Ian James at the Desert Sun this week took on the journalistic task of rounding up the back-and-forth over the politics, law, policy, and science of the Cadiz project, a proposal to pump groundwater in the deserts of Southern California and ship it off for use in coastal plain cities. Ian, who’s earned a reputation …
Continue reading ‘Cadiz, scientization, and how Dan Sarewitz almost drove me out of journalism’ »
I’ve been joking to my Colorado River management friends about how I keep trying to leave the Salton Sea out of my book. This effort has been such a failure that the Salton Sea now makes multiple appearances in the current draft. All paths to the end of my book’s argument seem to pass through …
Jay Lund, Dr. Water at UC Davis, asks a provocative question that gets to this gnarly question of the status of water saved by conservation measures – what if municipal water users could direct how the savings from their conservation efforts are used? Albuquerque has done extraordinarily well in the last two decades. Per capita …
Some thoughts after today’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on federal western California New Mexico etc. drought legislation…. On Congressional process We currently have two “California drought bills” – H.R. 2898 developed by California House Republicans and S. 1894. They are very different. As a matter of process, the details of the difference don’t …
Continue reading ‘Thoughts on federal drought legislation circa October 2015’ »
Brandon Loomis, in an excellent recent piece on the problems of the Salton Sea, quoted a resident along the troubled inland California lake who thinks the answer to its decline is straightforward: Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act…. His favored solution is to pipe seawater from …
Continue reading ‘Why pumping water from the ocean to save the Salton Sea is a bad idea’ »
Southern California water policy is looking like a game of speed chess right now. Amid the moves to supplement its Colorado River flow with extra water from Las Vegas and Imperial (agenda pdf), Met’s board also is considering spending money on cleaning up and reusing more of the sewage effluent Southern California currently dumps in …
Continue reading ‘Met eyeing sewage recycling for Southern California supply’ »
From the Paris Review, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s journal of his 1961 visit to El Centro and the Salton Sea: Even at the Salton Sea, the face of death has its smile. In the morning the wind is still blowing but the sun is bright, and life is stirring. Even at the bottom of a well, there’s …
Continue reading ‘That time Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited the Salton Sea’ »
I sometimes think that, in trying to understand the impacts of drought, we pay too much attention to the water numbers. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how much is in the reservoir, or is being pumped from the ground, but it’s only the first link in the chain of impacts. California economist Jeff Michael …
Continue reading ‘Despite drought, California farm employment rising’ »
The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s board will take up a proposal this Thursday to ship 150,000 acre feet of Las Vegas’s unused Colorado River water to Southern California to help out during California’s epic drought. The water will help the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California make up for shortfalls in its supplies from Northern …
The question of what is included in the “Colorado River Basin” is in part a legal one. The seven-state Colorado River Compact of 1922 defined a weird legal geography: [T]he term “Colorado River Basin” means all of the drainage area of the Colorado River System and all other territory within the United States of America …
Continue reading ‘Grand Junction: A view from higher up in the watershed’ »