I often don’t know what to make of California, despite it being the state of my birth and a source of endless study and fascination. Jerry Brown was the governor when I was a teenager, and I respect him as one of the nation’s great politicians. I mean something specific and respectful by the term …
Back in the 1980s, when I was a reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, Tim Brick sold me on the fact that water was a great story. Pasadena had a municipal water agency, so it made sense that the city hall beat reporter should pay attention. But Tim, Pasadena’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District board …
Given the findings of the recent federal-state Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, it’s useful to look back at what other efforts at sussing out the region’s water problems and solutions have found. It’s especially interesting given the (to me) striking assertion in the Basin Study that building a pipeline from the Missouri, or …
From the Joe Mozingo at the LA Times: The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, …
California had one of its memorable (and important for water supply) “atmospheric river” storms earlier this month. The folks at NASA have posted a particularly beautiful image of one of the results: That’s a huge blast of sediment flowing out the mouth of the Eel River in northern California following the storm.
Jeff Mount from UC Davis: The San Francisco Bay Area business community should be taking notes. This trifecta of high tides, storm surge and intense rain is also a Bay Area scenario. Scientists and a host of government agencies have been warning about such an event for years. It may not appear so on a …
Here in the arid West, land of the pioneer spirit and the rugged individual, we have a longstanding tradition of sticking someone else with the bill for our water projects. The carefully constructed edifice that is Law of the (Colorado) River is complex set of legal and institutional deals among the basin’s water users built …
There’s a truism in water politics and policy in the western United States that “water flows uphill to money”. But is it correct? I ran across it most recently in an excellent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s proposal to build a pipeline to rural Nevada, along the Utah …
Continue reading ‘Does water really flow uphill toward money?’ »
Cynthia Koehler, writing in the Sacramento Bee last week, offers another example California water’s wicked problem. While all the attention is focused on the Sacramento Delta, are the critical headwaters of the state’s great river systems being given short shrift? California’s farms, commerce, industry and 38 million residents rely in large part on water that …
One of the smartest comments on last week’s Cal-Fed announcement about the California Bay-Delta system came in a blog comment from UC Davis’s Jay Lund: The Delta has always been about hostage taking – traditionally with local interests using Delta salinity as a hostage on the big water export projects, and water export users using …