Tucson Water Wars

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Tony Davis had a story last week on Tucson’s approach to meeting (or not meeting) the water needs of new developments on its perimeter:

A city water policy that had been described as “trick-or-treat” for new developers has been replaced by a tougher stance in which City Hall has denied service to four projects in unincorporated areas.
The new policy denies water to developments outside existing city service areas. It triggered a recent legal claim for $46.25 million by the developer of a saguaro-rich property in the Tucson Mountain foothills.
The problem here is that, under Arizona law, pretty much anyone can drill a well and pump as much water as they want. They’ve got to pay the full cost of extraction, but there is no scarcity pricing attached, which encourages exploitation of the resource. I was at a conference a year ago in Tucson where I heard stories of people angered by city water rates just drilling their own wells. Makes managing a scarce and dwindling resource difficult.

Hillerman

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Before I came here – before I even thought about coming here – I read Hillerman’s Fly on the Wall. It was my first introduction. After I got here, I used The Great Taos Bank Robbery as my formal introduction.

We were a degree of separation apart, and I treasure the fact that the guy read and liked my work – and went out of his way to tell me.

I’ll let Belshaw say it for us all:

When people found out I knew him, they invariably asked, “What’s he like?”


And I would invariably say, “If you had the power to pick your next-door neighbors, you would pick Tony and Marie Hillerman. They are smart, funny, compassionate, unpretentious human beings God gave us as something to strive toward.” ….

He didn’t speak like he wrote. He spoke like what he was — an Oklahoma country boy. I have no memory of any spoken word resembling any of the grace and beauty that flowed from his mind through his fingers and onto the page.

So I asked him: “Where did that come from? Demure little blossoms?”

He shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It was just there.”

Don’t Celebrate That Cheap Oil

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David Strahan in the Independent:

A falling oil price has real short-term benefits. Petrol has dropped below £1 per litre for the first time in almost a year; domestic heat and power bills should eventually follow; food prices and inflation should also ease, giving the monetary authorities greater freedom to cut interest rates.

But these benefits may prove fleeting because the collapsing oil price is bad for supply in the medium term. The cost of building new oil production capacity has soared in recent years, and many planned projects that were viable just a couple of months ago are uneconomic today. Christophe de Margerie, chief executive of Total, recently warned that if the oil price settles at $60, “a lot of new projects would be delayed”.

Others put the investment bar much higher, and that means the oil supply could soon fall short of demand, forcing the oil price sharply upwards. A recent research note from Barclays Capital argues that if oil prices stay below $90, large amounts of expected oil production capacity will not be built, and “the world faces a serious supply-side crunch as little as two years away”.

The oil price collapse also threatens renewable energy projects as their viability is judged against the cost of electricity produced from natural gas, which is itself determined by oil.

(h/t TOD)

The Rhetorical Attractiveness of “Energy Independence”

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David Henderson on energy independence:

[T]he case for being “dependent” on other countries for oil is the same as the case for being dependent on other countries for bananas or coffee. At some tariff-protected price, the United States could be self-sufficient in bananas or coffee. If the price were high enough, someone would grow bananas and coffee plants in greenhouses. But why would we want that? Why would we want to pay more for coffee and bananas than we need to? Another way of saying that we would pay more is that we would give up more of our resources (capital, labor, and land) to have domestic bananas and coffee than we now give up by producing other things with these resources and using the proceeds to buy coffee and bananas more cheaply abroad. We would be poorer. The reasoning doesn’t change when the good is oil. By preventing people from importing oil, either with a ban on imports or a tariff on oil, the government would make us poorer.

I Write About Iris

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My friend Jim Belshaw, who writes a newspaper column and has long had a love-hate relationship with blogging, sent along an Atlantic essay by Andrew Sullivan about blogging. Sullivan was one of the first bloggers I read who deserved the label, as it has now come to be known. But before blogging was the thing it is today, I was introduced to the phenomemon by a wonderful site called Advogato, a gathering place for free software developers who wrote mostly about what they (and we, for I was one of their tribe then) were working on.

One of Sullivan’s central points involves the way blogging creates a record of what you were thinking as you were thinking it, which sent me back to the spring of 2001, when I joined Advogato and started blogging myself. Even then, I wrote about iris and killdeer:

Lissa spent a good part of yesterday weeding in our huge iris bed in the front yard, picking through the plants. “It’s like getting reacquainted with old friends,” she said.

I had the same feeling this morning when I saw a pair of killdeer on my morning bike ride. It’s finally getting warm enough to ride outside in the mornings, so I’ve been heading up the bike path along the flood control channel. There’s a big bend in the channel where the water slows down and drops silt, and it turns into a little wetland every year, despite the flood control people’s best efforts to keep it scooped out. That’s where the killdeer hang out, pretty little birds with a white collar and a cheerful song. Old friends.

Neutrinos are not a breakfast cereal

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I still do write about science now and then:

In an unused alcove at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Stanford physicist Giorgio Gratta and his colleagues have built a high-tech lab to try to measure the weight of what scientists call “the little neutral one,” one of the most mysterious of the tiny subatomic particles that make up all matter in our universe.

“The mass of the neutrino is something we don’t know,” said Roger Nelson, chief scientist at the Department of Energy-run WIPP.

Don’t Call It “Drought”

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A reader familiar with my longstanding interest in how one defines “drought” sent along this interesting story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Federal Government-selected experts want people to start using the word “dryness” to describe Australia’s worst drought in a century.

The word “drought” makes farmers feel bad, says the Government’s hand-picked Drought Policy Review Expert Social Panel.

The politically-correct push also aims to make farmers accept that drier weather is here to stay, and is not a temporary crisis, the panel’s newly released report said.

I’ve not read the underlying report, but I suspect they’re on to something here. One of the problems with the use of the word “drought” to describe climatic conditions that are essentially the dry side of the normal range of variability is that it lets you off the hook. We see that here in the southwestern U.S. all the time. We take the wet side of the probability distribution in stride, not noticing the bounty, but then when we get to the dry side, we call it a “drought” and act all surprised.