Transboundary Water Issues

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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.

Why We Ride

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Scot, on his commute home yesterday in some sort of dry hurricane:

I came very close to being simply swept into a car waiting alongside me at the light at MLK and Broadway. My teeth were sandpaper by the time I got home, and my face a circle of pitted dark encircling the clean patch of where my sunglasses had been.

It was crazy. Damn it was funny. And I’d do it again in a second, especially if I can keep my brain from realizing that I had a better than half-decent chance of being killed by a giant hunk of flying sheet metal or large, wind-blown cow yesterday.

We’re number 1!

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Theme, title and all subsequent material stolen from William Connolley, who notes that George Will has helped launched our BAMS paper on the 1970s global cooling myth to the top of the charts. More interesting, however, is William’s analysis of what draws readers to the strange and wonky world of American Meteorological Society journals:

Conclusion: the current AMS download list reflects what the general public is interested in more than what professional met. folk are reading. Which I suppose might be good – if the public are actually reading any of the content they download.

Let ’em build in LA

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palm trees

palm trees

Economist Edward Glaeser (based on work he’s done with Matthew Kahn) argues in the LA Times for the environmental benefits of relaxing anti-growth measures in Southern California’s temperate climes:

Much of America struggles with cold winters and hot summers. Making such difficult climates comfortable for humans requires a lot of energy. By contrast, much of coastal California is pretty pleasant year-round, requiring far less energy. The natural implication is that to reduce carbon emissions, more Americans should live in temperate California.

On Line vs. Driving to the Store

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Via Green Inc., the answer (sorta) to a question I posed a while back:

Shoppers sitting in their living rooms and ordering items like hair-dryers or cameras online used 35 percent less energy, the study found, than people who shopped the old-fashioned way.

“Customer transport” — in other words, driving to and from the mall — accounted for 65 percent of energy and emissions from the brick-and-mortar shopping method.

Click through for caveats. Lots of them.

Crying Drought

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One of the common themes in drought journalism (mine at times included, sadly) is the tendency to cry “drought” at minor excursions into the down side of natural variability, when the real problem is not so much water supply as voracious consumption. Blaming nature is a whole lot easier than blaming ourselves.

Is that the case now in California? Bettina Boxall’s story in this morning’s LA Times (h/t Belshaw) seems to suggest it might be:

The water interests who have spit out grim news releases the last two months were silent Monday in the face of the growing snowpack.

Those who would like to build new reservoirs and canals and to weaken environmental regulations have invoked the drought like a mantra in recent weeks.

A recently introduced congressional bill that would allow federal officials to relax endangered-species protections in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is titled the California Drought Alleviation Act.

“For over 100 years in California, the drought argument has been used consistently to justify actions, and I think this is no exception,” said Robert Wilkinson, director of the Water Policy Program at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.