Pat Mulroy and the Problem of Western Water

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Pat Mulroy is one of the most interesting people in Western Water right now. As the General Manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, she’s the one responsible for getting Las Vegas the water it needs. Or, more precisely, the water it says it thinks it needs. Michael Campana had an interesting comment recently, though, about the fundamental disconnect that lies at the heart of Mulroy’s job:

Many people demonize Pat Mulroy. The fact is, she does her job extremely well – too well for some. Land use ultimately drives water use, and she does not make land-use policy; the politicians do. But as long as the elected officials in southern Nevada buy into growth and more growth, she will find the water.

You see this disconnect over and over across the West – water managers bound and determined to get the water their growing communities need, without a mechanism for feedback in the system. There eventually will, of course, be a mechanism for feedback (let’s call it the Barnett Feedback Loop), it’s just a question of how ugly it will be be.

Is The “Global Warming” Really A Secret US Military Project?

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From Danger Room:

“Weather modification was used successfully in Viet Nam to (among other things) hinder and impede the movement of personnel and material from North Viet Nam to South Viet Nam,” notes a Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division – China Lake research proposal, released last month through the Freedom of Information Act.  But “since that time military research on Weather Modification has dwindled in the United States.”

Yeah, “dwindled.” That’s what they want you to believe, isn’t it?

The Prerogatives of the Yellow Jersey

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A friend was riding up Albuquerque’s long Tramway Hill Sunday when he was passed by a lone rider on a time trial bike in full Team Astana kit. Astana, current home of last year’s Tour de France winner Alberto Contador, had been training in Albuquerque. We thought they had gone, but Contador was apparently still in town Sunday.

Tramway is a great training ride, a long sustained climb, not terribly steep. It has big wide shoulders, which is where we ride, leaving plenty of room for the cars. But not Contador. He was out in the lane, my friend noted, making the cars go around him.

The yellow jersey carries with it certain prerogatives.

Congestion Costs

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An interesting post from last month on those hidden costs and benefits of higher gas prices. Turns out, according to some smarty-pants economists, that if the price of gasoline goes up (if, for example, we impose a gas tax), people carpool and ride the bus more, resulting in less congestion and therefore net time savings for the people on the highway. But ah, for the poor slobs who switched to the bus?

Note that while the time-savings compensates those who continue to drive, those who switch transit modes may have reduced welfare.

(Note that I quote here because I love the smarty-pants economists’ way of talking. Reduced welfare. I just love that turn of phrase. It disguises so much.)

Water Wars

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We here in the West tend to think parochially about our water wars, as if we’re all six guns throwing down at the OK corral over whether the humble sheepherders or the evil cattle barons control the creek – as if no one knows water fights like us grizzled Westerners. But right now it looks like we’ve got nothin’ on the good ol’ boys down south:

Georgia lost a major court fight in the Southern battle over water rights on Tuesday when a federal appellate-court panel said the state could not withdraw as much water as it had planned from an Atlanta-area reservoir.

The victory went to Alabama and Florida, which had contended that Georgia’s plan would siphon off water that should flow downstream to their consumers. The two states had brought the appellate suit to undo an agreement between Georgia and the Army Corps of Engineers that would have given Georgia rights to use nearly a quarter of the water in Lake Sidney Lanier, which supplies drinking water to much of northern Georgia.

The reality is that we started with the idea of scarcity, and all of the fights (lawyerly and otherwise) have left us with a much more well-developed set of institutional structures for handling water fights. Down south, they seem to be newer to this Wild West water scarcity idea.

(Hat tip Belshaw)

Inkstain Yard Sign Survey

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I conducted the latest edition of my heralded Inkstain Yard Sign Survey this afternoon. The survey area this year is the two neighborhoods I happened to wander through on the last leg of my bicycle ride, shortly after the thought occurred to me. Actually, the idea occurred to me early in the ride, when I rode past the big Obama sign on Indian School Rd. near the golf course, but I didn’t count that one because it didn’t fit into my rigorous methodology, as described below. Plus, I forgot to look for more signs until later.

First, the demographics. Neighborhood one is sorta lower middle class. Neighborhood two is sorta upper middle class. The total length of neighborhood streets ridden is a mile, or maybe two. I counted every yard sign I happened to notice, and occasionally looked down side streets. The results:

  • two people want me to vote for Hillary Clinton
  • one person wants me to vote for Barack Obama
  • six people want me to buy their house*

From this data set, I conclude two things

  1. The turnout for Tuesday’s New Mexico primary/caucus thing will be extremely low.
  2. The housing market is an important issue.

* This does not include the two “open house” signs attempting to lure me off of my carefully chosen route to see houses for sale elsewhere. But I do find their presence significance. I mean, who holds an open house on Super Bowl Sunday? These people are desperate to sell.

Alfalfa

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The inimitable Coco weighs in on the problem of agriculture in the desert:

Just how ill-suited desert communities are to agriculture in general depends entirely on the location of the desert community. The short view prevails. It says agriculture isn’t profitable on a small scale. We don’t have enough of it to matter anymore. And besides, this is a desert.

But the long view is useful. Agriculture has been practiced in the Middle Rio Grande for around a thousand years. The pueblo people built small dams and irrigation ditches on the valley floor before the Spanish. They also terraced the mesa to capture the intermittent stream flows for crops planted along modern day Coors Boulevard. Pumping an aquifer for pivot irrigation in west Texas is qualitatively different than gravity fed irrigated agriculture in this valley.

 

Global Warming and Football

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Environment America is raising serious and important questions about the elephant in the room – the impact of global warming no one wants to talk about:

National trends from recent seasons suggest that a home field advantage for cold weather teams over their warm weather rivals may truly exist.  Environment America pointed to the National Football League’s 14 cold weather teams having won 65 percent of their home games played after Halloween against warm weather teams from 1998 through 2005.

Unfortunately for the fans of these cold weather teams, winter temperatures are on the rise in cold weather teams’ cities across the country, potentially threatening the home field advantage that these teams have historically enjoyed.  Specifically, Environment America compared the average temperatures in 14 cold weather teams’ cities for the last seven football seasons to the average temperatures measured in those cities from 1971-2000.  In just the last seven years, the cities’ average temperatures from November through January have risen significantly.

Have you heard anyone ask the presidential candidates about this? No. Is it, perhaps, because the television networks broadcasting the presidential debates have a vested interest in the lucrative football franchise? Why is no one talking about this?

But the problem is far more serious than even Environment America is willing to admit. Given the global warming already in the pipeline, even if we rapidly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, football as we know it may be doomed. Like much of the global warming debate, I fear that Environment America is afraid to tackle the serious question of adaptation. Football teams in our northern climes must adapt to the inevitable. This is not an argument for sidestepping the hard challenge of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. American football (the kind with the pointy ball that bounces funny) is far too important for that. But we must recognize that no matter how much we reduce our Sunday driving to the in-laws’ house to watch the big game, adaptation will be critical if American football as we know it is to survive.

I recommend a Manhattan Project-style effort to develop giant air conditioning units. The model is already there among those facing the difficult challenge of playing baseball in the summer in the desert southwest. But this challenge is far greater. These air conditioning units need to be really, really big.

We must act now, before it is too late.

(HT Environmental Capital)

Bitter Fruit

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I am frankly one of those who has celebrated higher oil prices, getting a quiet smile as I see the sign at the corner gas station hit $3 a gallon. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking this through, as Keith Johnson suggests:

What’s most striking is the bitter irony. Many proponents of alternative energy have long cheered for high oil prices. The more expensive oil is, the theory goes, the more incentive there is to move to other energy sources. The Anything But Oil mantra assumed the Anything has got to be cleaner than burning hydrocarbons.

And what happened? High oil prices made hard-to-recover fossil fuels—not just cleaner alternatives—an economic possibility. And the hard-to-recover fossil fuels are even dirtier than Middle East sweet crude.