Stein’s Law and Colorado’s Water

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courtesy Republican River Conservation District

I’ve become entranced with “Stein’s Law” as an alternative to the faux Twain “water’s for fightin’ over” as a cliche to help guide water policy rhetoric:

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

The draining of Bonny Reservoir in eastern Colorado to comply with the terms of the Republican River Compact – such an odd event that it even drew the attention of the Brits – is my latest example. There wasn’t enough water in the Republican to keep Bonny wet and still meet everyone’s water needs. The blue line is supply. The red line is demand.

So it’s being drained. No fighting here, just a harsh reality in the era of limits, and a compact complied with.

 

The soil moisture data problem

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It’s that time of year when a water wonk’s thoughts turn to the hills, to the romance of the beginnings of a winter snowpack’s accumulation. But there is a problem every year at this time – soil moisture. In particular, a lack of data about soil moisture. This matters come spring, when things start to melt, and the first water must soak into the ground. How moist was it the melt began? How much water will be soaked up by dry soil before the streams and rivers that feed our reservoirs begin running?

Sadly, our soil moisture data is problematic. That is one of the messages in a new Department of Interior report, Strengthening the Scientific Understanding of Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Resources of the United States:

Numerous specialized soil moisture networks exist across the Nation, but there is no design for a national soil moisture network. The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive Mission, planned for 2014, in conjunction with a robust in situ network for calibration, could provide adequate soil moisture data for many applications at regular intervals over much of the country if these efforts were implemented in a coordinated manner.

 

The conservation-revenue dilemma, private sector edition

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On the subject of the problem of declining revenue from water conservation, there is this, from the February 2009 10-k filed by American Water Works, a private water utility, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission:

Increased water conservation, including through the use of more efficient household fixtures and appliances among residential consumers, combined with declining household sizes in the United States, has contributed to a trend of declining residential per customer water usage. Our Regulated Businesses are heavily dependent upon revenue generated from rates we charge to our residential customers for the volume of water they use.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on our forests burning

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Lissa and I are in St. Louis, a wet place. I know it is a wet place because there is no dirt. Or, more specifically, there is no bare dirt. Something’s growing everywhere, the result of 38 inches (97 cm) precipitation per year. I’m always struck by that when I visit a wet place.

While here (we’re actually sitting in the airport pending a return to Albuquerque) I see that my story about the ponderosa forests in our dry place has run in the Sunday newspaper. It’s a bit of a grim tale (sub/ad req):

As fires burn through Southwestern forests with increasing intensity, the ponderosa pines so characteristic of the landscape are increasingly being eaten away, and in some areas have little chance of returning, scientists say.

Las Conchas was the sixth and largest of a series of increasingly destructive fires dating to the 1950s on the east side of the Jemez Mountains. While some of the fire burned at low severity, leaving healthy forests behind, more than 150 square miles of the area’s forests have been burned in destructive, stand-replacing fires, according to Allen. Much of that forest was ponderosa. The result has scientists and forest managers looking intensely at the area to try to understand what happens next.

Ponderosa is only one of the types of forest ecosystem found in the mountains of New Mexico. Piñon-juniper of the lower elevations and the mixed conifer forest found in the Sangre de Cristos above Santa Fe burn differently, resulting in different patterns of revegetation. Damage from fires has been far less severe in those forest types. But ponderosa is a special case because of the special ferocity with which it has burned in recent years.

Conservation and the water pricing dilemma

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We see this over and over again.

Generally speaking, water is free to municipal/industrial customers in the United States. What we pay in our water bill is for the cost of delivery – the pumps and pipes. We’re paying for water delivery infrastructure, not the commodity itself.

But we nevertheless generally price the water by unit consumed, with utilities setting their rates to cover those infrastructure costs (plus profit if it’s a private utility).

We conserve. Revenue (remember it’s priced by unit sold) goes down. But most of the cost for the pipes and pumps is fixed, and doesn’t vary when users consume less. So conservation-minded customers are rewarded by rate increases. From the Orange County Register:

The Golden State Water Co. has applied to the California Public Utilities Commission to raise its 2013 water rates that could see Golden State’s average residential customer’s bill in Orange County increase by 24 percent. The boost, the company says, is to offset lower profits caused by a drop in water consumption and for system upkeep.

Cue Zetland.

Fabulous Desert Paradise

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My sister, Lisa, found this old postcard at Mom’s last week:

Palm Springs postcard

Howdy from Palm Springs, Calif., Fabulous Desert Paradise

The caption on the back argues that Palm Springs is America’s favorite winter playground. Who am I to argue?

After we’re done with the Peripheral Tunnel, pyramids!

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Pyramids

Pyramids, courtesy Ricardo Liberato/Wikimedia Commons

An economic analysis released last week suggested a Peripheral Tunnel to move California’s water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta could create 129,000 jobs. (Good Alex Breitler story lays out the details.)

The boosters at the Southern California Water Committee jumped on the argument:

This new jobs study on the tunnel options is the first major study of its kind, and it opens our eyes to the fact that – beyond helping secure our water supply, promoting a better Delta environment and providing a monumental boost to our aging and deteriorating public infrastructure – building a new conveyance tunnel could create more than one hundred thousand new California jobs.

Awesome. But can I point out that spending $12 billion building anything will create a lot of jobs building that thing?

Personally, I think new pyramids would be awesome.

 

Mike Taugher tells us what’s really going on with Sacramento Delta diversions

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A group with one set of interests in California water has tried to frame the discussion over how much water can be diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the classic “farmers vs. fish” framework. Others disagree. Traditional “view from nowhere” journalism quotes one from Column A and one from Column B and calls it good.

Kudos to my old bike riding buddy Mike Taugher for a more blunt, “view from somewhere” approach in his story Friday on the end-of-water-year pumping numbers:

New measures to protect fish indeed have affected water supplies, but most of the cuts to date have been due to drought.

Taking a straw out of the Colorado?

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The premise of a piece I wrote recently over at the Lane Center was that folks in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin are all elbowing up to the front of the line to try to get the next straw slurping water out of the big river before it’s too late. The focus was on the state of Colorado’s discussions of a running a giant, multi-billion dollar straw up to Flaming Gorge:

Colorado’s dilemma is the same one found all across the states of the Colorado River Basin. The water is in one place, while the people are in another. Thus you have what amounts to artificial rivers all up and down the Colorado, siphoning and draining and pumping the water away from the Colorado as the basin states try to maximize usage of their legally allotted shares of the river.

In response, an alert reader pointed me to an interesting counter example – a Salt Lake Tribune editorial arguing against a similar project up there:

The Legislature should close the floodgate on any scheme to finance the Lake Powell Pipeline with state funds. Utah can’t afford the pipeline in the current weak economy, the water for the project may become unavailable due to climate change, and other state demands must have higher priority, beginning with education and transportation.

Anyone know if this would be a first?

 

Irony defined: Barnett’s “Blue Revolution” at the office pond

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Irony defined: sitting in the shaded courtyard at work yesterday at lunch, next to a lovely fountain/pond flanked by lush lawn, reading the opening chapter of Cynthia Barnett’s Blue Revolution:

Sacramento landscape architect Ronald Allison tells of a two-and-a-half-acre residential design in Granite Bay with a waterfall, a grotto, a cave, six fountains, a pool with a bridge and an island, and a ninety-foot water slide: “It’s fun for the grandkids.”

Irony multiplied: After lunch, walking back to the newsroom to write about Albuquerque finishing up its driest water year on record, at 3.26 inches (8.28 cm)  since last Oct. 1.

This morning I totaled up and double-checked the numbers for my house, a couple of miles from the official airport gauge that yielded that depressing 3.26. I had a whopping 4.94 inches (12.55 cm).