Overheard on the 766 Rapid Ride bus as it pulled into downtown Albuquerque….
Guy standing in the aisle: “Is that a good book?”
Guy seated: “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.” Pause. “It’s as old as fuck, though.”
I look over to see the guy sitting across the aisle from me has a beat up paperback Beowulf. “It’s a poem,” the guy says, opening it randomly, pointing to text. “Old English” – he points to the left page, then to the right, adds – “translation”.
They both got off the bus.
Would I be right to guess that this is the first time tree rings have been in the Rolling Stone?
“It was like looking through a telescope into the future to see how forests would respond, and it felt awful,” Williams says. “The result was totally unimaginable: wildfires, bark beetles, a huge reduction in forest growth, massive mortality. In the afternoons, I’d go on jogs on the trails outside my office and take mental inventory of who was dying and who was living. All over New Mexico, trees keeled over. It was like they’d been transported onto a new planet where climate is entirely different than what they were evolved for.”
Except I realize on second reading that, despite being essential to the story of Park Williams’ groundbreaking work on climate and our future forests, tree rings didn’t get a direct mention.
So you should probably still click on this link and buy my book
One way to conserve water is to pay people to not use it.
That’s not the normal way of talking about water markets, but that’s one way of framing what’s going on right now between Southern California urban water users and rice farmers up north:
With the drought stretching into its fourth year, a heavyweight water agency from Los Angeles has come calling on Sacramento Valley rice farmers, offering up to $71 million for some of their water.
The price being offered is so high, some farmers can make more from selling water than from growing their rice.
Users (in this case rice farmers) conserve in a dry year and are compensated. Overall system water use (by “system” I’m talking about the state’s interlinked artificial watershed) is reduced. The shock that might otherwise happen if the shortage happened arbitrarily (one or the other parties to this transaction simply running out of water) is avoided.
Potential uncaptured externalities: the people who sell farm equipment to the rice farmers, and their employees. This is not without negative spillovers.
There is a natural desire in water-short communities to capture and use stormwater. But a brewing feud between the state of New Mexico and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a reminder that tweaking the stormwater management system is not without consequences, because the water you’re capturing would otherwise be going somewhere and doing something.
At issue is a new EPA stormwater permit for the greater Albuquerque area intended to improve water quality in the Rio Grande. Stormwater, especially from New Mexico’s summer thunderstorms, washes all kinds of crap into the river. This rightly concerns the EPA, which is charged with keeping crap out of rivers. But the new stormwater permit, according to a Feb. 26, 2015 letter from the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission to the EPA, pursues this goal in part by reducing the amount of water that gets to the river.
The ISC also plays the Endangered Species Act card, arguing that reduced summer storm runoff reduces the amount of water available to meet flow targets for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow:
While this specific conflict – a federal stormwater permit – is narrowly focused, this raises a broader issue about the way we think about stormwater here in the Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico. The Middle Rio Grande Regional Water Plan, for example, proposes to enhance stormwater capture as a water management strategy. My University of New Mexico colleague Bruce Thomson has long argued that we need to recognize that water management approaches like this are entering into a zero sum game – water captured before it hits the river (stormwater, treated effluent) is less water in the river. From a note he send to water colleagues this morning (quoted with permission):
For decades folks have had their eye on stormwater as the untapped resource that was going to save us all from future water shortages. Stormwater collection is in the 2004 MRG Regional Water Plan. The North Diversion Channel goes right past the Water Utility Authority’s treatment plant and they’ve had conversations about diverting storm water down the hill to their plant. And a topic at all of the local & regional water meetings is about repealing the 96 hour rule to allow folks to capture and store stormwater. The reason is simple – nobody has claimed stormwater or has rights to it so everybody’s first thought is we can see it, it’s right there, we might as well take it and use it.
This letter from the ISC is the first formal declaration that I know of to throw down the gauntlet and officially declare that that water serves an important role in the state’s water balance. There are going to be some wonderful battles to watch between the environmentalists, state & federal regulators, water rights holders, water planners and others as they begin to realize they can’t do anything that will impact stormwater flows.
Here’s the full ISC letter:
The New Mexico legislature is considering a bill this year that would make it easier for farmers to maintain their “agricultural” designation, for property tax purposes, during drought. This is important for preservation of rural agricultural ways of life, because ag land taxes are cheaper than land otherwise labeled (“residential”, for example). For this reason, the New Mexico Acequia Association supports it:
In acequia communities this is vitally important to keep lands in agricultural production and to protect continuity in agricultural use. It protects landowners and families with long-time ties and long-term commitment to agricultural use of the land.
But there are competing/conflicting policy issues.
In the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area, the ag property tax designation incentivizes keeping irrigation going that is clearly non-economic for agricultural purposes alone. (In the most recent census of agriculture, net farm income in the county in which Albuquerque sits was negative.) This suggests that, here, people are farming as a lifestyle amenity, with a day job that pays the bills and a tax break that subsidizes the enterprise.
This may very well be a desirable policy outcome. The community as a whole may sufficiently value that green space to support such a subsidy and to prefer the resulting incentive to divert water to that use. But the discussion should be explicit about that tradeoff.
The legislation: HB 112
update: a couple of helpful comments from Coco over on the Twitters (I wish there was some way to automate this, a lot of the most interesting discussion these days happens over there)
.@jfleck On top of desirability of open space, as general rule ag land put no demand on services, unlike under-property taxed commercial.
— Coco J. Harris (@Cocolaboca) March 12, 2015
.@jfleck Alfalfa bales and cows don't go to school or the emergency room.
— Coco J. Harris (@Cocolaboca) March 12, 2015
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly report forecasting Colorado River Basin reservoir operations for the next 24 months (pdf) came out today, and it had some good news and some bad news for people in the Lower Colorado River Basin worried about dropping levels in Lake Mead.
Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, February 2015, by John Fleck
Good news: We’re all but guaranteed at this point (a 95 percent chance) that there the Bureau of Reclamation will release some “bonus water” from Lake Powell to help keep Mead’s levels from dropping further. Under normal operations, the rules require upstream states to release 8.23 million acre feet per year*, but this year the likely release will be 9 million acre feet.
Bad news: Despite the extra water, Mead is forecast to continue dropping – another 6 feet at the end of September compared to a year previous. How could that be?
The answer is what some people are calling the “structural deficit” (though I’ve gotten some pushback on the term). The basic rules that govern water accounting call for normal deliveries to Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico that, when combined with evaporation and system losses as the water moves downstream, are greater than the amount of water available:
In the past, water users were able to ignore this problem because “bonus water” above and beyond the minimum 8.23 million acre feet was routine. But because of unprecedented drought (climate change?), the bonus water is gone. Despite the drought, the Upper Basin states have continued to meet their 8.23 million acre foot base requirement, but the days of bonus water are gone.
It seems obvious that the folks downstream would look at this situation and say, “Hey, we’ve got to stop using so much water!” And they have, to a point. In 2007, they signed a shortage sharing agreement that calls for a reduction in Arizona and Nevada’s share if Lake Mead drops below 1,075. The idea here is that they use the water while they’ve got it, and then cut back when the reservoir drops to troublingly low levels.
When basin leaders were hashing out the details of the 2007 agreement, they considered options that would have cut use sooner deeper, and sooner, but they didn’t do it, so this is where we are now.
* Lawyers will argue about this number, but for all practical purposes, that’s the way the system’s being operated.
The folks at Montgomery & Associates are publishing a handy new summary of reservoir storage for Arizona, which I’m told will be updated monthly.
Our interest in “water”, as measured by the frequency with which we type it into Google, follows a seasonal cycle, peaking in July and bottoming out in December:
interest in water
The Albuquerque fairgrounds flea market is the place for hats.
Albuqerque fairgrounds flea market, March 2015, by John Fleck
I no longer have to shave, wear work shirts, and eschew the Oxford comma.
The first two I expected. The third has been a pleasant surprise.