By Eric Kuhn As Utah pushes forward with its proposed Lake Powell Pipeline – an attempt move over 80,000 acre feet per year of its Upper Colorado River Basin allocation to communities in the Lower Basin – it is worth revisiting one of the critical legal milestones in the evolution of what we have come …
Continue reading ‘The roots of a coming Lake Powell Pipeline legal tangle’ »
Between trying to figure out how to work with graduate students I can’t see in person, and starting nervously at our pantry counting cans of beans, it’s been hard to do any of the work that has sustained me these last many years. Thinking, and writing. As the fog settled in back in March, one …
Continue reading ‘Kuhn and Fleck talk about “Science Be Dammed”. May 6, in the cloud.’ »
While Colorado River water management eyes were focused elsewhere this year – on the big snowpack up north, or the chaos success of the Drought Contingency Plan – California has quietly achieved a remarkable milestone. Its use of Colorado River water in 2019 will be 3.858 million acre feet. The last time it was below …
Continue reading ‘California’s 2019 use of Colorado River water lowest since 1950’ »
Public radio station KJZZ looks at Science Be Dammed, the new book by Eric Kuhn and John Fleck on the overallocation of the Colorado River.
My early review copy arrived yesterday, ahead of the “official” Nov. 26 publication of the new Eric Kuhn-John Fleck book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado. River. I’ve got but one – I talked to Eric this morning up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, (in the Upper Basin) and he’s got a …
Continue reading ‘A book arrived at my house yesterday by post’ »
When I was wrestling six years ago with a path through what became my book Water Is For Fighting Over, I collected material about what I came to call “the great mistake” – the overallocation of the Colorado River’s water. One of my favorite stories surrounded William Sibert: It is quite probable that the compact …
Continue reading ‘From “The Great Mistake” to “Science Be Dammed”’ »
I’m talking with University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students about the Colorado River this week, and pulling together some readings I had occasion to revisit the opening of The New Book: The boat ramp at Las Vegas Bay, once a shimmering recreation mecca on the shores of Lake Mead, now ends in a …
Continue reading ‘Las Vegas Bay: a path into the story of the Colorado River’ »
tl;dr Folks in the Upper Colorado River Basin are only using ~60 percent of their Colorado River Compact allocation Use has been basically flat since 1990. It is not going up. A couple of weeks ago I got an email, with an attached spreadsheet, from my co-author Eric Kuhn. It was his distillation of data …
They’ve posted my talk from the recent CU Boulder Getches-Wilkinson Center conference, in which I explain how we messed up the Colorado River Compact: Eric Kuhn and I are publishing a somewhat longer version this November.
My co-author Eric Kuhn was in town over the weekend to finish up the copy edits for our upcoming book Science be Dammed, and happily we were not so busy that we didn’t have a chance to get in a couple of bike rides. (In our collaboration these last few years, “Are you going to …