From today’s Judge Parker, it looks like Sophie’s on to something big:
“A company in Nevada has been slowly buying agricultural property all over the West!”
“So?”
“They’re buying the property to gain access to the water underneath!”
Smart girl. This sounds like trouble. (Hat tip Kelsey.)
Went back to the full text in my RSS feed. Sorry for the delay, Luis. I just forgot.
There’s an interesting framing thing going on here in New Mexico around the Fiscal Year 2008 budget. The House of Representatives is pushing some relatively deep cuts in the nuclear weapons research, development, manufacturing etc. budget. For those not familiar with New Mexico, we’re home to two large nuclear weapons labs. Those cuts would effect a significant number of jobs. That’s been the main frame around this issue, and it is a legitimate frame. But there are also substantive policy questions at stake. One is the question of where and how to manufacture new nukes. In Saturday’s story, I wrote a story that featured that frame:
Should Los Alamos National Laboratory someday become the nation’s “permanent” plutonium bomb manufacturing center?
That is one of the major policy questions behind the fight currently under way in Congress over the lab’s budget.
This is a great practical example, I think, of framing. Both frames are accurate. Both raise legitimate issues. One’s been getting all the attention, and I just felt as though it was important to offer up the other.
Further reading:
Staci Matlock has a good story in this morning’s Santa Fe New Mexican outlining the regulatory dilemma facing New Mexico related to Sandoval County’s hunt for brackish water for desalination:
This new, deep source of water poses a regulatory challenge to the state engineer, who is charged with overseeing New Mexico’s increasingly precious water resources. Under current law, brackish water found at least 2,500 feet below the ground — and proven unconnected to upper aquifers bearing potable water — can be pumped without a permit from the state engineer.
The kicker at the end of Staci’s story nails down the fundamental problem – if the water is truly disconnected from surface water, that means that, by definition, it’s going to run out:
To avoid having to apply for a state permit, Sandoval County and Rio West must prove that the deep aquifers they tap into won’t impact any of the potable aquifers closer to the surface.
Just in case, though, the county agreed with Rio West that after 20 years of pumping, Sandoval County would be responsible for finding a renewable water source for the Rio Puerco, Springfield said.
The agreement points to a long-term dilemma for anyone looking to deep aquifers as a new source of water: If the deep aquifer is disconnected from any renewable supply, eventually the water will run out. Then the water for developments like Rio West will have to come from somewhere else.
If drawing water from the deep aquifer does impact upper aquifers, developers of big projects like Rio West face the same prospect as other developers: Fighting farmers, environmentalists and other communities for the right to pump.
Further Reading:
One of my great frustrations as a science journalist covering environmental controversies is that they are often driven not by risks themselves, but by the entities that cause them. Thus, for example, an environmental risk caused by us – the hazardous wastes we through out in our own trash, which ends up at a municipal landfill – does not receive the same institutional attention from environmental groups and therefore from government institutions as equivalent amounts of hazardous wastes disposed of by an evil actor – Acme Mining, to make up a phony example. Even if the risk from the trash out of our own garage is demonstrably greater, Acme gets all of the attention because they’re evil.
That problem came to mind as I read a story from Friday’s Los Angeles Times (hat tip Aquafornia) about how remarkably free of pestilence LA’s beaches are this year because of the drought. There’s been no rain washing over the cities and flushing all that dog poop and stuff that leaks out of our cars and off of our chemically treated lawns into the sea:
Heal the Bay officials attributed the improvement primarily to a lack of urban storm runoff, a major source of pollution.
A remarkable story out of Alabama, where Alexander City seems to be quite literally running out of water:
“The water is so low the pumps are shutting down on us,” said Eugene Mahan, superintendent of water treatment for the system, which provides drinking water to about 50,000 to 60,000 people in east central Alabama, including to about 15,100 residents of Alexander City.
“This is not just about recreation, it’s not about washing cars, this is drinking water,” Mayor Barbara Young said. “We’ve got to have some rain.”
The area it’s located is in the southeastern drought bullseye. They’re in remarkably bad shape down there.
I swear to god. I am not making this up. That’s Rob Browman on the left, who founded Inkstain with me back in 1998. Winning an Emmy. I swear to god.
Rob’s a video producer now at MediaStorm. He and his colleagues won the Emmy for a remarkable piece about a young man’s emigration from Cameroon to France.
But the question “Has man inadvertently changed the global climate, or is he about to do so?” is quite legitimate. It has been widely discussed publicly – unfortunately with more zeal than insight. Like so many technical questions fought out in the forum of popular magazines and the daily press, the debate has been characterized by misunderstandings, exaggerations, and distortions.
Helmut Landsberg, Science, 18 December 1970
Been said before, but bears repeating: Tom Swetnam’s Senate testimony Monday:
Global warming is making Western wildfires worse, a top fire expert told members of the U.S. Senate on Monday.
Combined with a century of firefighting that has left some forests choked and overgrown, along with people building more and more communities at the forests’ edge, the problems “are coming together in a perfect firestorm,” said Tom Swetnam, head of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Swetnam testified Monday before Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and the other members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
The highest mountain “tundra” terrains of the Western United States are disappearing because of warming temperatures, according to a new paper by Henry Diaz and Jon Eischeid:
In the last 20 years (1987–2006), rising temperatures have caused a significant fraction of these areas to exceed the 10°C threshold for alpine tundra classification. The result has been a 73% reduction in coverage of this climatic type. The remaining classified alpine tundra in the last 20 years now averages between ?9°C–10°C during the warmest month, so that continued warming past the classification threshold, would imply that areas where this climate type is found today in the West will no longer be present.