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 …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River – a comparison’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Will taxpayers bail out delta water exporters?’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Isenberg: you want more storage? who’s gonna pay?’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘National Research Council on the scarcity value of water’ »
I’ve written before about John Van Dyke’s memorable description of the line between a desert river’s ribbon of green and the arid landscape that surrounds it… the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. This holds true when the knife’s edge is …
Continue reading ‘the sharp edge of a knife between wet and dry’ »