From Janet Wilson at the Desert Sun: The Colorado River Board of California voted 8-1-1 Monday to sign on to a multi-state drought contingency plan, which, somewhat ironically, might not be needed for two years because of an exceptionally wet winter. The process was fractious until the very end, with blistering rebukes from the river’s largest water user, and charges that …
Publishing a book is a weird exercise in time shifting. Last fall, I was finishing Science be Dammed, the new Eric Kuhn-John Fleck book, while simultaneously working on a new afterward afterword to Water is for Fighting Over, out in paperback, well, tomorrow. My friends at Island Press helpfully reminded me this morning that it …
Continue reading ‘Water is For Fighting Over, out in paperback tomorrow’ »
The booming Rocky Mountain snowpack has eliminated the risk of a formal Lake Mead “shortage” declaration in 2020, and has substantially reduced the risk in 2021, according to the latest Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study. More importantly, in my view, is the reduction of a longer term risk of a legal battle over the Upper …
Continue reading ‘For now, a Lake Mead “shortage” is off the table’ »
One of the many reasons the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California interests me so much is the way that it integrates much of the complexities of water management in the western United States. By drawing supplies from the Sierra Nevada as well as the Colorado River Basin, it links the two largest arid-west ag-urban …
By Eric Kuhn If, as being widely reported, the Colorado River basin states (and the major water agencies that largely dictate what the states do) ultimately decide to proceed with a Lower Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plan that cuts out the Imperial Irrigation District (IID), no one should be surprised. It’s simply continuing a …
Editor’s note: This is the first post by Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation district and the co-author, with Inkstain’s John Fleck, of the forthcoming book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, to be published this fall by the University of Arizona Press. By Eric …
Continue reading ‘Why Does the Lower Basin Need a Drought Contingency Plan?’ »
I deeply misunderstood central Arizona’s readiness to respond to declining Colorado River supplies. Because I thought Arizona had a plan. In fact, Arizona did have a plan, a carefully crafted priority system that provided some users with deeply subsidized water in the short run, with the understanding that they would be the first to have …
Continue reading ‘How Arizona abandoned its plan to reduce its Colorado River water use’ »
I’m giving the first real talk about the new Eric Kuhn-John Fleck book – Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River – this Friday to colleagues and friends as part of the UNM Economics Department spring seminar series. In a nutshell: The fate of nine states across two nations in western …
Continue reading ‘I’ll be talking about the new book this Friday (Feb. 22, 2019) in Albuquerque’ »
Walking the newly appearing shoreline of Lake Mead in December, I picked up the above clam. After I used the picture yesterday to illustrate a blog post and my water newsletter, I got a note from Karl Flessa, one of the founders of Centro de Estudios de Almejas Muertas – the Center for the Study …
Amid the Sturm und Drang of Arizona’s struggle to find a path to reduce its Colorado River water use in the face of a federal ultimatum, I lost sight of an important point. With last week’s legislative approval, Arizona has now agreed to a plan that could eventually reduce the Central Arizona Project’s flow of …
Continue reading ‘The path to Colorado River collaboration is narrow, but we remain on it’ »