I was talking the other day about California’s struggle to solve its Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta problems with a friend who grows food with Colorado River water in California’s southeastern desert. The delta’s more than five hundred miles and three or four watersheds away as the crow flies from his farm. Why such a keen interest? …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta-Colorado River farming nexus’ »
Tara Lohan at Water Deeply had a great interview last week with Tom Ash of Southern California’s Inland Empire Water Agencies about the problem of water revenue in a time of conservation and drought: Tom Ash: What I learned is that it doesn’t matter where in the world – China, Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Israel …
Continue reading ‘Flawed rate structures cost California water utilities half a billion dollars’ »
I joke that I kept trying to leave the Salton Sea out of my book, because it’s such a hairy problem that in threatened to derail me in so many ways. Of course I failed, because the Sea is a critical piece of solving the distributional problems of scarce Colorado River water. Agricultural reductions in …
Ry Rivard in Voice of San Diego: As San Diego benefits from its new supplies of water, its customers are cutting their water use. That means San Diego now has more water than it needs. This is what I’m talking about Friday at the Law of the Colorado River conference. It’s the core of the …
Continue reading ‘The great water decoupling, San Diego edition’ »
While we were blathering on mindlessly in a comment thread about the water exported form California via alfalfa exports, Peter Gleick helpfully jumped in with come actual data: California’s total water footprint is an estimated 64 million acre-feet of water. That’s more than double the amount of water that flows down both of the state’s …
OtPR has a super insightful observation about three decades of California water policy: The Peripheral Canal was voted down in 1982. My sense is that the possibility of the Peripheral Canal has largely paralyzed California water policy since then (with the possible exception of IRWM). If the Peripheral Canal had been entirely off the table, the regions …
Continue reading ‘Has the Peripheral Delta Tunnel Canal Thingie paralyzed California water?’ »
California Gov. Jerry Brown has requested $80 in his new budget for dust mitigation and habitat restoration at the Salton Sea, Jesse Marx and Sammy Roth report: That’s less than the $150 million local officials wanted, but still far more than the state has ever allocated for restoration projects at the dying lake. The money …
Continue reading ‘More California state money for the Salton Sea’ »
The social media team at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California tweeted a couple of nice pictures this evening:
Every toilet currently in stock at my local Home Depot has the EPA WaterSense label, even the cheapest ones, meaning they uses 1.28 gallons per flush or less. This is a big part of why we see water use – on a per capita basis, but also in some cases on an absolute basis – …
Continue reading ‘Low-flush at the Home Depot: bending the water use curve down’ »
UC Davis’s Thomas Harter makes an important point in a recent Public Policy Institute of California blog post about California’s evolving effort to manage its groundwater: The state’s new groundwater law requires locals to form groundwater sustainability agencies and develop sustainability plans, and it will be important for farmers and rural communities to actively engage …
Continue reading ‘The importance of local knowledge in groundwater management’ »