A: The Endangered Species Act A useful question came up on the Twitter last week about California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan that’s nicely answered by a state legislative analysis I read this afternoon. The BDCP is a key part of process underway now in California that seems to be headed toward creation of a Peripheral …
Continue reading ‘Q: What’s behind the Bay Delta Conservation Plan process?’ »
An economic analysis released last week suggested a Peripheral Tunnel to move California’s water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta could create 129,000 jobs. (Good Alex Breitler story lays out the details.) The boosters at the Southern California Water Committee jumped on the argument: This new jobs study on the tunnel options is the first major …
Continue reading ‘After we’re done with the Peripheral Tunnel, pyramids!’ »
A group with one set of interests in California water has tried to frame the discussion over how much water can be diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the classic “farmers vs. fish” framework. Others disagree. Traditional “view from nowhere” journalism quotes one from Column A and one from Column B and calls it …
Continue reading ‘Mike Taugher tells us what’s really going on with Sacramento Delta diversions’ »
While we all understand the market distortions caused in the United States by government subsidies for irrigation water, Michael Campana raises an interesting question about the international implications. Quoting a talk at the XIV World Water Congress by Paul Stanton Kibel of the Center on Urban Environmental Law (“CVP” is the Central Valley Project in …
Continue reading ‘The international implications of U.S. water subsidies’ »
John Bass made a great point in a recent comment thread at Delta National Park that highlights one of my frustrations about California water discussions: [I]f basic facts are contentious, then the problem isn’t facts. The comment was triggered by a point the California Farm Water Coalition’s Mike Wade made regarding an editorial that ran …
Continue reading ‘We’re in trouble when we’re arguing about the numbers’ »
If you think California’s water problems look bad now, just wait. That seems to be the message of a new study by a team from the USGS, Scripps, Berkeley and elsewhere who ran detailed simulations of climate change scenarios on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta/San Francisco Bay system. The project provides a useful exercise, not in …
Continue reading ‘Climate change and California water: a bad situation likely to get worse’ »
In an interview with Sacramento’s Capital Report, California resources secretary John Laird got off the water wonks’ quip of a lifetime: Water is the Rubik’s Cube of public policy. It will be quoted for all eternity. But really, it’s a lousy metaphor. Here’s the meat of what he said: The thing that probably works to …
Continue reading ‘Water: Why “the Rubik’s Cube of public policy” misses the point’ »
In my automated news searches on California water issues, I’d run across a number of stories of late on a web site called “News Hawks”, which seemed to be devoting an inordinate amount of time to detailing the efforts of an obscure Southern California water agency called the Central Basin Municipal Water District. I didn’t …
Continue reading ‘Central Basin Municipal Water District ignores the first rule of holes’ »
Great job by Jay Lund in unpacking the issue of California water storage – how much it has, how it’s used and what role it might play going forward: Climate warming is reducing the ability of California’s snowpack to store water seasonally. Fortunately, downstream reservoirs on many streams are already large compared to seasonal changes …
I’m all for a serious discussion about the costs and benefits of desalination as a source of water supply in the arid southwestern United States. But I find this argument, from Ted Owen of the Carlsbad, Calif., Chamber of Commerce, less than helpful: Jobs. Everyone in business and government is talking about the need to …