YUMA, ARIZ – There’s not much Colorado River left by the time it gets to Yuma, on the U.S.-Mexico border. But the folks here seem to embrace it, modest though it may be. Warm summer evening, and people are out floating, barbecuing, swimming and generally acting like they feel comfortable with their river: From Colorado …
HOLBROOK, ARIZ – I grew up entranced by radio. There was something about the magic of the disembodied voice, always deep-throated, speaking to me from a world I could only imagine. It was Vin Scully calling a baseball game, or the mystery of hockey play by play (imagine a kid lying in the dark with …
When I first started to seriously cover Colorado River water, I kept going around to smart water people asking the same question: when we finally hit the wall, and there is less water in the Upper Colorado River Basin than needed to meet the states’ needs – a “call”, in the legal lingo – how …
Continue reading ‘The Implications of Uncertainty in Administering Upper Basin Shortage’ »
There was nothing geographically special about the farmlands surrounding the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. It was an accident of history that Gettysburg was the place where Union and Confederate armies met in the summer of 1863. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but the epic political struggle over health care is similar. If it wasn’t health …
Continue reading ‘Climate Legislation as Partisan Battleground’ »
Intriguing comments by Brian Brady, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District, during a hearing last week before the House Water and Power subcommittee held in Las Vegas: Rural areas like ours have their own plans for the future growth and development of their respective regions. Transfer too much water and you destroy your ability …
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at China’s race to capture the global renewable energy market (sub/ad req): If you want to see how green is done these days, China is where the action is. With a voracious appetite for fuels to power its rapidly growing economy, China’s energy sector is booming, and nowhere is …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: China’s Approach to Green’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River operations 24-month study (pdf) is out this afternoon, formally confirming what has been clear for some time: that this year’s release from Lake Powell will be 8.23 million acre feet, the minimum under current operating rules. Based on the current modeling (see page 11 of the pdf), this means …
With the Colorado River forecasts out this week, I’m ready to call it: there won’t be enough water in the river for an extra water release this year from Lake Powell to help bolster the levels in the shrinking Lake Mead. Those declining red dots, month by month in the graph above, tell the story. …
If you follow nuclear weapons policy, the last thing you need at this point is another analysis of yesterday’s Nuclear Posture Review rollout. But I did have something to say in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req) that represents what I think is an important and underappreciated piece of the debate. Here in New Mexico, home …
Continue reading ‘Nuclear Posture Review, a Bottom-Up Perspective’ »
A friend called me out on this morning’s column, a piece about Cathy Plesko, a Los Alamos scientist working on the asteroid mitigation problem (sub/ad req). He said he’d gotten all the way to the end before he realized it was really a column about global warming. Kaching! Back in the ’90s, I wrote a …