OK, “strategy” is not exactly the right word here, but we take our water conservation where we can find it, eh? Luke Runyon took a nice dive into the water supply implications of the West’s wave of coal plant retirements. Because coal plants use water. Here’s my coauthor Eric Kuhn on the implications: “As a …
Continue reading ‘Retiring coal plants as a Colorado River Basin demand management strategy’ »
As I empty the last of last month’s big snowstorm from my rain barrels onto the garden, I notice the water comes out more and more slowly. It’s a reminder of why power production drops as supply in our big reservoirs declines. Some tricky tradeoffs here:
NPR’s Dan Charles had a nice piece on California’s drought this week digging down a layer into how farmers are actually responding to California’s drought. They are: Fallowing fields of annual crops like corn to ensure they have enough water for their permanent crops, like almonds. Sarah Woolf takes me on a tour of her …
Continue reading ‘Water is different than other industrial raw materials, but how, and why?’ »
User “A” has some water rights that he or she would like to put to use for economic benefit, but with the current amount available and the current economics of the business in question, it’s just not penciling out. User “B” comes along offering to pay to put the water to an alternative use. What’s …
The Jevons Paradox would suggest that our new solar panels would give me an easy comfort about using more electricity. And yet, ever since we gathered two weeks ago with the installers and the electric company guy in the ritual of turning them on and watching the meter run backward, I have been obsessed with …
Continue reading ‘my education in economics: an anti-Jevons anecdote’ »
Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in …
So it looks like we’ll have solar panels installed by the end of February. How long after that will it take for global warming to stop?
Lauren Morello at E&E has a fascinating piece about research into the views of US farmers regarding climate change: “Most of the farmers will admit that climate change is happening,” he said of the growers he advises in western Kentucky, on the Corn Belt’s eastern fringe. “What they don’t want to hear is that it’s …
Here’s a counter-intuitive result from Lucija Muehlenbachs and colleagues about the effect of shale gas drilling on neighborhood property values: While shale gas development can result in rapid local economic development, negative externalities associated with the process may adversely affect the prices of nearby homes…. We find that proximity to wells increases housing values, though risks …
Continue reading ‘Shale gas, groundwater and real estate values’ »
Hey lazyweb – anybody know if someone’s looked rigorously at the question of greywater use in the context of a Jevons-like paradox? Putting together some notes for a talk this weekend to the Xeriscape Garden Club of Albuquerque (Sat. 10 a.m. at the Garden Center if you’re in town), I’ve been thinking anew about the question …