I sat in the audience dumbfounded last month listening to Pat Mulroy speak at the 16th Annual Water Conservation/Xeriscape Expo here in Albuquerque. Mulroy is the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that wholesales water to the Las Vegas, Nev., area, and is arguably the most prominent figure in western water politics and …
Continue reading ‘“the largest artificial watershed in the world”’ »
In the elevator at Mazano del Sol, the retirement apartments where Mom and Dad live. Lady gets in with a fabulous cane – wooden, lightly carved and lovely bright paint job. Me: That’s a great cane? Does it have a story? Her: Got it in Old Town. Twelve bucks. It works. And she spryly strode …
Ezra Klein’s nominally talking to economists, but you guys sitting in the back might get something out of this as well: Listen to political scientists, sociologists, etc. They have perspectives, evidence and training worthy of consideration.
So I’m not sure how this happened, but apparently I’m all over the Internet this week as the token science journalist trying to defend my entire profession. Good luck with that, me. Eli started it, and I tried to discuss things with him there. I figured I would get an indulgence since he was kind …
In a coda to my old Elephant Diaries series on the economics of news, a brief note from Dallas as the Morning News goes paywall: “Local newspaper websites are never going to scale to page view levels that make the math work,” he said. “The volume of traffic to these sites is inherently limited by …
The March forecast out today (pdf) for this year’s operations on the Colorado River is looking very good for the chances of extra water to be shipped downstream to help top off the dwindling supplies in Lake Mead. The magic word here is “equalization”, which means that under the river’s operating rules, there is sufficient …
From this morning’s paper, a visit to Work Case 82B (sub/ad req) at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology, where they keep that which has gone extinct: The Carolina parakeet on the top shelf of Work Case 82B, green with a dingy red head, looks little different from the other 30,000 stuffed …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote Elsewhere: A Visit to Work Case 82B’ »
In a thread last month, Francis offered this as one explanation for the prominence of lawyers in western US water policy discussions: The states are co-equal sovereigns, and the feds have not invoked federal supremacy. It applies elsewhere. In Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the state will go to court next week to argue for …
Continue reading ‘Fighting for Atlanta’s water: what was it I was saying about lawyers?’ »
Daniel Treisman: Among the countries for which I have data, the most robust correlates of fearfulness relate to countries’ religious traditions. Fear tends to be higher in countries where more people believe in Hell and where fewer believe in Heaven.
Chris Corbin argues that flood irrigation isn’t the bogeyman it’s frequently made out to be. Some footnotes Chris and I came up in a twitter conversation: Ward and Pulido-Velazquez, PNAS, Water conservation in irrigation can increase water use Huffaker, WRR, Conservation potential of agricultural water conservation subsidies Pfeiffer and Lin, The Effect of Irrigation Technology on Groundwater Use This …