Pat Mulroy, head of the water authority that serves Las Vegas, Nev., lays out the problem:
Today the Colorado River represents 90 percent of our water supply. Due to the severe drought, we are within three years of losing our upper intake in Lake Mead, which represents 40 percent of our water supply; if the drought persists for three years beyond that, both intakes will be dry.
I’m still new to the strange and wonderful ways of lower Colorado River management, so I was struck by the hilarity of this situation, as explained by Chris Brooks. Farmers order water, which takes several days’ river time to reach them. But then it rains, so they don’t need the water, so it flows down the river – horrors! – unused:
I’m sure there are a lot of water agencies that shudder to think that, at times, water is being released from Lake Mead that isn’t used by anyone.
I am reminded of Andy Revkin’s post of several weeks ago, which mentions clams as possible downstream users who might benefit from such a situation.
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.
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.
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
But for full context, also this:
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.
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.
A discussion of the Colorado River over at Tom Yulsman’s blog led to a helpful post on the consumption side of the ledger:
According to a 2008 study published in Water Resources Research (subscription required for full text), Lake Mead already is being overdrawn by 1 million acre feet of water per year.
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.