When I interviewed Mike Connor, the Bureau of Reclamation’s then-newly minted commissioner, back in 2009, one of his central points was that the era of American dam building was behind us: Michael Connor, the New Mexican who took over as head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation three months ago, inherited an empire. It is …
When I posted a couple of weeks back on the fact that land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is subsiding faster than sea level is rising, a smart reader asked privately, “Yeah, so what’s the point?” My reader’s observation was, in essence, that it doesn’t really matter much in terms of policy response whether the …
Barry Nelson had an insightful post today comparing and contrasting the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta systems. There are important similarities – crashing (or crashed) ecosystems and water supplies for human systems that are stretched beyond the point of sustainability. But the institutional frameworks for addressing those problems and the prospect of …
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The risk from sea level rise to California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta system is frequently discussed. As sea level rises, the argument goes, the risk of failing levees increases. With a substantial share of California’s farmland and population depending on water supplies that flow through the delta, failed levees is an enormous risk. Levee failures, as …
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From the Delta National Park blog: I mean, how much competent science leading to inconclusive policies needs to be commissioned before smart people admit that this is not a problem of science? Yup.
Jeffrey Michael runs the numbers and suggests the marginal cost of water from a new Peripheral Thingie (canal or tunnel beneath/around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) will be prohibitive for agricultural users asked to foot a share of the bill: According to the draft BDCP, the marginal cost of new water the contractors get out of …
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Phil Isenberg, head of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, gets to the heart of the matter in the discussion of the possibility that California needs more water storage capability: The council agrees with Assemblyman Logue that water storage is a critical component of any solution to meet the state’s water supply and environmental needs. Over the …
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In southern California, the Metropolitan Water District is cranking up the rate meter, squeezed in the conservation v. cost vice: As more people conserve water, MWD sells less water, and that means revenues go down. But MWD’s costs of delivering that water remain essentially the same: Thus, prices go up.
Writing in the Sacramento Bee, Newsha Ajami of the Pacific Institute and groundwater guru John Bredehoeft ask, in relation to the proposed Cadiz aquifer pump-and-sell project in the Mojave Desert, who owns the groundwater? The company plans to extract 2.5 million acre-feet of the water, a public good, over the next 50 years and sell it back …
Another tidbit from the National Research Council’s new report on the problems of the California Bay-Delta: By assigning to water a scarcity value of zero, many current policies signal consumers that water is available without limit, even while the limits imposed by scarcity are intensifying. As a result, more water is used than would be …
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