There are supply droughts, where the amount of rain falling from the sky drops precipitously, and the amount of water evaporating from plants and transpiring from their leaves, rises. And there are demand droughts, where the main problem is not in the supply of water nature offers, but in the way we use it. The …
Continue reading ‘What Kind of Drought is South Texas Having?’ »
New Mexico’s June 2009 gasoline sales were the lowest for the month since 1994:
An explanation (justification?) for why the NM water reporter is paying so much attention to the Vegas water story. (It’s a bit of a fib. Really it’s just a fascinating story, and the NM angle is cheap. But this is just between you and me. You won’t tell my editors, right?)
When an organization dedicated to the world’s water problems conducts a survey that concludes people care a lot about the world’s water problems, it’s good to accept the results with some caution. That caveat notwithstanding, the results of this survey are nevertheless not surprising: The survey, commissioned by Circle of Blue and conducted by Toronto …
When we talk about “water wars” in the United States, things like what is now happening in Atlanta, we’re not really talking about shooting wars. But there’s are widespread fears that globally, water wars will be one of the defining structures of 21st century conflict. Not so, suggests a new paper in the Journal of …
Albuquerque’s on the brink of New Mexico’s largest sewage reclamation project, taking 2,500 acre feet per year of water from the city’s wastewater treatment plant outflow and using it to water parks and golf courses. All well and good. Sounds like a great idea to put wasted water to use. But, as I tried to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Albuquerque’s Sewage Reclamation’ »
Via NASA’s Earth Observatory, MODIS view of California’s central valley. The brown, blocky bits are areas where agricultural land, which would usually be growing this time of year, lies fallow. Click through to see it big:
If you’re interested in western (US) water, you almost certainly already read Emily Green. If you’re not, you must: “DOES anyone think Southern Nevada [Water Authority] is going to build a $15 billion pipeline and then let somebody turn it off?” — Snake Valley rancher Cecil Garland, pictured above center.
Oil industry behind “energy citizens rallies” The U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying organization is behind a series of “energy citizens rallies” against pending climate change legislation, including two in New Mexico later this month, according to a memo obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan,” American Petroleum …
When U.S. Army Lt. J.C. Ives explored the lower reaches of the Colorado River in 1857-58, he made careful efforts to record as much of what he saw and learned as possible, “it being doubtful whether any party will ever again pursue the same line of travel.” Ives wrote: The region explored after leaving the …
Continue reading ‘sublimity perhaps unparalleled in any part of the world’ »