Archive of posts filed under the cawater category.

California drought: Jerry Brown doesn’t have a knob to turn

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Yesterday’s executive order from California Gov. Jerry Brown (pdf here) illustrates a crucial issue about water governance, the issue of the scale at which we manage our water. The headline news from Brown’s announcement – “First Ever Statewide Mandatory Water Reductions.” But what does “mandatory” mean here? Here’s the explanation from Craig Miller, who’s covering California …

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Where will California’s water shortfalls hit?

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Craig Miller at KQED has a useful roundup of what sort of shortfalls California water users might see this summer as a result of drought: Ag: “More than 400,000 acres of farmland were fallowed last year because of scarce water. Credible sources have estimated that figure could double this year.” That’s in the neighborhood of …

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Corn, cotton, hay, rice all down: how California farmers are responding to drought

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California farmers by now have a pretty clear picture of what their water supply situation is going to be this year, whether it’s reservoir and irrigation system surface delivery, or groundwater pumping. The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released projected acreage for the state’s major field crops (pdf) that reflects farmers’ resulting choices: corn: 430,000 …

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Keep breathing, California. You can do this.

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A year ago, I wrote a piece urging calm in the face of California’s extreme drought: The thing to remember – and this’ll help you get through the tough year ahead – is that drought is no one big thing. It’s a series of little things – one water user, one water system at a time. …

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How Southern California quietly doubled its 2014 supply of Colorado River water

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Resilience is a system’s ability to absorb a shock and still retain its basic structure and function. Here, in one complicated table, is an example of the sort of institutional plumbing valves we need to build to increase resilience in the face of drought. It’s a table accounting for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern …

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In drought, would peripheral tunnels doom the Sacramento delta?

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Doug Obegi lays out an interesting argument about the implications of drought for the “Bay Delta Conservation Plan”, the California plan to build great water-carrying tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for farms and cities to the south. On paper, the tunnels would be largely dry during drought years, to preserve salinity balance in the …

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Pat Mulroy and “the tragedy of the anticommons”

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Lea-Rachel Kosnick, in a paper a few years back, described the “tragedy of the anticommons”. In a classic “tragedy of the commons,” every pumper is sticking their straw into an aquifer and sucking it out, with no incentive to conserve because the other folks will just take the rest anyway. In the “anticommons” example, there …

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