Water in the Desert: CocoBait Edition

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C.J. Brooks, a Tucson water geek and author of the “Watering the Desert Blog”, talks about the linkage between land use planning and water in Nevada. Washoe County has done the sort of thing advocates around here have been talking about ever since I started thinking seriously about water issues (and likely for a lot longer than that). Brooks quotes an article from Water Strategist discussing the initiative:

The measure requires the amendment of the Truckee Meadows Regional Plan (“TMRP”) to require future land use and water requirements in the county are in balance.
The practical impact is to have regional planners plan for 200,000 more people in the county for a total of 600,000 persons based on current water use and available water.

Brooks has concerns about the “what happens next” part, suggesting that this may do a better job of creating work for lawyers than it will in aiding water and land use planning efforts:

The Washoe County initiative makes no reference to supply augmentation, merely referring to “identified and sustainable water resources” available in the county. That could be interpreted to place a pretty firm cap on future growth under one possible interpretation. Look for lots of litigation to spring from this measure in the future.

Bottom line (to borrow Zetland’s trick): It is a good idea to link land use planning to water availability, but you’ve got to do it right.

Elephant Diaries: Report from Colorado

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Tom Yulsman, from the Center for Environmental Journalism in Boulder, bemoans a life without Rocky Mountain News and, potentialy, the Denver Post?

If Scripps cannot find a buyer for the Rocky Mountain News — and no one thinks it will — then the paper will go belly up,  leaving the Denver Post as the only daily in town. But there’s no guarantee that the Post will survive either, as Moody’s Investors Services reports MediaNews, owner of the Post, could default on its loans. Moreover, Dean Singleton, the Post’s publisher, said today that he must slash expenses by $20 million.  Maybe he’ll get the unions to cooperate. But will that be enough? I wouldn’t bet on it.

So we are faced with the rather alarming prospect of a major American city of some 2.1 million people lacking a daily newspaper to cover cops, crime, city council, education, zoning, politics, corruption, sports, entertainment, etc. — and the environment.

Tom suggests a non-profit model, but grasps the audience problem that would result:

But will a small group of hungry reporters aided perhaps by academics and student interns have the reach and influence currently enjoyed by the dailies? I doubt it.

Elephant Diaries: The Great Paradox

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Surowiecki in the New Yorker:

The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.

Worth noting: I didn’t pay for Surowiecki’s piece, and don’t regularly read the New Yorker. A blogger pal emailed it to me. Thanks, Ken!

The Flip Side of Declining Food Prices

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Yes, as I have noted many times, food is getting a lot cheaper. But the other downsides to the current economic mess are likely to overwhelm any short term benefits for the hungry in the world’s poor parts, according to an analysis by Joachim von Braun of the International Food Policy Research Institute, published in Thursday’s Nature (sub. req.):

An International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) model, developed by division director Mark Rosegrant, explores what might happen in the face of the recession. If global economic annual growth falls by 2–3 percentage points below recent years’ figure of about 5%, and agricultural investment declines in parallel by 20% — a realistic scenario — this would result in cereal prices 30% above what is expected without a recession by 2020. Globally, 16 million more children would be malnourished.

That’s a lot of hungry kids. Von Braun argues for R&D investment to help plug the holes:

Doubling all agricultural R&D in developing countries between 2008 and 2013, from US$5 billion to $10 billion, could increase agricultural growth by 1.1 percentage points a year, and lift about 282 million people out of poverty by 2020. Although this would mark a historic turnaround in such investment, it pales in comparison to the financial bailout costs.

Trading One Crane for Another

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Coco notes Sandhill cranes in a field destined to become a subdivision, and fights back bile:

Sandhill cranes on a field that will soon be chopped up for sale because: you can’t do agriculture on land worth that much.

I note the economic disincentives standing in the cranes’ way (the externality of a public good stacked against private costs and benefits, a situation we’ve not been terribly good at handling – see climate), and ask Coco for suggested paths forward through the current political and policy maze. I benefit from the cranes’ presence, at zero cost to me. In a Kunstlerian future, I also might benefit from the food. Though the economics of that is a bit trickier, and it’s more likely that in the Long Emergency, I’m just fucked. But even in the short run, we all get the benefit, and Farmer Brown pays the costs in the form of the opportunity cost of all that subdivision land value lost. How do we compensate Farmer Brown and keep the birds?

Macroeconomic Indicators: NM Copper

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Commodities like copper are one of the best global macroeconomic indicators, and we’ve got copper in New Mexico. My colleague Rene Romo has a nice story in this morning’s paper (watch an ad to read it) translating the general into the specific:

“In past times, if you’d get laid off, you’d go somewhere else and find work,” said Antonio Soliz, a state Department of Workforce Solutions employment representative. “In the current times, there’s no place to go.”