The Colorado River and the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons

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Some notes on the current state of the Colorado River…

I’m preparing for a panel discussion this evening in Albuquerque. I promised – three-finger promise, Scout’s honor, which still means something to me – that I wouldn’t use any swear words., either in the blog post or the panel discussion.

The state of the water

  • Per the latest numbers from my colleague/collaborator/friend Jack Schmidt, Lake Powell currently holds 1.57 million acre feet of water above the protect-the-infrastructure no-go line of elevation 3,500.
  • Storage at this point in the year is similar to 2022, when we began a hair-about-to-be-on-fire drill as Interior raced to figure out how to protect Glen Canyon Dam because of newly understood (or newly publicly understood) risks of dropping below minimum power pool and using the dam’s outlook works. That constraint still holds.
  • The forecast this year is a catastrophe compared to 2022: 1.75 million acre feet for the 2026 runoff season, compared to 3.8 maf in the 2022 runoff season.
  • The result, according to the most probable forecast from Reclamation, is that absent some sort of action (see governance below) Powell will drop below 3,500 in September, and stay that way until the spring runoff in 2027.
  • According to the min probable forecast, which is realistic given the looming heat-pocalypse, we hit 3,500 by July and stay there forever (by which I mean as far as the current 24-month forecast runs – as the late Jim Morison wrote, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near).

The state of the governance

The state of the governance nests two separate by closely linked problems: near term actions and long term rules.

Near term actions

Protecting Glen Canyon Dam from that 3,500 no-go line requires coming up with a least 2 million acre feet of water over the next two years – to get us past that spring 2027 problem described above. There are two ways to do this. The first is to release a bunch of water from upstream, primarily Flaming Gorge Reservoir. How much? Dunno. The second is to cut releases from Glen Canyon Dam, reducing flows through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. How much? Dunno, though we may find out soon.

The current rules, adopted in response to the challenges of 2022-23, allows releases from Glen Canyon Dam to drop this year to 6 million acre feet, which effectively gets 1.5 million of the needed 2 million feet from Lake Mead by reducing releases thereto. Another 500,000 in releases from upstream reservoir gets you 2 million acre feet, with room to do more if the hydrology gets even worse – which it might.

Longer term actions

The longer term stuff is where, as a student of governance, this gets really interesting for me. As a citizen of the basin, I am inclined to swear words at the dysfunction that has left us with no long term plan beyond the end of this year. But I Scout’s honor promised, so shifting to the “student of governance” schtick gives me a view from nowhere way to approach this dispassionately, without the, y’know, words that would have made Mr. Vinatieri, my Scoutmaster, disappointed in me.

Others have chronicled the failure of the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states to come to a consensus agreement on a set of river operating rules, we need not repeat that here, other than to note that what we have here is a classic case of what has been called the tragedy of the anticommons. This is a situation where many people or entities – in this case the states of the Colorado River Basin – each have the power to block a solution that might be to the benefit of the community as a whole. In this case, each of the seven states of the Colorado River Basin have blocking power over solutions that would prevent the reservoirs from crashing.

See above: the reservoirs are crashing and we have no plan to prevent it because any proposal that might prevent it has been blocked by one or more states that object.

The reason behind this is a set of rules written beginning in the 1920s governing the river – the Colorado River Compact and a series of ad hoc additions that followed – that attempted to lay out rules for managing the river but failed to include functional processes for modifying the rules when they proved inadequate to changing the situation. We’re now stuck with a system under which each of the seven basin states has blocking power over any attempt to change the rules.

This violates one of the fundamental institutional design principles identified by the late Elinor Ostrom, who taught us so much about how we succeed or fail in overcoming the tragedy of the commons: “How will the rules … be changed over time with changes in the performance of the resource system, the strategies of participants, and external opportunities and constraints?” We have to have rules about how we rewrite the rules. We lack that.

Despite this, we have succeeded in the past, in a series of rule-writing exercises that began in the late 1990s, by depending on principled actors at the state level recognizing that they needed to balance their need to protect their own community’s water supplies against the need to solve problems at the scale of the basin as a whole.

My personal values on this question are both instrumental (things that I think are in the best interests of myself and my community) and deontological (things that I think are fundamental moral principles). The second first: I think we have ethical obligations to those upstream and downstream of us in shared river basins. This is, for me, fundamental. The second is instrumental – I think compromise is in the best interests of my community’s water supply and therefore its future, because if we end up in litigation and the system crashes, we stand to lose a lot more than if we compromise, are willing to act on our obligations to our downstream neighbors by using less ourselves.

The last two years of increasingly hostile negotiations among the states make clear that behavior that recognizes those principles is gone, replaced by interpersonal bickering and a game of chicken driving the basin toward litigation (effectively hoping to manage the basin by convincing a judge of our preferred interpretation of ambiguous rules written a century ago) and reservoir collapse.

Thar be dragons.

“It is as dry as it has ever been.”

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Update: Apologies to Norm Gaume and the Water Advocates for screwing up the link to the original quoted piece, which is shared here via Creative Commons copyright [CC BY SA].

Original post:

Terrific visualizations from the Water Advocates of the state of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande:

Graph showing declining Rio Grande flows at Otowi over the last half century

Screenshot

Water Demands and the Effective Water Supply Stress Are Now Far Greater

Groundwater pumping from aquifers hydraulically connected to the Rio Grande exerts a persistent depletive effect on surface flows that was much lower during the 1948–1964 drought — making the effective water-supply stress today far greater than the raw Otowi flow numbers suggest. During 1948–1964, the Middle Rio Grande corridor had far fewer people and cities were much smaller: Albuquerque’s population in 1950 was roughly 97,000; today the metropolitan area exceeds 900,000. Municipal, industrial, agricultural, and riparian water demand is dramatically greater today. Decades of heavy withdrawals from both the alluvial aquifer and the underlying Santa Fe Group aquifer have drawn down water tables throughout the Middle Rio Grande Valley.

Full post.

Quoting Jeff Kightlinger and Jim Lochhead

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As the former CEOs of two of the largest water utilities using water from the Colorado River, we have been deeply engaged in interstate and federal negotiations on the river for over 30 years. Those negotiations were tough, but the basin states ultimately reached agreement, including reducing California’s use of water by 800,000 acre-feet and adopting the current set of operating rules for the federal reservoirs.

Although we fought hard to protect our individual interests, we understood that the public interest is not always served by “winner-take-all” negotiating tactics. Agreements benefiting the river as a whole also benefit every individual water user, and the environment. We recognized the responsibility of the states, tribal nations, water users and conservation organizations in the basin to determine our own future, and not to have it dictated by interstate litigation or federally mandated solutions.

The clock is running out. Unfortunately, the current negotiations remain stuck, characterized by brinksmanship and talking points.

– Jeff Kightlinger, former head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Jim Lochhead, for head of Colorado Department of Natural Resources and Denver Water

In which my colleagues and I share thoughts on the future of Colorado River governance

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It is hard to know where to begin. The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River draft environmental impact statement, and the deep questions it raises, is an “everything including the kitchen sink” sort of process.

But at its root, the question it raises is simple: Tell us what you’re going to do.

It is easiest to quote the Draft EIS itself on the central question: “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” Roger that. Tell us what you’re going to do.

In the short run, with a meager snowpack and no clear explanation of how federal and state managers are going to operate the reservoir system, the basin’s dams and diversions now, we have no clear picture of what will happen in 2026. Tell us what you’re going to do.

Some specifics

The ad-hoc collective that Allen Best dubbed “the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River” – Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, Rin Tara, and me – took yet another stab at offering our suggestions in comments we submitted yesterday to Interior’s P26 EIS process.

I’ve been mentally largely elsewhere lately, finishing up the book and managing my health (I’m doing great! Thanks for asking!), so I mostly show up at the last minute on these things to dub my vocals, but my friends are very kind and inclusive, and they do good work. In particular, stuff like this full of both useful NEPA-speak and also substance:

The analyzed alternatives do not meet the purpose and need of the proposed federal action. “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” Therefore, the alternatives analyzed do not meet the purpose and need for the federal action as described in the DEIS. It is incumbent on Reclamation and Interior to provide at least one alternative that meets the purpose and need.

As I said: Tell us what you’re going to do.

The Final EIS and Record of Decision must specify how short-term operations will address the current vulnerability of the system and its critical infrastructure. The new operating regime for the Colorado River will be implemented at a time of unusually low storage volumes and unprecedented low flows. The vulnerability of the system in providing an adequate water supply is unprecedented. Regardless of the duration of the next set of guidelines, it is imperative that Reclamation provide a clear picture of what actions will be implemented in the near term (i.e., next year, next 3 years, next 5 years) to protect critical infrastructure, and to protect public health and safety.

As I said: Tell us what you’re going to do.

The preferred alternative should be based on the broadest possible interpretation of federal authority to ensure a sustainable water supply provided by the river. The DEIS states that, “The Basic Coordination Alternative is designed to be implementable without agreements among Basin water users regarding distributions of lower Colorado River mainstream shortages, storage and delivery of conserved water from system reservoirs, or other voluntary agreements….” Because the Basic Coordination alternative does not meet key performance objectives for a large percentage of the Dry and Critically Dry futures, it is incumbent on the Agency to explore and propose using the outer limits of their authority to achieve a system that provides a sustainable water supply. Reclamation and Interior should not default to a “safe” legal approach when those operations are insufficient to balance supply and demand and provide a prudent operating regime. Lawsuits over the operating guidelines adopted by the Department of the Interior are inevitable, regardless of which alternative is adopted, even a theoretically “safe” one. Therefore, the preferred alternative should utilize the broadest possible interpretation of Reclamation’s and Interior’s authority to provide a predictable and resilient Colorado River so that the system can continue to operate in a reasonable manner while the lawsuits proceed.

This one’s on you, Secretary Burgum. We do offer suggestions, but if you don’t like ours, then tell us your alternative: Tell us what you’re going to do.

This one has seemed for a long time like a no-brainer to me:

The Upper Basin demand scenarios utilized in the modeling are unrealistically high.… [T]he Upper Basin demand scenario utilized in modeling the impacts of the various alternatives is much higher than historical use and does not reflect likely future actual use. The 2016 UCRC demand scenario embedded in the DEIS modeling is approximately 40% to 50% higher than recent average demand. Public statements by representatives of the Upper Division states emphasize the limitations imposed on Upper Basin water users by annual hydrology, but the UCRC demand scenario fails to take those hydrologic limits into account.

Graph comparing Upper Colorado River demand projections with reality, showing they are unrealistically higher.

Really?

This one’s on my Upper Basin leaders: Really?

Reclamation should specifically identify what additional authority is needed to implement an operating regime that meets the purpose and need for the EIS over the long term. There are no alternatives identified in the DEIS that meet the purpose and need and that Reclamation can implement without additional legal authority. This creates significant uncertainty around river management, despite the intended purpose of providing water users a greater degree of predictability about water availability in the future. Reclamation should describe specifically what additional legal authorities it believes would be required to implement desired operating provisions. Furthermore, Reclamation has indicated the intention to “seek additional authorities” to protect critical reservoir infrastructure. These additional authorities should be explained.

Again, Secretary Burgum: Tell us what you’re going to do.

The colossal failure of the Colorado River Basin leadership is on display in this simple sentence from the draft EIS: “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.”

You’ve spent the last few years telling us what you can’t do. It’s on you now: Tell us what you’re going to do.

(Lots more in the full comments, it’s a useful primer on the current state of play.)

Pitchers and catchers report

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A black and white picture of the outside of a stadium with the sign "Tingley Field" and a man throwing a baseball

Tingley Field, courtesy Albuquerque Museum

The best Albuquerque baseball stories I heard are both about Willie Mays.

The first is that time at the old Tingley Field where, as a friend put it, “Willie Mays once broke a lady’s car windshield with a foul ball.” We’ll have to take my friend’s word for this, but he says he straight up heard it from a guy who was there.

The likely date was a spring exhibition game April 2, 1956, the New York Giants against the Cleveland Indians. The Giants won 7-6; Mays went 0-for-4 (we know from the Albuquerque Journal’s story that he drove in a run on a ground ball, RBI’s weren’t standard in box scores back then). There is no mention of the foul ball incident in the newspaper accounts, but why would there be? My friend straight up heard it from a guy who was there, which is good enough for me.

Tingley Field

Fence around baseball field with sign reading "No dogs on field, no kids in dugout".

No dogs on the field. Tingley Field circa 2026, Albuquerque, New Mexico

The inspiration for today’s bike ride was the start of major league spring training – pitchers and catchers reported to their Cactus League and Grapefruit League camps in Florida and Arizona.

We started the tour at the site of the old Tingley Field, home of the minor league Albuquerque Dukes from 1946 to 1968. The old stadium is long gone, replaced by a nice new stadium up the hill, then another nice newer stadium up the hill (another Willie Mays story there, hold on) now home to a team named after a joke from The Simpsons. (I guess all baseball history is storied, I sure like ours.)

Tingley Field today is a city park with a couple of softball fields, set below grade so it can double as a flood control retention basin, with a big drain in one corner out beyond the right field fence.

From there, we just hopscotched around town from ballfield to ballfield – some high school, some little league. We finally found an actual game of baseball being played at the UNM Lobos’ field, but it had that annoying metal bat sound, so we didn’t stay long. I’d tried to make a map of ballfields. It was a pretty lazy effort, both on my part, and on the part of the technology I was using, but it didn’t really matter. As we wandered the city, we realized there are ballfields everywhere, necessary urban infrastructure I suppose.

The other Willie Mays story

Bicycle parked next to large lopsided baseball sculpture in front of modern baseball stadium.

Sometimes we also call it “The Lab.”

The final stop was the big lopsided baseball in front of what we insist on calling “Duke Stadium,” despite the best efforts of the municipal and corporate overlords who would prefer we call it “Rio Grande Credit Union Field at Isotopes Park.” The Isotopes , the minor league team that plays here, were named after a joke in the Simpsons.

Sometimes we call the ballpark “The Lab,” which I’m pretty sure one of my other friends came up with, but like the earlier Willie Mays incident, this is not well documented, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Epistemology – your choice about whether to believe me.

But the final Willie Mays story is well documented. And how.

It was March 31, 1969, when once again the Giants and the Indians barnstormed through Albuquerque on a late spring training tour. And it was Mays himself who was the first player to bat at the newly completed Duke Stadium. It is said that Mays called it “the greatest minor league ball park I’ve ever played in.”

There’s another foul ball story, though it revolves around a kid who rode his Schwinn Stingray to the ballpark, got hit in the head with said line drive foul ball, but he was OK and ended up with a Willie Mays autographed ball. The Stingray is the best part, sweet rides. The game ended in a 5-5 tie, called because of darkness. The stadium has lights now. The novelist Don DeLillo wrote that, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.” I have always loved this about night games.

Mays went 0-for-3, which by my count makes him 0-for-7 lifetime in Albuquerque. Likely the altitude, though they used to say that Duke Stadium was a hitter’s park because of the thin air.

My career as an energy economics journalist in two figures

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Newspaper with headline reading "End of the oil is coming, prof warns"

Hubbert’s peak

But the peak will inevitably come, perhaps later this decade, perhaps now. The signs Gerth wrote about Feb. 24 may be the first signal that it is starting. “We simply don’t know,” Goodstein said. This is a problem New Mexico oil and gas producers have thought about a lot. Here, production peaked in 1969 and has been generally declining ever since, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute

– John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, November 2004

Graph showing steadily rising New Mexico oil production

Hubbert’s steady continuing climb

Colorado River news isn’t all bad!

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I’ve been pretty successfully checked out of Colorado River work while I put the finishing touches on the new book (pre-order now!) but my colleagues are on it with a new post looking at the over-winter storage at the big reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams:

Key Points

  • The rules that control releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead are very different. Lake Powell’s releases are determined by an Annual Operating Plan that has little flexibility during the year. Lake Mead’s releases change each month in response to changing delivery requirements to Lower Basin users. The impact of these different release rules on each reservoir’s storage was illustrated this autumn and early winter when Lake Powell steadily declined and Lake Mead steadily increased. The magnitude of Powell’s decline and Mead’s increase compensated for one another, and the total combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead did not change.
  • During the four months between October 1 and February 1, Lake Mead’s releases were reduced in response to decreasing Lower Basin demands, but Lake Powell’s releases were not similarly reduced. Lake Powell lost 615,000 af during the four-month study period, and Lake Mead gained the same amount.
  • On February 1, Lake Mead had 2,714,000 af more water than Lake Powell, the largest difference between the two reservoirs since April 2022.
  • Modest flood inflows in early October delayed drawdown of Lake Powell by six weeks. Releases during the four-month study period were the second smallest since at least 2010[1]. Releases from Lake Mead were the smallest since at least 2010. Despite the small inflows to Lake Mead, the increase in storage in Lake Mead during the study period was the largest since 2019.
  • The four-month delay in depletion of the combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead saved between 400,000 to 900,000 af.
  • Forecasts for spring snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell are not encouraging and have been declining all winter, because Rocky Mountain snowpack remains meager.

[1]We compared the inflows, outflows, changes in storage, and Lower Basin consumptive uses between 2010 and 2026.

This feels like good news, or least not bad news, except for that last bullet. The Upper Basin median forecast is just 40 percent of the median.

Craig Mod on Books

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That’s what we’re here for. The books. Nothing we do is more durable or meaningful. I believe this more and more with all my heart. The weirder the world gets, the less meaning there seems to be in public discourse, the more I feel: BOOOOOOOOOOOKS. Printed, hefty suckers, immutable and offline. Moar. I trust books as a medium. I trust how they get me to collate my thoughts in a way no other medium does. Their arc can be long and infuriating (years from conception to release), but there is a density of committed effort present in a book held in hand that cannot exist in a YouTube video or a thousand Instagram Reels.

– Craig Mod

I’m working my way through the page proofs of Ribbons of Green, the new Fleck/Berrens joint, on shelves in June. We’ve got a Feb. 20 deadline to get stuff back to our friends at UNM Press. It’s a project to be savored, this final run through the page proofs, the last step in the chain from manuscript->pdf-page-proofs->”printed, hefty.”

The number of public words I have written in my life is large. I recently had occasion to download the corpus of this blog, dating to 2003: 6,500+ posts, 1.4 million words not counting the comment threads, which used to have a lot of my words in them too. 37 years of daily newspaper work is likely another 2 million words (big error bars on that second number, but it’s likely in the ballpark, maybe +/- 500k?). I loved all of that writing. I never didn’t love doing it, learning stuff, crafting strings of words to share what I learned with y’all – the constraints of the structure of a newspaper story traded off against the utility of being handed a sizeable audience right out of the gate; the elbow room of the blog, to break out of the constraints of the newspaper form and say “fuck” sometimes and also be fully opinionated and weird. Writing about bike rides and stuff.

The books – Water is For Fighting Over, Science Be Dammed (with Eric Kuhn), and Ribbons of Green, (with Bob Berrens) are tiny in comparison, but it’s in the density that they become the thing Mod is talking about, pursuing/sustaining a line of thought for 75,000 words, the drive to say something useful and new at scale.

I’ve got nothing against, as Mod put it, “a YouTube video or a thousand Instagram Reels.” I’m a blogger! One of the surprises of my Inkstain data analysis project has been the volume of stuff I wrote on the the blog in 2014-15 when I was using the blog really aggressively as a sketchbook for the work that became Water is for Fighting Over – three words on the blog for every word in the book. The ephemeral stuff has value too, I could not have lasted through a 37-year newspaper career if I didn’t believe that.

But the book’s the thing.

Quoting Rolf Schmidt-Petersen on water management in New Mexico in 2002

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2002 snowpack and runoff were terrible on the Rio Grande and San Juan. Think the San Juan Chama Project diverted about 6,000 acre-feet into the Rio Grande that year (normal would be between 80,0000 and 120,000 acre-feet. Heck, for Colorado on the mainstem Rio Grande, we had to negotiate a new delivery by Colorado to New Mexico because the actual inflow that year was lower than any contemplated in the Rio Grande Compact. Only thing that allowed us to manage thru the year was releases of water stored in previous years. If this dryness continues, with no storage to speak of, 2026 will be a very difficult year of water management/flows and, unfortunately, possibly fires.

– Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, pulled out of the comments here.

Inspired by Rolf’s comments, I ran some numbers to get a feel for what reservoir storage looked in 2002. Here’s the most useful graph – total water in storage above New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley this year, compared to 2002:

A graph showing high storage in northern New Mexico reservoirs compared in 2002 compared to today.

2002 compared to 2026, reservoir storage in Northern New Mexico. Data USBR, graph by John Fleck

Watch the dotted line. That’s storage declining in 2002 as water managers drained water out of El Vado and Heron reservoirs (primarily) to keep the Rio Grande flowing. We don’t have that option this year.