My California water friends are breathing a tiny bit easier, as an El Niño-fueled jet stream queues up a series of storms for the parched state. But the latest forecast models suggest the Colorado River Basin is going to have to wait its turn. The invaluable Daniel Swain wrote a couple of days ago about …
Continue reading ‘California wetting up, Colorado Basin will have to wait’ »
If you care about Colorado River Basin water, it behooves you to pay attention to the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada. It’s an entirely different watershed, but 2015 demonstrated how the interconnections in California’s plumbing have left the two inextricably linked. The tl;dr version of two interrelated points below: California’s drought has put pressure on the Colorado …
Continue reading ‘2015 puts Sierra Nevada-Colorado Basin linkage in stark relief’ »
Water is just water, right? What happened when Sierra Madre, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, switched from local groundwater to imported Colorado River water is a reminder that, well, no: In 2013, Sierra Madre was forced to begin importing water from the Metropolitan Water District. That led to a new problem. The water source …
Fortunately, the L.A. Department of Water and Power has come a long way in the last 20 years. For a time, says McQuilken, managers balked at the idea that conservation and recycling could replace the Mono Basin losses. But since then, the utility has become one of the country’s most progressive. Take water conservation. Simple measures like …
Jon Christensen makes a great point: Christensen says experts learned lessons about the “stickiness” of behaviour change during California’s drought. “When there’s a lot of messaging about conserving water, when there are incentives to conserve water, people do conserve water, they use less water,” Christensen says. “And when the drought is over there’s some rebound, …
Continue reading ‘the “stickiness” of drought conservation messaging’ »
I tend to enthusiastically and often uncritically embrace every new water conservation number, as if using less water is an unqualified good. I generally believe that, and you’re going to have a hard time pushing me off that intellectual turf. But there’s a flip side I’m trying to think through. It’s what economists might call …
Michael Doyle reports in the Sacramento Bee on the apparent death of California drought legislation: A California water bill that skeptics say has been cloaked in excessive secrecy will probably miss its Capitol Hill train this year. Facing criticism from fellow Democrats, and with key details still unresolved, Sen. Dianne Feinstein conceded Friday that the …
Continue reading ‘Federal California drought legislation looking increasingly dead’ »
Nicholas Pinter at UC Davis points to one of the benefits of drought as we head into an El Niño winter: With California reservoirs at record lows, most regulated rivers in the state are unlikely to see major flooding downstream of their dams.
Daniel Polk, an anthropologist now based at Stanford’s Lane Center has an interesting post looking at the question of our perceptions of the Salton Sea – natural or not? The lake demonstrates that the “natural” is a fluid and not fixed term. Proponents of the Salton Sea often emphasize the natural qualities of the lake. …
From a new Public Policy Institute of California white paper on water allocation reforms: Regions with drought-prone climates need reliable accounting of water availability and use. Authoritative water accounting is a foundation for the transparent, reliable, timely administration (and, if necessary, curtailment) of water rights, management of groundwater, and water trading. This drought spotlighted serious …