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?’ »
I’ve long dismissed the “pipeline to the Missouri River” (PTM? “canal from the Missouri”? CFM?) and other similar large-scale water importation schemes as vastly impractical distractions from serious water policy (see for example here and here). The argument, which I get regularly from well-meaning readers, points to the big network of oil and gas pipelines spidering across …
OtPR: The range of public water discourse is very narrow; it is all incremental change from how we do things now.
Precipitation this winter at Crater Lake, in northern California southern Oregon, is a tad above normal. Snowpack is at record lows: On Friday morning, the snow level was at 32 inches, tying the Feb. 27 record for low snow. However, snow was falling Friday from a new storm system bringing rain to the Rogue Valley …
Continue reading ‘In the mountains of southern Oregon, what used to be snow turns to rain’ »
The new paper by Ben Cook and colleagues clarifying our understanding the risk of megadrought in the southwestern United States has rightly gotten a lot of attention. Combining paleo records and modeling of a changing climate under rising greenhouse gas scenarios, Cook and his colleagues have created some scary reading: [F]uture drought risk will likely …
Continue reading ‘Megadrought paper: message received, now what do we do?’ »
From yesterday’s New York Times: The problem with using ocean water to replenish the lake is that current agricultural runoff adds three million to four million tons of salt per year, Mr. Shintaku said. The same amount of ocean water would add about 10 times as much salt. As the water evaporates, the salt would …
Continue reading ‘Why pumping ocean water into the Salton Sea wouldn’t work’ »
Using NASA data, some scientists built these maps of California farm land fallowed during the drought. Green is planted, brown is fallowed:
Interesting tidbit out of California’s San Joaquin Valley: Pasture owners around Oakdale willing to go without water will be paid for fallowing their land this year, Oakdale Irrigation District directors decided Tuesday. The water saved by idling fields will be sold to thirsty out-of-county water agencies. OID landowners volunteering for the deal could collect millions …
Lest our city shrivel and die, we must have more water, we must built a great new aqueduct to the Colorado. William Mulholland, Los Angeles, 1925, as quoted in Vincent Ostrom’s Water and Politics
In the Colorado River Basin, I’ve been arguing that if you want to think hard about water policy, you have to be thinking hard about alfalfa. Out in California’s Central Valley, as Felicity Barringer explained last week in her last story for the New York Times (sad face), you’ve got to be thinking about almonds: …
Continue reading ‘Almonds, water policy and cropping decisions’ »