Why don’t they redo the Colorado River Compact?

Posted by on

Koda, co-author with Bob Berrens and John Fleck, of the forthcoming book The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City, to be published as soon as we can write it and find a publisher.

My co-instructor Bob Berrens and I added a slide this morning to our welcome lecture for first-year students in the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, hoping to foreshadow two questions we’ll be asking the students over and over and over and over this semester:

Bob: That sounds great, how are you going to pay for it?

John: X sounds great, why don’t they just do X?

The welcome lecture includes all the usual “read the syllabus”, and “no this won’t be on the quiz, we don’t have quizzes”, and such, as we shove aside the bureaucratic detritus of academia so we can get down to the business of talking about water.

The headline for this year’s class (yes, I am an inkstained wretch, see blog title, our syllabus has a headline) sums up the dilemma:

There’s less water. What do we do?

There’s less water. What do we do?

It’s the ninth or tenth time we’ve taught the class together, depending on how you count, and we love doing it because we are good friends who have spent the better part of that decade talking about water in and out of class, we still don’t really understand all the things, and teaching helps us sort through our own confusions.

We have our lists of things we hope to share with the students – the challenge of market and non-market values of water, the strange land of municipal pricing, the even stranger land of agricultural water use in its many forms and flavors, the tools of water measurement, the wisdom of Elinor Ostrom and Ronald Coase in analyzing water governance structures, the story of the orange groves of Upland, California, where I grew up.

Through it all, as we’re building the scaffolding, we’re also asking the students to use that same scaffolding to begin to analyze a question. A month or so back, while walking with Bob’s dog Koda around Altura Park (which sits midway between our two houses), we settled on this year’s question.

There’s less water. What do we do?

As the reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams on the Colorado drop to record lows, as irrigators in central New Mexico struggle to water crops after an early start and early end to their irrigation seasons, as I spend countless hours with reporters from across the country looking for help understanding all of this, as my own river goes dry, it remains the central question. And I do not know the answer.

I’ve got some schtick involving case studies I’ve written over the years about successful conservation and collaborative water-sharing agreements, and about the importance of being attentive to science, however inconvenient. I will happily share all of this with our students over the coming semester. I really believe it, and I think it’s all important, and I feel so privileged that students want to sit and listen to me yammer on about it for hours on end!

But I’m mindful of Bob’s and my questions, which really are important – how are we going to pay for the things that need to be done, and why haven’t they been done already?

Let’s assess the farmers to to pay for it.

The point of Bob’s question is the more obvious – many solutions we might contemplate are costly, and understanding how we pay for them (or fail to come up with a mechanism to pay for them) are at the heart of many of our dilemmas. We need to think through these questions carefully. This is central to the new book Koda, Bob, and I are beginning to write. Bob’s insights about financing mechanisms are one of his most important gifts to my thinking.

Why don’t they build a pipeline/canal to the Mississippi?

My question – why don’t they do “X” – is more obscure, because in one common usage it isn’t really even meant as a question. Often, a person posing it really means “X should be done“. But I’ve found it incredibly useful, going back to a long career in journalism, to really try to pose it as a question – to really understand the reasons X has not been done.

In some cases, upon closer inspection, I find they haven’t done X because it’s a really bad idea for reasons I hadn’t thought through. In other cases, I find that X has costs, or downsides, that I hadn’t thought through. In other cases I find obstacles that, however good an idea X is, must be overcome.

Sometimes (see above), X hasn’t been done because we have no way to pay for it. I’m pretty sure it was Koda who pointed out that Bob’s question is really a particular case of my more general formulation.

I pretty much never find that they haven’t done X because it never occurred to them.

Darkness at the park

At Bob’s suggestion (I have found these to be useful), I was rereading this morning a 1959 essay by Charles Lindblom called “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’“. It provides a great framework to explain why, the more time I have spent in the study of water policy and governance, the less clear the answers have become.

Lindblom suggests that our desires for an omnisciently rational policy making process, while widely expected, is impossible – because of bounded rationality, and lack of clarity about how to weigh relative values (shared and unshared). So we end up muddling.

During the pandemic’s darkest last winter, Koda, Bob, and I were walking around the park in the cold dark of night. Halfway down the park’s north side, Koda alerted – there was something in the park. We couldn’t see it, but we have come to understand that Koda is far smarter than we.

I guess that’s my hope for the semester, that Bob and I might walk down the side of the darkened park and get some help from our students in seeing what is there.

The Magic of Radio

Posted by on

When I was a little kid, the Fleck family had a big box with a radio and a record player and speakers in the family room.

Radio was always magical to me, and when I was at my littlest I imagined a man inside the box, scrunched up and holding a guitar, talking and singing to us. I dreamed of becoming that man, and while I never did learn to play the guitar or scrunch down inside the radio box, I did launch my life as a communicator more than four decades ago by talking to people over the radio.

Live radio remains, for me, a great joy.

Tomorrow at 10-11 a.m. eastern time, 8 a.m. Albuquerque time (Aug. 25, 2021, remembering the permanence of this blog post) I’ll be live on NPR’s On Point out of WBUR in Boston talking about the Colorado River.

If you’re not in Boston, WBUR streams over the internet. It’ll be boxed up for later distribution as one of these newfangled podcast things so popular with kids today.

But I would be so very happy if you would join me live.

 

Sources of Controversy in the Law of the River – Larry MacDonnell

Posted by on

As we lumber toward a renegotiation of the operating rules on the Colorado River, one of the challenges folks in basin management face is the differing understandings of the Law of the River. There’s stuff we all know, or think we know, or stuff Lower Basin folks think they know that Upper Basin people may disagree with, and stuff Upper Basin folks think they know that Lower Basin people may disagree with.

Larry MacDonnell, one of the Law of the River’s great legal minds, has written a terrific treatise to help us untangle this. It’s clearly written from an Upper Basin perspective (“Yay!” said the guy – me – who drinks Upper Basin water!), so Lower Basin folks may disagree with some of what Larry is saying. That’s OK, the important thing is to understand that the answers to these questions are not given – that there are genuine disagreements on this stuff, and the negotiations to come need to wrestle with these questions.

A few of Larry’s key questions:

Uncertainties Concerning Mainstream Water Use Entitlements in the Lower Basin

The traditional understanding of fixed allocations to the three mainstream states in the Lower Basin must yield to the reality of a declining water supply.

In some sense, this is a “duh”. If the water isn’t there, it doesn’t matter how much water the Compact or the Boulder Canyon Project Act or whatever says you’re entitled to. But Larry is making a more nuanced argument about what the rules themselves say.

Uncertainties Respecting Uses of Water from Lower Basin Tributaries

This is an argument I’m increasingly hearing from Upper Basin folks. Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, made it forcefully in a webinar last week (starts around minute 12 in this recording). The current Colorado River accounting norms tend to ignore Arizona’s in-state use of the water from its Colorado River tributaries, but there’s a lot of water involved here. A million acre feet a year? Two million acre feet a year? We don’t know, because it’s not being accounted for right now.

Here’s Larry:

All beneficial consumptive uses of tributary water in the Lower Basin are
included within the Articles III (a) and (b) apportionment and need to be fully identified and accounted for annually. The effect of these uses on water availability in the main Colorado must be taken into account. Uses exceeding 8.5 maf/year may constitute a violation of the Law of the  River under certain circumstances such as if their existence causes a failure to meet treaty obligations with Mexico.

Uncertainties Respecting the Meaning of Article III (d) in an Era of Climate Change–Induced Water Shortages

Does the Upper Basin have a legal obligation to deliver 7.5 million acre feet a year past Lee Ferry? Or it, as my Upper Basin friends like to say “a non-depletion” obligation. What if it’s climate change that’s depleting the water rather than the diversions to my tap to bring me all that sweet, sweet San Juan-Chama drinking water?

How much is the Upper Basin on the hook for meeting our delivery obligations to Mexico?

The traditional view that the Upper Basin has an obligation to provide 750,000 acre–feet per year to meet the Treaty obligation to Mexico needs to be reconsidered when Lower Basin uses exceed 8.5 maf/year, when Mexico adjusts its delivery requirements to reflect shortages, and in view of the fact that, in some manner, the treaty water is a national obligation.

There’s a lot more, river nerds should really read the whole thing, and as I said there will be smart Lower Basin people who will be happy to explain “Nothing to see here, move along.” But these ambiguities in the Law of the River have to be part of what we sort out in the upcoming negotiations.

“We can’t have land back without water back.” – Julia Bernal

Posted by on

Via Laura Gersony at Circle of Blue, a look at the work of Julia Bernal, leader of the Pueblo Action Alliance and a really interesting thinker on land and water here in the Southwest:

She is an advocate of the Land Back movement, which calls on the U.S. government to allow Indigenous people to continue stewarding the lands as they did before colonization. And in the American Southwest, she has taken up a new refrain: that “we can’t have land back without water back.”

Julia’s also a student in the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program.

Cold Facts … and Death

Posted by on

Cold Facts and Death – Arizona Republic, Jan. 15, 1949

I ran across this Arizona Republic cartoon some years ago while working on my book Water is For Fighting Over etc. I found it in a 1985 book by Frank Welsh called How to Create a Water Crisis. It reared its head this week as I’m working with some colleagues on some stuff about Arizona and the Colorado River. I had not realized until one of said colleagues traced it back to the original that it was part of a paid advertisement, sponsored by Southwestern Sash & Door Co. of Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Albuquerque.

This suggests that a lack of water is bad for the sash and door business.

Albuquerque’s Rio Grande Oxbow

Posted by on

Albuquerque’s Rio Grande Oxbow, July 2021

Mary Harner and I tagged along yesterday morning out in the Rio Grande Oxbow with Wes Noe, a UNM Water Resources Program/Community and Regional Planning student who is doing his masters project at field sites there.

Mary Harner and Wes Noe on the Rio Grande at the Oxbow, July 2021

Loyal readers will remember remember my travels with Mary, a University of Nebraska colleague studying the Rio Grande.

Wes is a masters student in our WRP/CRP dual degree program, drawn to the Oxbow as a study site because of its fascinating linkages between the riparian ecosystem and human communities on the bluffs above. Neighbors banded together to preserve some open space surrounding it, and Wes is connecting that political and community process with years of intermittent scientific study of the Oxbow itself.

Now that Wes has a permit to work at the site, Mary and I asked to tag along on a field visit. He’s doing return sampling at sites that were studied a number of years ago, looking at bugs and measuring depth to groundwater, looking for changes over time, and variations among the sites.

The Oxbow is an amazing outlier in the Albuquerque Rio Grande riparian system. At ~50 acres (~20 hectares), it’s the only river-connected wetland in this stretch of the river.  A fragment of old river stranded, it was stranded by water managers in the 1950s who, desperate to more efficiently more water for human use, dug the channel that you see in the picture of Mary and Wes above. It’s fascinating to me that what passes here for the “natural” river channel is in fact an engineered system. But then, I guess, the whole system is engineered at this point, for better or worse.

Surrounded by bluffs and relatively inaccessible, the Oxbow has oddly thrived, though as a particularly novel ecosystem. I’ve poked around its edges for years, but thanks to Wes’s permits and wayfinding skills (and his cheerful curiosity – best part about students!) Mary and I were able to get into its interior yesterday for the first time.

A remarkable wilderness pocket right in the middle of the city.

 

New Mexico’s Rio Grande, bailed out by an impressive monsoon

Posted by on

Rio Grande at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue Bridge, 8 a.m. July 28, 2021

A robust July monsoon has allayed our worst fears about central New Mexico’s Rio Grande.

Is it really a “monsoon”?

Back in the days when my paid gig was writing newspaper stories, I loved writing about the monsoon, and every time I did I would get helpful feedback from readers anxious to explain that I was a doofus and didn’t know what I was talking about, a monsoon, no way!

While they may have been right about the doofus part, with respect to the monsoon part, yes way.

Here’s Ben Cook and Richard Seager by way of explanation:

The North American Monsoon (NAM) may be a poor relation of the majestic Asian monsoon but is nonetheless a real monsoon that provides important rainfall to Central America, Mexico and the interior parts of the southwestern U.S. (primarily Arizona and New Mexico). In Mexico and Central America the NAM is critical for water supply and agriculture since winter precipitation in these regions is so small. In the southwest U.S. winter precipitation, arriving at a time of low evapotranspiration, is critical to water supply but the NAM precipitation remains important for soil and groundwater recharge, ecosystems, rainfed and rangeland farming and for fire.

How has this year’s monsoon helped central New Mexico’s Rio Grande?

When last we visited on this topic two weeks ago, I’d just completed a swift bike ride to watch the river dry. Since then, we’ve had two weeks of wet.

Rio Grande flows since mid-July 2021, via USGS

 

Each one of those little spikes represents runoff from a rain event somewhere in the watershed between the Central Avenue Bridge in Albuquerque and Cochiti Dam to the north. Our monsoon’s spotty that way – the “official” Albuquerque rain gauge at the airport has recorded just a third of an inch of rain during that time. But every couple of days it’s rained somewhere in the watershed feeding the river – sometimes a lot.

(It has been accompanied by tragedy. People with no home of their own often take up residence in Albuquerque’s flood control system. Three people died last week in one flash flood – see Elise Kaplan’s thoughtful effort to memorialize them. Our flood control infrastructure is great at protecting our city, but it has this dark side.)

The latest I have heard in conversation with water management folks is that the rains may have bailed us out of the river drying in the Albuquerque reach – we’re at this point unlikely to be writing about “the first time the Rio Grande has dried through Albuquerque since 1983”, which many of us have been doing.

But what about Elephant Butte?

The good news is that a lot of this monsoon water – flowing past Albuquerque and contributed by arroyos downstream – is making it to Elephant Butte Reservoir, which provides storage for downstream users in southern New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico.

The bad news is that Elephant Butte is really, really big, and really, really empty, and the monsoon inflows are tiny compared with what we need, which is a big winter->spring snowmelt.

A month ago, modelers at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were projecting Elephant Butte would bottom out at about 10,000 acre feet of storage in early August. It’s a 2 million acre foot reservoir. That’s just a half a percent full. That would have been the lowest since August 1954.

Updated model runs, incorporating the burst of monsoon moisture, now suggest Elephant Butte will bottom out at around 60,000 acre feet of storage sometime in the first part of August. That’s still just a hair above 1 3 percent full, which illustrates a central feature of the monsoon’s role in Rio Grande water supply: Compared to winter snowpack, monsoon rains’ contributions are tiny, only playing a minor role.

But coming at the right time, they nevertheless matter.

(Huge thanks to Carolyn Donnelly and Mary Carlson at the Bureau of Reclamation for modeling run data and helpful explanations. Tons of data in the  right hand rail here.)

Most Albuquerque: Green Chile in the Bike Lane

Posted by on

Green chile in the eastbound bike lane, Route 66 bridge over the Rio Grande, Albuquerque, New Mexico, July 28, 2021

A most Albuquerque summer morning for a bike ride:

  • Muggy monsoon dewpoint
  • Muddy storm-fed Rio Grande
  • The smell of green chiles roasting, early, in the El Super parking lot
  • This lone green chile in the eastbound bike lane over the Rio Grande

Is the Colorado River “Stress Test” stressful enough?

Posted by on

By Brad Udall and John Fleck

Earlier this year, we argued in a Science magazine editorial that Colorado River forecasting must take the growing risk of climate change seriously. The latest five-year projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation offer a practical example of the challenge.

Published July 8 (see here and here) with an accompanying news release, the projections suggested that if the trends of the last 30-plus years continues, there is a 79 percent chance that Lake Powell could drop next year below elevation 3,525 – a danger zone for managing power production and releases to the Lower Basin going forward. With the reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams expected to drop below 30% by early 2022, these projections take on a new importance — we no longer have a huge water buffer to protect us from future low flow years.

It is stark news. But perhaps not stark enough.

This forecast takes advantage of an important new tool Reclamation has invested in called the “Stress Test” to give us a sense of the future risks we face.

The Stress test goes beyond the old “the future will be like the past” scenario building we have used in the past on the Colorado River. This new tool takes an important step toward incorporating climate change. But we are concerned that it doesn’t go far enough.

The five-year projections come in two flavors. One, “the future will be like the past,” uses the historical hydrology since 1906 with a mean flow of 14.8 maf. In a stationary climate, this hydrology would be fine. But the climate is not stationary, and the only real use for this hydrology is to see just what we’ve lost as climate change saps the river, not what the future might hold.

The alternative ‘Stress Test’ hydrology uses the period from 1988 to 2019 with an annual flow of 13.3 maf. While more reflective of current conditions than the full hydrology, these flows also do not reflect the past 22 years with its annual runoff of 12.4 maf.  When river managers first began using it, the “Stress Test” marked an important step toward taking climate change seriously. But these flows are no longer what they purport to be.

What we really need, and what we argued for in our Science editorial, is a ‘reasonable worst case future’.  This is the future that a prudent person would plan against, knowing what we currently know.

The last 22 years are the best analog for our 5-year future.  And within those 22 years one period stands out as the worst, the period from 2000-2004.  These years averaged 9.4 maf, and during that time Powell and Mead lost ~25 maf.   This period is what a prudent person would pick as a reasonable worst case — it happened before and it can happen again. In fact, the extreme dry of 2020 and 2021 suggests it may be happening now.

It would be interesting to see how Reclamation’s model performs against 2000-2004 and also against 2000-2021.

Within the Colorado River management community, there are questions about these modeling exercises on the demand side as well. Are water uses across the basin overstated? Might that at least partially offset overly optimistic supply estimates?

Pat Mulroy, after being burned by false probabilities, famously said that as a water manager she was only interested in possibilities, not probabilities.  The hydrology from 2000-2004 is a possibility. Let’s learn the lessons it holds.

 

Walking and chewing gum: mixing crisis narratives and messages of optimism

Posted by on

Not gonna lie – watching Colorado River reservoirs decline so precipitously has been painful.

But it is important to cultivate optimism, and there is, in fact, reason to be hopeful about our ability to deal with the challenges. That’s the message the University of Arizona’s Bonnie Colby and I shared in a recent conversation with Sarah Bardeen at the Public Policy Institute of California:

Bonnie Colby: Everybody knows we’re moving into a serious situation. State and federal officials have been tracking reservoirs and groundwater levels, and tribal nations are involved in a way that they never have been before. That’s much needed, from a social justice perspective, and because they’re holders of the most senior rights in the system. In Southern California, 20 years ago, all the water users were much more likely to lean on their legal entitlements and litigation. We see much more flexibility nowadays—there’s been big progress.