I was delighted to see my friend Tanya Trujillo’s name on the incoming Biden Administration Department of the Interior transition team list released yesterday. Tanya’s a New Mexican, former chief counsel to the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, and current member of the commission. She served as a legislative aide to New Mexico Sen. Jeff …
There’s some fascinating tension around a proposed wastewater reclamation collaboration in Southern California. The project, if it goes forward, would provide some 150 million gallons per day (~170,000 acre feet per year) of treated effluent. Water now being discharged into the ocean would instead be available for aquifer recharge within Southern California. There are a …
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Climate change, as I’ve often heard Brad Udall point out, is water change. By that, Brad means that the effect of a changing climate on people and ecosystems is most clearly felt through changes in how much water there is. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot as I work on three related projects …
Continue reading ‘Climate change and the water policy funnel’ »
The conventional simplification of the Colorado River Compact’s water allocation scheme is that it set aside 7.5 million acre feet of water use for the “exclusive beneficial consumptive use” of the states of the Lower Basin – Nevada, Arizona, and California. In the 21st century, the official accounting shows the Lower Basin states using an …
By Eric Kuhn As the Colorado River Basin’s managers wrestle with thorny questions around the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline, a colleague who works for a Lower Colorado River Basin water agency recently asked a question that goes to the heart of the future of river management: With land in the Lower Colorado River Basin, why …
Shrouded in pandemic fog, I’m only now getting to my sorta annual “Happy New Water Year!” post, where I traditionally look on in alarm at dropping Colorado River Basin reservoir levels and make fun of the Lower Basin for using too much water. The alarm remains – after a crappy runoff, combined storage in the …
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Burnishing my notes for UNM Water Resources class this afternoon to talk about Elinor Ostrom, I spent a bit of my morning going back through the underlined bits in my copy of her seminal book Governing the Commons. I first read it in the fall of 2009, when she won the Swedish prize. My initial …
The six Colorado River Basin states that do not have the letters “U-T-A-H” in their names just sent a remarkable letter to Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt with a plea – don’t let the rush toward federal approval of Utah’s proposed Lake Powell Pipeline blow up the Colorado River Basin’s framework of collaborative rather …
The written version of remarks delivered by Eric Kuhn at the Aug. 25 Western Resource Advocates webinar on the Lake Powell Pipeline, featuring Eric, WRA’s Bart Miller, and Alice Walker, attorney for the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians. PRESENTATION COMMENTS ON THE LAKE POWELL PIPELINE ERIC KUHN 8/25/2020 When John Cyran asked me to participate …
A friend last week pointed out something remarkable. Arizona, California, and Nevada are forecast this year to use just 6.8 million acre feet of their 7.5 million acre foot allocation of water from the main stem of the Colorado River. And that’s not just a one-off. Under “Tier Zero” of the Colorado River Basin Drought …