Jeff Michael published some new data today suggesting California agricultural has been more resilient and less damaged by the current drought than I expected. “[T]here is virtually no difference in farm employment between 2014 and 2013 in the 3 counties that are thought to be most devastated by the drought,” Michael wrote. But perhaps I …
Continue reading ‘California farming in drought: a “robust corpse?”’ »
Reading Alex Breitler’s story yesterday about Stockton, for the first time in history, restricting the days of the week residents can water their lawns, I was reminded of this bit of business from Las Vegas: In 1950, the municipality began restricting lawn watering. During the next two years the city employed the alternate day method, …
Continue reading ‘The history of odd/even day watering restrictions’ »
Ensconced in my office in Albuquerque, I’ve been popping in and out of the webcast of today’s California State Water Resources Control Board workshop on the future of the Salton Sea, and I’ve noticed a very interesting subtext to the discussion that I think is important. It’s about the importance of Salton Sea environmental management …
Emily Green has written a great primer for Southern Californians on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the distant geography from which a big chunk of their water emerges: [W]hat makes the Delta the Delta is water. After winter rain and snow, roughly half of California’s fresh water arrives in this quirkily engineered, mis-named place. Twenty five …
Continue reading ‘Sacramento Delta 101, and sharing water’ »
David Zetland: [W]e see a total lack of vision or action to address the REAL drivers of scarcity — retail prices too low to notice, permissive overuse of groundwater, failing water-as-charity policies, and the blinders of a historic pretension that water rights are properly allocated (nope) in the correct volumes (NOPE). Taken together, the excess …
Continue reading ‘An economist’s view of California’s water problems’ »
Jeff Michael at the University of the Pacific’s Center for Business and Policy Research summarizes data on economic recovery in California suggesting that the impact of the drought has not, at least to date, been as significant as some might suggest: Focusing just on the Central Valley, there is a geographical pattern from north to south. …
UC Davis’s Jay Lund responding to the flurry of news coverage surrounding Jay Famiglietti’s Los Angeles Times op ed: While the drought is serious, a UC Davis scientist is casting doubt on Famiglietti’s dire prediction. “It’s not the right impression that one more year of this and we’re toast,” UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences …
Continue reading ‘How much water does California have left? The other Jay disagrees’ »
Here’s a reader quiz. Which headline would be more like to draw your click? “California has about one year of water left.” “California has about one year of reservoir storage and then we must rely even more on groundwater” The first is the headline the Los Angeles Times put atop a Jay Famiglietti op-ed last …
In a twitter discussion this morning, Brian Jordan shared a telling graphic that exposes the problems with Victor Davis Hanson’s recent City Journal essay about California’s water problems. Hanson’s argument is that California abandoned a dam-building program that, had it been pursued, would have provided the necessary storage to meet needs in this year of …
One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it. That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north: With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight …
Continue reading ‘In California, a new face of water conservation?’ »