‘A perfect drought’
Posted on | December 15, 2010 | 1 Comment
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?
Posted on | December 14, 2010 | No Comments
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 lead business and regulatory advisor on the two largest revenue bond issues ever completed and has advised public power, investor-owned utilities, governmental agencies and non-regulated energy suppliers on over $30 billion of value of transactions.”
If confirmed by the City Council, Nichols will replace interim general manager Austin Beutner, a financier who had precisely no experience managing water when appointed, who replaced interim director S. David Freeman, who had quite a lot of experience, but who last summer left the department, the mayor and the city council in a circular firing squad position over rate hikes.
The choice of an energy consultant to succeed Beutner shows that the mayor is again trending in favor of a candidate who can deal with the complicated transition of LA’s power from coal-fired to renewable sources. That LA also has a water conservation program crippled by budget cuts and lawn lovers at City Council, fractious relations with Inyo County (source of roughly one third of the city’s water), and aging pipes whose bursts took out the GM before Freeman, one can only hope that Nichols is a fast learner.
Over at Mayor Sam’s Sister City, a question being asked is will part of his job include paying dividends to Villaraigosa’s old boss and water speculator Keith Brackpool? Time will tell. Brackpool is like an oil slick. He gets in everyone’s feathers. In the meantime, good luck Mr Nichols (pictured left). You’ll be needing it.
How right was Reisner?
Posted on | December 14, 2010 | No Comments
Central Arizona Project. Source: Federal Bureau of Reclamation
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. Click here to keep reading
Nevada’s latest test site
Posted on | December 13, 2010 | 1 Comment
Moapa Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Source: Wikipedia.
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. Click here to keep reading
Tags: chance of rain > Coyote Springs > Emily Green > Southern Nevada Water Authority
The week that was, 12/5-11/2010
Posted on | December 12, 2010 | No Comments
Panama Canal diagram. Source: Wikipedia
Both the Gatun and Alajuela lakes have reached the highest water levels ever recorded… — Panama Canal closed due to rain, Panama Digest, December 8, 2010
“… these rules are dangerous because, on the surface, it looks like the DRBC is doing something when they’re not.” — New Jersey chapter Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel, Delaware River Basin Commission posts proposed Marcellus Shale rules, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 2010. (For an overview of the water quality debate about gas exploration in the Marcellus Shale, click here.)
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