While we eagerly await whatever it is that might happen this week as the Colorado River basin states struggle to come up with a short term plan to use less water, the Bureau of Reclamation is inviting y’all to a webinar this afternoon (Monday Jan. 30 2023, details here) to begin thinking about a long …
As we get spun up for the second time in six months about a capricious notion of a “deadline” to fix the Colorado River, I’m reminded of the tagline from my favorite teenage superhero comic, Marvel’s Howard the Duck: Trapped in a world he never made. Once again, we are trapped in a narrative driven …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: Trapped, again, in a world we never made’ »
The big farms we have left in Albuquerque’s South Valley are weird. I spent a good fraction of my weekend staring at maps of them, or riding my bike around them, or both. My co-author Bob Berrens and I have zeroed on in this area for a key part of the storytelling in our new …
Doing reading for the new book on early 1920s Albuquerque, as business leaders pursued what would become the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, I see the regular return of a phrase I’d come to see frequently my reading of Colorado River history in the same time period: the flood menace Here’s the Albuquerque Journal, reporting …
Continue reading ‘the rise and fall of “the flood menace”’ »
Jeff Lukas: Update of the forecasted Powell inflows chart. Past 2+ weeks has been very good for the Upper Basin.Jan 1st @nwscbrfc forecast called for 105% of average inflows.Jan 17th forecast: 125% of average.Long way to go, but really low #ColoradoRiver flows are off the table. pic.twitter.com/v5og1LGuRY — Jeff Lukas (@LukasClimate) January 18, 2023
Writing in 2018 in the Seattle Journal of Environmental Law, Kait Schilling argued that the doctrine of prior appropriation – the notion that those who first put water to use hold priority over those who came later – was no longer compatible with a climate-changed world. Climate change is diminishing water rights equally regardless of …
An exchange on Twitter about the definition of “dead pool” sent me back to Jack Schmidt et al’s extremely useful (and now extremely relevant) 2016 analysis of what would be required to empty Lake Powell and move all the water down to Lake Mead. It’s the thing that disabused me of my simplistic notion that …
It’s taking me a while to figure exactly what “the new book” is about. In an early manifestation (I recall such things based on the names of computer file folders of my scribblings) it was called “the ghost of water”. The idea was to find threads of the past in the stuff we built to …
A review of Calendar year 2022 on the Colorado River Colorado River reservoir storage dropped 3.1 million acre feet this year, but there is a proposal now being circulated among the Basin States to cut use by that much to bring the system into balance. Total Storage Total year end storage in Lake Mead, Lake …
Continue reading ‘Dead Pool Diaries: Colorado River 2022 Year in Review’ »
No bad days on the bike. At the risk of a tortured metaphor, rides are the warp threads of the loom of my life, bound firm in the frame of the loom as I weave the day’s events around them – the places I go, the things that I do, and the rides that get …