A lot of people have asked me my opinion about the new water legislation just passed in Sacramento. Here is a longer version of my piece in the New York Times Bay Area blog page
Someone is stealing our water. Many someones. But who and how much? No one knows today, mostly because the agency responsible for keeping an eye on water rights and use–the State Water Resources Control Board–is blind, deaf, and dumb.
Blind, because they don’t look. Deaf, because they don’t listen to or act on most requests to investigate water rights allocations and use. Dumb, because they don’t talk about these issues. “Asleep at the switch,” as a colleague describes it.
New numbers on total water use in the United States in 2005 have just been released by the U.S. Geological Survey, which does an assessment of water use every five years.
In a previous post here, I raised the population and water issue in a general way. My point was that ignoring the population component of our resource challenges was a mistake, certainly in the long term and in some places, in the short term. I think this is indisputable — resource constraints are worse than they would otherwise be if populations are large and growing rapidly rather than small and growing slowly, or even shrinking.
Population discussions raise lots of hackles. And they bring the crazies out of the woodwork like termites when the Orkin Man appears.
Disasters happen. Earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, tsunamis, and more. And as we see at each disaster, and saw last week with the terrible earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific region, the first and most urgent need after rescue operations are finished is usually clean, adequate water. What do we do? We load heavy pallets of plastic […]
One of the key solutions to our water problems is to use the water we have more efficiently.
Regular readers of this blog know my feelings about the potential to improve the efficiency of our water use. Besides being cheaper and more environmentally beneficial than new supply options, efficiency improvements are easier to find.
It is raining this morning. Very unusual for September. Maybe we’ll have a wet year.
As more and more of the world looks to knowledge, education and science as the routes out of poverty and conflict, parts of America seems to be slipping back toward the Dark Ages,
Rigged feasibility study shows desperation for new surface reservoirs.
