Matt Weiser reports the Brown administration* is backing away from a giant “Peripheral Tunnel” option for solving California’s bay-delta mess, or at least backing away from the notion that the big tunnel is The Plan: Gov. Jerry Brown’s top water official revealed Tuesday that a giant tunnel diverting water from the Sacramento River is no …
Given the current flooding on the Mississippi, this from the Public Policy Institute of California’s discussion of flood risk in that state seems relevant: Perception of risk directly changes pressure for improving flood management. Longer periods of time since a natural disaster reduce the perception of risk—a phenomenon referred to as the “flood memory half-life.” …
In trying to understand California’s efforts to deal with its Bay-Delta water problems, I’ve been digging into the Delta Stewardship Council and Bay Delta Conservation Plan processes, and frankly have been left feeling a bit like Dorothy upon her descent into Oz – lots of familiar cues, but over and over again things weren’t quite …
What I did on my spring vacation: Lissa and I got the backyard train running (track needed a bit of post-winter sprucing up) We rode the big people train to Santa Fe I got new glasses We got far more work done to the car than I expected Slept in some, but got up early …
Rob Davis at Voice of San Diego has a nice overview of the proposal being considered to build a desalination plant on the coast of Baja, near Tijuana, to provide water for U.S. and Mexican users: Together with the Mexican government, the agencies supplying San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson are studying …
Continue reading ‘Is Desal Really Only an Option at the Margins?’ »
Now that California’s drought is over, the folks in San Diego are back to whining about water rates. A new poll shows: More than half of respondents — 55 percent — said water is too expensive. Among households who pay their own water bills, 48 percent said they are not willing to spend more each …
How China’s surging manufacturing sector helps save water in California: Although California’s population has continued to grow rapidly, water conservation activities and changes in economic structure (notably, less water-consuming manufacturing) have reduced water use enough since the mid-1990s to keep total gross urban water use roughly constant. From the PPIC’s “Managing California’s Water“
Economists have a useful framework for thinking about effects of an economic transaction that extend beyond the actors involved in the transaction. They call them “externalities”. They can be good or bad (benefits/costs enjoyed/borne by those not involved), but mostly the conversation revolves around the bad ones. The good ones we tend to take for …
Continue reading ‘California Water: Pricing the Externalities’ »
Now that I’ve got this “largest artificial watershed in the world” hammer, everything’s beginning to look like a nail. The “hammer” involves the notion that the vast artificial plumbing system we’ve built across the west has linked our water management fates in a way that did not exist when water tended to spend its human- …
Watching California’s water argument from afar, I can’t help but see what looks like a remarkable failure to develop a process for juggling competing interests in the management of a classic common pool resource. From yesterday’s political theater drama House field hearing, here’s Mike Connor’s explanation of why it’s not a simple matter of just …