Now that California’s drought is over, the folks in San Diego are back to whining about water rates. A new poll shows:
h/t George Janczyn
How China’s surging manufacturing sector helps save water in California:
Although California’s population has continued to grow rapidly, water conservation activities and changes in economic structure (notably, less water-consuming manufacturing) have reduced water use enough since the mid-1990s to keep total gross urban water use roughly constant.
From the PPIC’s “Managing California’s Water“
When I’m telling stories, I look for the telling example that can represent something deeper – some small but memorable tip to stand in for the rest of the iceberg.
There are ways in which Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, the two photojournalists killed this week in Libya, are terrible examples, bad choices as the tip for the journalism iceberg. The staggering pictures of a firefight Hondros took inside a Misurata apartment building the day he died are vastly different from the week I spent scouring tables of groundwater test data. Mostly
Courtesy Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun and Newseum
what we do is far more pedestrian than the work of Hetherington and Hondros. There is no question that I lack the courage to chase an armed rebel up a stairway in the midst of a firefight to get the picture. But at its root, we’re doing the same thing – trying to make sense of chaotic but important parts of the world, and to come up with the best way to explain it.
Perhaps a quieter example from the recent world of journalism might illustrate why I feel so passionately proud of the work of my tribe.
It’s the work of journalists at Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun, a daily newspaper in Ishinomaki in northern Japan. From the Newseum:
For six consecutive days after the twin disasters (the earthquake and tsunami), reporters used flashlights and marker pens to write their stories on poster-size paper and posted the “newspapers” at the entrances of relief centers around the city. Six staff members collected stories, while three spent an hour and a half each day writing the newspapers by hand.
There were no press releases where Hetherington and Hondros and the staff of Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun were working, just stories that needed to be told. It’s a high bar, a standard we don’t always live up to, but it represents the best of us, and it’s a calling of which I am deeply proud.
At the risk of sounding maudlin, these are my people.
It’s only Tuesday, but I think I can call the Quote of the Week already. Chris Brooks, on who will end up bearing the cost of the externality that is the drying Salton Sea:
What typically happens is that the costs are imposed on a large, disinterested constituency – i.e. all the taxpayers of Calif. Then it’s considered a useful compromise that maximizes utility. Or at least that’s what the taxpayers are told.
Shaun McKinnon’s great reader piece on the retirement of Larry Dozier after 42 years working western water issues has an interesting coda. The story’s drama is the great tale of Glen Canyon Dam and the 1983 flood. (I like to call it “the year they nearly lost Glen Canyon Dam”, though that’s perhaps a bit theatrical.)
The story’s closing is a point that I’ve heard quite a few times in interviewing people for my book, and I’ve wondered if it’s Polyanna, or if this is a key element of how the western water system works:
“I’d be on a plane for a conference and I’d look around, and if I didn’t know a lot of the people, I’d think I was on the wrong plane,” he said.
What he learned was that, no matter how contentious the talks, no matter how long the meetings dragged on, the people in the room could never make it personal.
“After a while, you figure out if you’re going to get something done, you better get along,” he said. “And the next thing you know, you’re friends. You can trust them to promote their viewpoints and defend their interests, but you can also trust them to be honest.”
New Mexico sky
Economists have a useful framework for thinking about effects of an economic transaction that extend beyond the actors involved in the transaction. They call them “externalities”. They can be good or bad (benefits/costs enjoyed/borne by those not involved), but mostly the conversation revolves around the bad ones. The good ones we tend to take for granted.
Imperial Valley, 1905
Externalities are one of the big problem areas in sorting out how to create useful water markets in the western United States, where ag-urban water transfers are seen as one of the primary solutions to water shortages. The archetypal externality is the tractor dealership. The farmer sells water to the city, a transaction advantageous to both, meaning both benefit. But the guy selling tractors will sell fewer of them as agricultural land is taken out of production.
In the case of the complex reallocation of water now underway, the reduction of flows of ag tail water from the Imperial Irrigation District to the Salton Sea creates an externality. Critics of the reduction, who are not part of the IID-urban water transfers, argue that they would be harmed by the transfers because the Salton Sea would become even more icky than it already is. The question is how one accommodates that concern.
A grassroots group called “Citizens for a Reliable Water Supply” filed a brief with the California courts earlier this year suggesting this solution:
It is the people who receive water from the Quantification Settlement Agreement who should pick up the tab for environmental impacts, says Citizens for a Reliable Water Supply.
Questions for my smart Inkstain readers:
The Carlsbad Current-Argus yesterday morning had a story saying this:
Officials at the National Weather Service in Midland, Texas, say their weather data shows the drought in Eddy County and the surrounding region is on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Eddy County has not had any measurable rain since Sept. 25, and according to David Henning, National Weather Service meteorologist, there is no rain in sight for southeastern New Mexico and the neighboring Texas communities.
No.
No, no, no.
SE NM Climate Division, precip, Oct. - March, courtesy WRCC
As you can see from the accompanying graph (click to see it larger) of the SE New Mexico climate division Oct. – March precip, they’ve had a very, very bad year down there. But it’s been one bad year.
The Dust Bowl (and the drought of the 1950s, which is less famous ’cause it has a less cool name, but was worse in this part of the country) were decadal-scale events. From 1933 to 1940, precip for this part of the year was mostly well below average, and barely got above it. From 1950 to 1957, same thing, only worse.
Comparing this year’s single bad year to the Dust Bowl (or the drought of the ’50s) is inappropriate.
(Time history plot toy, very useful for this kind of blog science, available from the Western Regional Climate Center.)
Now that I’ve got this “largest artificial watershed in the world” hammer, everything’s beginning to look like a nail.
The “hammer” involves the notion that the vast artificial plumbing system we’ve built across the west has linked our water management fates in a way that did not exist when water tended to spend its human- and ecosystem-useful life in the watershed in which it first fell from the sky.
The latest nail is this William Roller story in the Imperial Valley Press on the reaction to the announcement that California’s drought is over. Imperial Valley depends not a bit on the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which is the subject of the most recent drought announcement. IID’s water comes entirely from the distant Rockies, and is so buffered by massive storage and legal entitlement that the concept of climatological, hydrological drought is largely irrelevant to Imperial Valley farmers. And yet…
The declared end of the state’s drought emergency is welcomed by the Imperial Irrigation District so that other agencies will not look to IID to fill the gap, says an official.
IID, with its huge Colorado River allocation, is a tempting target, the biggest potential “source” of water in the system. Drought in one place can cascade through the system in interesting ways.
Little Colorado River, Springerville AZ
More art from the hard drive reorganization. This is the headwaters of the Little Colorado River from another Lissa-John road trip (we road trip well) through Arizona. It’s just outside Springerville, and yes, it’s green, and flowing. (The Little Colorado is more famous for brown, and its relative lack of flowing.)
The development of the Little Colorado basin by 19th century Mormon immigrants is a fascinating bits of western water history. William Abruzzi has done some interesting work looking at the Mormons’ approach, which involved sharing of what one might call “ecological risk” across communities. From the Land Use History of North American project:
According to Abruzzi, it was the region’s numerous widely separated and structurally distinct local habitats that offered potential for widespread agricultural productivity. For example, a particularly wet 1890 agricultural season caused crops to rot at Alpine and led to the loss of dams at Snowflake, Taylor, Woodruff, and St. Joseph, but increased production at most other locations.
The particular genius that the Mormons brought to this region, as well as to others, was the development of a cooperative resource redistribution system that economically integrated the different farms and villages in the basin and enabled them to withstand otherwise devastating crop failures and dam losses. This took the form of a series of productive enterprises jointly operated by the early United Order towns in the lower valleys of the Little Colorado River, and a second system operated through the collection and distribution of the tithing resources among settlements dispersed throughout the river basin.