Benson on the Drought Relief Act

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Reed Benson, water law professor at the University of New Mexico, has an op-ed in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal arguing for the re-authorization of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Drought Relief Act powers, which expired last year (adwalled):

Major droughts, including more intense ones than this, have always been a fact of life in the West. We can’t expect government to stop drought, but we do expect it to assist in planning for it and to provide a measure of relief when it strikes.

The last Congress, however, actually made the current drought a little worse for the West: It failed to reauthorize the Drought Relief Act, allowing key parts of the law to expire in 2012.

This is one of those fascinating but obscure cubbyholes of federal water law that’s worth more attention than it gets.

The question is what authority the federal water agencies have, and what purposes they’re legally authorized to pursue, in managing water. (For example, the Army Corps of Engineers regularly argues that it’s only got the statutory authority to protect against flooding. That’s the job Congress gave it. This played a role in debates this year over barge traffic on the Mississippi, and is an argument that’s currently in play in debates over who has what responsibility in managing the Rio Grande for protection of endangered species.)

The Drought Relief Act provided the US Bureau of Reclamation the authority to expand its scope of action during drought. Here’s Benson writing in the Ecology Law  Quarterly:

Title I of the Drought Relief Act, however, authorizes the Secretary to take a variety of actions including drilling wells, constructing temporary facilities, acquiring water from willing sellers, making loans for various purposes, and providing temporary water supplies for a range of uses…. Thus, Title I can provide a measure of authority to act, which should allow USBR to be more effective in reducing the impacts of water shortages … including those related to climate change.

In particular, Benson argues that the Drought Relief Act might provide the Bureau with some flexibility in providing environmental flows during drought times (like now, for example). More generally, he argues the legislation might offer more general operational authority to the Bureau to help manage for what he calls the “double whammy” of climate change and drought.

my new rain gauge

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rain gauge

rain gauge

At the xeriscape show last  week, I picked up a nifty new rain gauge, courtesy of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, with this helpful advice:

Skip one watering when you receive at least a quarter of an inch of rain.

The last time that happened at my house? September.

my education in economics: an anti-Jevons anecdote

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power curves

power curves

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 turning off lights, rather than willing to leave them on.

I am a living anti-Jevons anecdote.

“The environment has always gotten the short end of the stick.”

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The interplay between human water use and natural systems has always been a ratchet, and when the environmental conversation began in earnest in this country, the ratchet was already cranked down tight.

By the time, for example, that we began having a conversation about preservation of environmental values on the Lower Colorado River, Hoover Dam was already in place and the Colorado River Delta was already getting very little of the water it once had.

Or take the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. California state law codifies the importance of “co-equal goals“: “providing a more reliable water supply for California and protecting, restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem.”

I can’t imagine UC Davis fish biologist Peter Moyle being terribly popular among water managers for pointing out this:

The reality is that the water priorities for people and fish and have never been anything approaching equal. The environment has always gotten the short end of the stick.

So achieving coequal goals should mean greatly improving conditions for fish, first, and then figuring out how to share the water better. It means we should give far greater consideration to native and other desirable species in the way we release water from dams and move it through the Delta.

Moyle’s got a lot to say about life in the anthropocene and thinking about “nature” and California’s great delta. Highly recommended click.

More on where the Bellagio fountain gets its water

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The Dunes

The Dunes

My post last week on the Bellagio fountain and the fact that it got its water from wells originally drilled to water an old golf course drew questions. Today, we have answers.

Jeffrey Prest asks: “What was the name of the old golf course?”

Doug Bennett at the Southern Nevada Water Authority shared this old postcard of the Dunes Hotel and the golf course behind it, which Doug says stretched from Tropicana Ave. to Flamingo Rd.

David Zetland observed: “I thought it was saline g/w, i.e., ‘useless’ for drinking but not for display…”

Doug explains:

The fountains at Bellagio are fed using well water for which the Dunes already had a long-standing permit from the State of Nevada. The fountains do not use municipal water. It is my understanding that the water is not of suitable quality to go straight to the fountain and that Bellagio treats it first. The Bellagio Hotel and fountain uses much less water than the golf course did and produces substantially more economic return, as you pointed out in your presentation. Similarly, the Wynn Hotel, built on the site of the old Desert Inn, also used well water conserved by a redesign of the old golf course to meet the needs of their landscape and water feature.

And now, my full confession, which may require me to turn in my Western Water Wonks membership card: I love the Bellagio fountain.

 

A half-hearted defense of the New York Times decision to kill the green blog

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I’ve been a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists for a number of years, but every year when my renewal notice comes up I wrestle anew with the membership and the label it entails.*

I’m a journalist who covers topics that are sometimes labeled “environmental”, but I’m not sure how to define the subject area other than by listing the things that fit within it. With some notable exceptions, I don’t really care much about water pollution or air pollution, for example. I write a lot about climate change because water. I write some about forests because fires, towers of smoke billowing over my community, jarred me. I’m pretty diligent about covering one endangered species, but ignore most others. I know I’m supposed to care about this Keystone pipeline because people who care a lot about the “environment” have placed it on the agenda, but it’s not on mine. Roadless rules and wilderness just don’t interest me journalistically. I pretty much bought the Nordhuas and Shellenberger argument (pdf) because the category they were killing off wasn’t working for me.

So I’m sympathetic here to Dean Baquet at the New York Times as he explains the reasons for killing off the newspaper’s Green blog:

“I think our environmental coverage has suffered from the segregation — it needs to be more integrated into all of the different areas,” like science, politics and foreign news, he said.

He agreed that environmental coverage is of great importance, and said that having The Times’s environmental reporters working on other desks is the best way to “drive more of these important stories onto the home page and the front page.”

A Green blog is a place where environmenty people go to look for environmenty news. If we’re doing it right, that sort of news is embedded in all sorts of stories rather than a category of its own. So I agree with the rationale – both for killing the Green blog and for dismantling the Times’ green pod. I think coverage of the family of issues sometimes called the “environment beat” is best done integrated into a bunch of different beats, not off on its own.

But I called this a “half-hearted defense” because it only works if Baquet and company aren’t bullshitting us here, if they’re really planning to drive the topic(s) out into the newsroom as a whole.

* Every year I re-up because, as Lissa reminded me this morning, it’s a great organization, and I have a lot in common with the other members.