Juicy new website
We all want the cleanest possible electricity, but to understand what that might eventually be, it helps to understand what fuels juice up our outlets now. This is an introduction to a new link from the editor whose day job is to compile Aquafornia, the newsfeed of the Water Education Foundation. At her new website, mavensmanor.com, Chris Austin can’t seem to stop herself from teaching and offers a selection of tutorials on California water and power. This mavensmanor link looks at electricity.…
‘A perfect drought’
The "bathtub ring" around Lake Mead revealed during the last decade by the Southwest's persistent overdraft of Colorado River water. Photo: Glen MacDonald / UCLA. Source: PNAS
Sod’s law would have it rain across California as a suite of papers explaining how a “perfect drought” is gripping the American Southwest appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That disarmingly dewy reassurance from the sky (we don’t capture or store most Southern California rain) doesn’t make the central warnings in Climate Change and Water in Southwestern North America any less true, or the need of our region to reform the way it manages growth and resources any less pressing. Click here to read the PNAS special series of papers edited by UCLA geographer Glen MacDonald and including contributions from the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick and Arizona State University’s John Sabo.…
Who he?
He looks less like the father of LA’s water system William Mulholland (left) and more like ER’s Anthony Edwards, but according to the Los Angeles Times, energy consultant Ron Nichols, managing director of the Seattle-based Navigant, is the new nominee to become the next general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.
More will become clear about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s latest candidate for a post whose politics have chewed up and spat out nine water department GMs in the last ten years. All the Nichols bio page at Navigant offers is a nugget that makes him sound like a Wall Street version of Wen Jiabao. “Ron Nichols is a Managing Director in the Energy practice [sic] has over [sic] 30 years of experience in utility asset and enterprise financing, utility mergers and acquisition, and power supply portfolio planning and procurement. Mr. Nichols was the …
How right was Reisner?
It’s a cliche because it’s true: there’s no drier topic than water. In 1986, Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, published what may be the most gripping book on the subject. Cadillac Desert begins from an airplane window looking down on land so dry that there appears no way that it could sustain the booming cities of the American Southwest, much less the agriculture that the US government had in mind when it formed the federal Bureau of Reclamation.
He then built the book with a succession of free-standing chapters that read more like magazine pieces, most but not all of which were marveling and disgusted histories of the region’s most famous (and infamous) water projects. …
Nevada’s latest test site
We watch big newspapers for the big stories, but the bulletins foreboding grand scale tragedy so often start small, such as this item in the Moapa Valley Progress. It reports that last month the Southern Nevada Water Authority began pumping what will be more than 8,000 acre feet of water a year from Coyote Springs, just north of the authority’s main service area in the Las Vegas Valley.…
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