Matt Weiser at the Sacramento Bee offered up a fascinating framework in a piece last Sunday for thinking about California’s $23 billion (and counting) proposal to reshape the way water moves in and through the largest estuary on the western coast of North America: [A]s the process now stands California voters will have no formal …
Continue reading ‘Fixing Northern California’s Delta: some process issues’ »
Visiting a farm recently, I was reminded that business people for whom water is an input think about water conservation differently than city folk like me. For a given amount of water available, the farmer wants to grow and sell as much food as possible. So it should not be surprising to see water conservation …
Continue reading ‘water conservation diaries: it’s about making more food’ »
Busy with New Mexico’s drought, I’ve been paying scant attention to the rollout of California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan, AKA the Peripheral Thingie. This is the scheme to build tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to move water south to California farms and cities. It’s the biggest and most interesting US water policy gambit out …
Continue reading ‘BDCP rollout: did anyone say anything that surprised you?’ »
Given my profession, I’m incentivized to freak out about drought. If I thought it wasn’t a big deal, I’d have to find something else to write about. But in darker moments, I wonder if I’m overdoing the freakout. Chris Austin’s writeup of Ellen Hanak’s comments at this week’s California water bond hearing raise the question …
From the California state water contractors, a new framing. It’s not that stupid little fish, or those pesky environmentalists: Limits on pumping operations are an ongoing issue due to the Delta’s outdated water delivery system. “Earlier this year, storms came through that could have provided a substantial boost to our water reservoirs, but we simply …
Continue reading ‘A new framing of the Sacramento Delta problem’ »
Apart from the specific contributions which mining made to agriculture in California, farming has always resembled mining in this state. The soil is really mined, not farmed. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception
The interplay between human water use and natural systems has always been a ratchet, and when the environmental conversation began in earnest in this country, the ratchet was already cranked down tight. By the time, for example, that we began having a conversation about preservation of environmental values on the Lower Colorado River, Hoover Dam …
Continue reading ‘“The environment has always gotten the short end of the stick.”’ »
To say that it is unpopular in northern California when the state ships water from north south is to understate things. So here’s a fun little bit of history on the willingness of the Record Searchlight, in Redding, to buck the will of its readers. From Bruce Ross, the paper’s current editorial page editor, great …
Continue reading ‘On the unpopularity of peripheral thingies in northern California’ »
The “broken windows fallacy” is the economic argument that spending money on X is of intrinsic value because of the jobs created, regardless of the value of the thing being done. The reference to broken windows is the argument’s reductio ad absurdum – hire one person to break a bunch of windows, and a second …
Keith Kloor had a nice riff the other day on the question of how we should decide what “nature” is supposed to look like, now that we’re kinda in charge: It’s not my job to say what nature should mean in a world shaped primarily by humans–I’m still working it out, myself–but I know others …