Immigration and California’s Water

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I’m guessing folks at “Californians for Population Stabilization” didn’t start with a worry about water supplies and then decide, “Wow, limiting immigration would be a great way of dealing with this problem!”

Over the last thirty years, population has grown by one million in San Diego and population levels are projected to grow by another million in the next thirty years. Now that water is being diverted upstream, San Diego simply doesn’t have enough water for its population, much less for another million people.

‘Cause when these folks express concerns about “immigrants”, they don’t seem to be talking about people moving in from Oregon.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Parched Rio Grande

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The Rio Grande at Albuquerque’s Central Avenue bridge dropped to 200 cubic feet per second overnight, perfect timing for this morning’s newspaper piece about low flows on the river (sub/ad req). For those not versed in our obscure ways of water measurement, “200 cfs” translates roughly as “awful damn low”:

Water agencies are scrambling to find enough water to keep the Rio Grande wet through Albuquerque after the river dropped last week to its lowest level in six years.

The discussions reflect a new reality on the middle Rio Grande, as the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority diverts increasing amounts of water from the river to provide drinking water for the metro area.

This is the sort of problem that exposes the weaknesses in New Mexico’s water accounting and management practices, about which I’ll have much more to say.

Swimming Doves

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Saw the strangest thing this morning in the pond outside my office at home.

Swimming Doves, October 2010

The pond’s a round metal stock tank Lissa got me for my 40th birthday. It’s popular with the birds, but never like what I saw this morning – swimming white-winged doves. The picture’s not great. I watched ’em for a while, but then when I went in the other room to get the camera to capture their strange  behavior for posterity, they largely stopped. Go figure.

I’ve had doves forever in the yard. They’re a common desert bird, growing more common in recent years. They sit on the power lines in the backyard, and frequently come down to drink. But swim? Never seen it.

There were half a dozen or so on the edge of the pond, taking turns jumping in a sort of paddling clumsily across, climbing up on the other side. One kind of floated, duck-like, on the pond for a few minutes. The show lasted probably less than five minutes, and then it was over.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Tea at the Santa Fe Institute

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I used to write a lot about the Santa Fe Institute and the fascinating trans-disciplinary research that goes on there, but in recent years I sorta lost touch. I went up last week for a visit to reconnect, and, among other things, have tea (sub/ad req):

SANTA FE — To understand the Santa Fe Institute, best to drop by around 3 in the afternoon for tea.

One recent afternoon around cakes and iced tea in the institute’s courtyard, the conversation drifted easily from linguistics to statistics to molecular biology to the history of geology to the history of astronomy in India to the big bang and the origin of the universe to quarks. In no particular order.

“It turns out,” paleontologist Doug Erwin said, “that if you get people together from very different disciplines and feed them, a lot of good things will happen.”

Pentagon Pull

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Re Dan Sarewitz’s Nature column of last April about the value of “Pentagon pull”  to drive energy innovation, here’s Elisabeth Rosenthal in the New York Times:

Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.

Water Pricing in California

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When the price of water rises, ag users feel the most pain.

That seems to be what is happening in northern San Diego County, where rising prices of water delivered by the Metropolitan Water District to the Valley Center Municipal Water District is apparently making a big dent in the avocado business, reports Pat Maio:

The district has found itself in the eye of a supply-and-demand hurricane. Water rates have soared 50 percent or more to agricultural customers in the last few years as the chief supplier, the Metropolitan Water Authority, has moved to end a subsidy program for farmers and jack up wholesale rates as supplies have become scarce.

Growers, meanwhile, complain that they can’t keep pace with the higher bills, so some are turning off meters as they abandon fields, either temporarily or permanently.

In the last month or so, meters have been turned off on hundreds of acres of avocado groves in the Hidden Meadows area north of Escondido and along Cole Grade Road in Valley Center, according to farm and water officials.

Other groves are being taken out of production as well. Overall, more than 5,000 acres have been taken out of production in the last year, according to Eric Larson, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

(h/t Groksurf)

In Search of the Rio Grande

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This being “World Rivers Day“, I spent the morning puzzling over the nature of ours.

My New Bicycle

My New Bicycle, September 2010

Truth is, I was planning on being aware of our river this morning anyway, via a ride on my new bicycle (seen here propped against a log at one of the constructed wetlands adjacent to the Rio Grande). I don’t really need formal river awareness activities. I’m down by the Rio Grande most weekends, and quite a few weekdays, being aware. Our river is a source of endless fascination.

One of the new bike’s main purposes, in fact, is to get me down to the river. It’s a hybrid road-dirt machine, so I can ride the five miles of street I need to get to the river, then ride the levees and dirt trails. (Bike geek tech here.) I’ve kitted it out with saddle bags to hold binoculars for bird-watching and enough food and water to get lost in my thoughts without incurring significant danger.

Rio Grande, September 2010

Rio Grande, September 2010

This morning I used it to get off the paved bits and onto the levee roads that flank the river through the heart of Albuquerque.

Albuquerque’s relationship with its river is an odd one. When I moved here 20 years ago, I was puzzled by the way the city turned its back on the Rio Grande. Aside from bridges carrying cars across it, there were very few places where you could actually get out to see the river. Few trails or picnic tables or benches. It has changed a bit, but not a lot. The Rio Grande is arguably the proximate cause of my city’s location in this particular spot of all other spots in which it might have been built. But it’s like it’s now been used and discarded.

This picture was taken on the west side of the river, looking north toward the big Interstate 40 bridge across the river. In the foreground, you can see a mud flat still wet from the high flows caused by an epic storm last Wednesday. A guy died. They found his body on an island upstream from here. But that’s another story.

For purposes of this narrative, you’d have to follow me up a levee road until it peters out on a stretch of river where the bluffs obviated the need for flood control protection, and there’s nothing but little single track through the willows, one of which dumped out on the mud flat. I guess enough people do care about their river to keep beating out the single track, because this is not a trail system, just people like me trying to figure out how to get out to see the Rio Grande.

Rio Grande irrigation ditch

Rio Grande irrigation ditch, September 2010

The Rio’s flowing at about 600 cubic feet per second through Albuquerque as I write this, which means nothing if you’re not a water numbers nerd. Three points of comparison:

  • The flow in the Rio today is about 50 percent above normal for this time of year.
  • Wednesday night’s flood was four times higher, which was enough to kill a guy.
  • The Mississippi at St. Louis is flowing at 431,000 cubic feet per second right now.

I’m a numbers guy, so thinking about the Rio Grande, for me, involves thinking a lot about numbers like these – cubic feet per second, acre feet per year. But it’s also important for me to get out as often as I can and look at the river, to help make sense of the numbers.

I looped back south and then across the river, where I stopped to look at one of the main irrigation ditches. It serves as a reminder of why Albuquerque is where it is – water diverted from up north, being carried to farms south of here. It’s another way of thinking about the – not flood danger, or recreation, or nature, but food. The river here, in a sense, spreads out across the middle Rio Grande Valley in a vast distributary system of ditches that you could think of as being as much river as the main channel is through this stretch of New Mexico.

A few years back, I interviewed one of the ditch riders, who talked about how spring is his favorite time of year, when they first turn the water out into the ditches and the valley starts greening up. It’s like the valley is taking a great deep breath, he told me.

Lots of different ways to be with, and to think about, our river.

River Beat: End of the Water Year, Taking Stock

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“Water year” 2010 ends next week, making this a good time to take stock of our historic position on the Colorado River. And by a couple of different measures, things are truly historic:

  • The latest forecast (and right now forecasting amounts to tiny fractions of in inch) puts Lake Mead’s surface elevation at 1084.14 feet above sea level at midnight Sept. 30, the official end of the water year. That is the lowest end of a water year since 1936, when Mead was being filled for the first time.
  • The latest weekly forecasts show Mead dropping below 1083 during the third week in October, which by another measure (lowest surface level at any point in the year) drops below the lowest point of the drought of the 1950s. That’s the point at which we can unambiguously say Mead is the lowest it’s been since they filled it in the 1930s.
  • Perhaps more importantly, the surface elevation level translates to an end-of-year storage level of 10.1 million acre feet of water, which is by far the lowest storage level at the end/start of a water year on record. This is the measure that matters the most, and by this measure we’ve been lower than the 1950s levels for a while. (Total storage for a given surface elevation decreases as the lake silts up.)
Lake Mead storage

Lake Mead Storage, data courtesy USBR

Click on the image for a bigger version, but it’s pretty easy to see at a glance what’s been happening. Since the late 1990s, the reservoir that supplies water to Las Vegas, LA, San Diego, Phoenix and the vast farm empire of Imperial County has been in decline.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released the latest draft of its 2011 Annual Operation Plan last week, with a preliminary summary of the year just past. In short, it was dry:

Inflow to Lake Powell has been below average in nine of the past eleven water years (2000-2010). Although slightly above average inflows occurred in 2005 and 2008, drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin persist. Provisional calculations of the natural flow for the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, Arizona, show that the average natural flow since water year 2000 (2000-2010 inclusively) is 12.0 maf (14,800 mcm). This is the lowest eleven-year average in over 100 years of record keeping on the Colorado River.

Lake Powell, located upstream, is the collection point for most of the Colorado’s flow. Reduced inflow there means less water to be released for downstream users.

It is important to remember that, despite the drought conditions, releases from Lake Powell have been sufficient during each of those 11 dry years to meet the Upper Colorado Basin states’ legal obligations under the Colorado River Compact. Drought has eliminated the surpluses on which the lower basin had come to depend, in the process laying bare the real problem with Colorado River Management. (see my May post for an explanation of the problem.)

But numbers, schmumbers, right? Via NASA, some pictures that tell the story better than any of my pretty graphs:

Lake Mead Circa 1985

Lake Mead Circa 1985, courtesy NASA

Lake Mead Circa 2010

Lake Mead Circa 2010, courtesy NASA

(thanks to Tom Yulsman for pointing out the NASA images)

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Jevons Paradox

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From this morning’s newspaper, a column (sub/ad req) about the reasons energy efficiency may not save as much as its advocates frequently claim:

In a new paper, a team led by Tsao has drawn international attention by arguing that, instead of leading to reduced energy consumption, super-efficient bulbs may instead lead to people simply using more light.

In some cases, in a result that seems counterintuitive, energy consumption could actually rise. But this is not a bad thing at all.

To understand why, take a trip to the villages in rural Costa Rica where Michael Fark has been working.

Fark heads a Canadian nonprofit called Lighting Up The World, which has been trying to get the super-efficient light bulbs developed by people like Tsao into the hands of the people who need them most.

There, one- or two-room clay brick houses are usually lit by candles or kerosene lamps.

It is lousy light by our standards, barely enough for the young Costa Ricans to do evening schoolwork after a day of helping in the fields. But that light, dim as it may be, is so precious that families spend up to 30 percent of their cash flow on candles or kerosene for a few hours of light per day, according to Fark.

Give the Costa Rican farm families a more efficient way to light their homes, as Fark’s organization is doing, and they will choose to consume more light, not less energy.

Multiply their predicament by some 2 billion people in poverty around the world, and you enter the counterintuitive world of “the Jevons paradox.”