger risk that can impact you long term in our business than climate change,” Sterba, chief executive officer of PNM, told the Journal in an interview.
Yulsman on Gore
Tom Yulsman ventures back into the political dangerous terrain left by another Al Gore exaggeration on climate change:
In an interview with the Guardian yesterday, the Nobel prize winner said business leaders are realizing that action is required on climate change because they are “seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years.”
When I talk to university classes about the climate science-politics-policy interface, I use Gore as an example, pointing out that he mostly gets the science right, but sometimes (as in the case of hurricanes and the iconic logo for his film, for example) emphasizes outliers at the expense of the bulk of the science on which he builds his case.
The examples I could cite here increase in number. This concerns me.
Elephant Diaries: Clay Shirky on Why Newspapers are Just Fucked
It’s not that we haven’t done The Right Thing. It’s that there is no Right Thing. The problems are fundamental:
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
The thing is, no one really wanted to fund the Baghdad bureau, or the guy at the city council meeting, or at least not very many people wanted to. It was just an odd civic side effect of the old model. That’s gone.
(h/t Ken)
The Difference Between Climate Scientists and Economists
Typical Environmental Economist
Climate scientists, apparently, are a dour, grumpy bunch, while economists have the cheerful demeanor of a plucky role model heading enthusiastically into the future.* This, at least, is the impression left by Jean-Marie Macabrey’s account** of last week’s Cophenhagen climate fest:
At the congress, it seemed that all the scientists had to share with their peers was bad news, but a number of economists saw the climate crisis rather as an historic opportunity to reorganize the world economy and develop new, clean and job-creating activities.
* I’ve never actually seen Dora the Explorer. This metaphor is merely notional.
** Cool that Climatewire stuff is now available via NYTimes.
Food Prices
Global food prices are down 6 percent from one month ago, 34 percent from a year ago, according to the Economist’s food price index.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: WCI
Over on the work blog, I pronounce New Mexico’s Western Climate Initiative legislation not quite dead but almost.
Elephant Diaries: The Perks
Helene Cooper on her first ride on Air Force One:
As we took off, the flight attendant motioned to the white telephone between one of my colleagues and me. “You can use the phone to make a call anywhere you want,” he said. I snatched up the phone, excitedly. “I’m going to call my sister from Air Force One!” I said.
I looked up into a solid wall of New York Times disapproval. All three of my colleagues were shaking their heads at me. “Don’t even think about it,” said one of them, Jeff Zeleny. Sighing, I put the phone back down.
Elephant Diaries: the Kids
As I’ve gotten older, one of my great joys as a journalist has been to watch the kids come through the newsroom, young journalists starting their careers with fire in their bellies and a naive but sincere passion for using journalism to help change the world. Which is why this was so sad to read:
I did everything I could to gain experience, learn new skills and become a concerned, involved and accurate journalist and citizen. I went from general newspaper reporting to web editing to radio reporting looking for a way to become a part of the media. And once I got my job as a web producer I felt like it all paid off.
Water in the Desert: West of the Pecos
Dam on the Pecos
L and I took a drive out on the eastern side of New Mexico’s central mountains today, up the Pecos River through the little villages of Villanueva and Ribera. You can think of the Pecos as a dividing line between the country’s great flat middle and the broken geology of the southwest. The phrase “west of the Pecos” serves as a catchy TV Western shorthand for a reason.
But in terms of the Pecos itself there is also an interesting north-south dividing line between the northern farming villages like Villanueva and the big, muscular farming of the Carlsbad Irrigation District down south. CID has all the hallmarks of early 20th century concrete water management, a product first of failed entrepreneurship and then federal intervention. It serves something on the order of 25,000 acres. Hemmed in by steep slopes as the Pecos cuts its way through the mesas of northern New Mexico, Villanueva does not sprawl. It has all the hallmarks of an earlier era, when farming was done on tight little plots immediately adjacent to western streams, in the flood plain, with all the risk and reward that entails. You can see the traces of family inheritance on the land today – long narrow strips of land, each touching a ditch at one end and the river at the other, the resdult of family subdivision over time.
In the spirit of Daniel Collins’ entreaty to consider transboundary issues, there’s a story here worth fleshing out, but I don’t know enough yet to do it justice. The boundary here is primarily cultural, rather than jurisdictional. There is a tension in New Mexico between the new and old ways of using water. In the old Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, acequias are a community project, requiring community labor to keep them functioning. The water rights embodied in them are also an asset. Senior water rights are worth lots of money now in New Mexico, and selling them is a reasonable option for landowners. But if too many of an acequia’s members sell their rights – to a city hungry for the water rights to enable growh, or to a large-scale downstream farmer – the community irrigation system breaks down.
The dam in the photo above is a small concrete structure that serves as the diversion point to start water into acequias. It’s still early in the season, but the main ditches were running in a number of places as L and I wandered today. There was still ice in the shadows on the Gallinas Creek, above Las Vegas (the New Mexico LV, on the far southern tip of the Rockies), but the snow line is currently quite high, and folks in LV were complaining how dry it is. The March 1 forecast calls for runoff this year in the 70 to 80 percent range in the Gallinas (which serves Las Vegas) and the Pecos.
Transboundary Water Issues
Daniel Collins at Crikey Creek has a great suggestion for folks in the water blogging community:
In the spirit of World Water Day, and in an effort to contribute towards transboundary cooperation, I propose that all us waterbloggers (and other bloggers too!) dedicate one or more of our posts that day or beforehand specifically to transboundary water issues.
World Water Day is March 22, and in the spirit of Daniel’s suggestion, and time permitting, I’m going to try to devote a bit of time over the next couple of weeks to his suggestion. This is a useful exercise in part because here in New Mexico we face a number of important transboundary water challenges, some of which I’ve not thought about closely because of the somewhat arbitrary nature of our political boundaries and the water law that goes with them.
A list of transboundary issues here to get my thinking unclogged:
- Whither the Colorado River Compact and its encrusted legal barnacles, a body of law that is clearly unsuited to 21st century problems. The transboundary issues here exist at a number of scales – states, nations (US/Mexico), basins (out-of-basin transfers, upper-lower basin transfer).
- Ditto the Rio Grande Compact, which faces similar issues.
- Transboundary groundwater basin issues at the U.S.-Mexico border.
- The Ogallala Aquifer, where groundwater pumping across a variety of political jurisdictions poses problems.
- More subtly, we face a host of interesting issues within the Middle Rio Grande involving use and transfer of water among and across local government jurisdictional boundaries. While not “transboundary” in the tradiational sense, the problems therein share a great deal of similarity with more traditional transboundary issues.
- The Bellagio Treaty, an effort to come up with a model treaty for dealing with trandboundary water issues. This is one of those interesting things that I’ve long wanted to learn more about. Now’s my chance.