Housing and water: a year later, are we closer to an answer?
Posted on | December 29, 2011 | 1 Comment
A year ago, I puzzled over the implications of the collapse of the southwest housing business for our long term water future.
We’ve got another year of data, and no real sign that the southwestern growth engine in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the two cities closest to the edge of the water cliff, are coming back:
Phoenix, Las Vegas Housing Starts, courtesy St. Louis Fed
What’s funny here is that it wasn’t the reasoned arguments of smart growth advocates, implemented through a wise political and policy process, that achieved this end, but rather the internal contradictions of the overheated housing business itself. Whatever. To what extent does this simplify the water policy dialogue in the southwest? Sure seems like it makes Pat Mulroy’s job easier, though I doubt she’s happy about the circumstances.
How US home builders screwed up
Posted on | December 29, 2011 | No Comments
Anthony Downs at Brookings, from “What’s Wrong With American Housing“:
Even before the dramatic collapse of housing starts after 2005, it should have been obvious to home building firms that they were in for a downward ride after starts surpassed two million in both 2004 and 2005. Those years of peak production led to an oversupply in 2006 that started driving nationwide median home prices downward for the first time since 1968. That overbuilding then helped generate the chain of events that led to the lending freeze of 2008-2009.
A Positive Spin on Texas Drought?
Posted on | December 28, 2011 | No Comments
Texas precipitation, percent of normal, 2011 (through Dec. 28)
Let me suggest a positive narrative to the story of Texas’ great drought of 2011.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality today released its latest list of communities whose water supplies are threatened as a result of the driest year on record. Topping the list is tiny Groesbeck, between Dallas and Houston, where a line of yellow pipe, built to provide an emergency supply, has become emblematic of the struggle to keep water flowing to Texas homes and businesses.
In converging on Groesbeck, reporters are doing what we always do – singling out the worst. If you tally up the latest TCEQ list, fewer than 8,000 homes and businesses, in a state of some 25 million people, are currently in the most high risk category: “Could be out of water in 90 days or less”. Fewer than 3,000 homes and businesses rank in the next most serious category: “Could be out of water in 180 days or less.”
Is Texas drought really the story of the resilience of an affluent society in the face of an unprecedented environmental insult?
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: a water wonk’s Christmas greeting
Posted on | December 25, 2011 | 1 Comment
There’s a tradition in newspaper journalism of the heartwarming front page story on Christmas morn. Here’s mine:
If you could look straight down 538 feet beneath the La Cueva High School neighborhood in Albuquerque’s far Northeast Heights, you would see water returning to the metro area’s depleted aquifer.
The water table in the area had dropped more than 60 feet after decades of pumping to meet the city’s drinking water needs. But, in the past three years, as the metro area’s largest water utility reduced its groundwater pumping and shifted to using river water instead, the water table beneath the La Cueva neighborhood has risen 8 feet.
From the whole Inkstain team, wishes for a Sassy Christmas
Posted on | December 24, 2011 | No Comments
Graphing the energy boom
Posted on | December 23, 2011 | 2 Comments
I’ve not been writing much about energy for the last couple of years, and only following it shallowly, so the fact that New Mexico’s oil production has reached the highest level since 1998 kinda snuck up on me. But what’s going on here is child’s play. Look at North Dakota:
North Dakota oil production
John McChesney’s done some good stuff explaining what this all means on the ground, and now comes Keith Schneider with some excellent new reporting out of North Dakota over at Modeshift. Schneider’s talking about North Dakota, but framing the argument more broadly – North Dakota as the epicenter of a remarkable US energy boom:
Bottom line: The 481,000 oil and gas production jobs are generating 1 million more jobs in related industry, service, and product sectors like tanker, pipe, and gas turbine manufacturing, construction equipment, real estate construction and the like. That’s 1.5 million jobs or “as many as 3 of every 5 new jobs created by the US economy since 2005 can be attributed to the recent surge in US oil and natural gas production,” said Robison.
One other point. EMSI found that the roughly 481,000 new oil and gas sector jobs generate an annual payroll of nearly $38 billion.
We’re not seeing North Dakota-style action here in New Mexico yet. Oil production here may be at its highest level in more than a decade, but unemployment in San Juan County’s oil patch is still at 6.4 percent – greatly improved from the recession peak of 10.6 percent in the summer of 2010 but far from pre-recession levels under 3. But the Baker Hughes rig count for New Mexico stands at 80 this week, up from 68 at this time a year ago.
So I’m watching.
Untangling the QSA
Posted on | December 21, 2011 | No Comments
Elizabeth Varin had an interesting story this morning about the latest Imperial Irrigation District discussions about the Quantification Settlement Agreement*, the Byzantine** water deal that provided a path for California to go on a Colorado River diet (reducing its use to its legally allotted 4.4 million acre feet per year). The deal has two key elements – an agreement to reduce ag use in the Imperial Valley and sell the saved water to cities on the coast, and a somewhat vague plan to make the Salton Sea suck less even though reduced ag runoff will make it even smaller and smellier than it is today.
The deal’s sort of a decade old, and to say its implementation isn’t going well would be an understatement. Varin’s story suggests fears in the Imperial Valley that folks there will be left holding the bag if (when?) the deal falls apart, which is why they’ve hired Chuck DuMars and his team of water policy analysts and lawyers to try to think through what a “Plan B” might look like.
Overall now, though, it seems like the goal of any plan B would be proposing a restructuring to deal with what is actually happening, he said.
“Much of our activities, much of the way we address society today is to propose a theoretical solution, and when it doesn’t work pretend it is working,” (DuMars) said.
That’s what troubles him about the QSA, he said. People wanted it to happen because it’s a great concept to keep agriculture viable and support the economic interest of the Valley, but it’s a product of huge urban political forces, the state, Bureau of Reclamation and Colorado River states all pushing for a result. At the end of the day that is not working
One major concern, both when the water transfer was originally being negotiated and now, is whether IID will retain its water rights on the Colorado River.
As part of the agreement, no, the water rights should not be affected, said Stephen Curtice with Law & Resource Planning Associates, DuMars’ law firm out of New Mexico. But in reality, whenever a city gets a source of water, they rarely give it back. The local water district won’t be using that water in 40 years, leaving it open to lawsuits about whether it should have present perfected water rights to it.
The QSA may have legal protection of the water rights of the Imperial Valley, but it’s not a permanent protection, he said.
* There’s a nice untangling of the QSA history in the USBR’s Colorado River Documents, which is a big fat book printed on pieces of paper.
** I mean “Byzantine” here in its sense of “excessively complicated”, not in the more pejorative “devious” connotation often suggested by the word. I think.
Coveting thy neighbor’s water
Posted on | December 21, 2011 | No Comments
It’s not clear to me whether the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study is a tool for developing solutions to the long term supply-demand imbalance on the river, or a process for the states and other interests to stake out their turf. Probably some of both.
Witness, for example, the comments in a story I recently did framing the study from a New Mexico perspective:
By 2035, according to new data released last month, annual demand for the basin’s water could exceed supply by 13 percent under the most likely scenario as use continues to grow while climate change reduces flows in the river. Such an imbalance is unsustainable, emptying the reservoirs on which the region depends, said University of Colorado professor Doug Kenney.
“That’s enough to crash the system,” Kenney said.
The risk for New Mexico, which is not yet using its full share, is that others may covet our underused allocation as supply-demand tension grows, said Estevan López, head of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and acting state engineer.
“We should be working with the other states to try and make sure that the other states aren’t looking at water that New Mexico is entitled to,” López said in an interview this month.
Note that staking out turf and developing collaborative solutions are not mutually exclusive.
Power for the coming centuries!
Posted on | December 19, 2011 | No Comments
Power for the coming centuries!
In Colossus
When Lissa and I were in Boulder City last week, I found this in the museum-y hallway at the Boulder Dam Brewing Company (which has a lovely collection of similar memorabilia), a poster hawking tours:
THE MAKING OF AMERICA! Power for the coming centuries! Blocking the age-long escape of floods to the sea! The massive Hoover Dam will create the largest artificial lake in the World. Never again will humanity view the open gorge of the Black Canyon, nor the river basin above it. See it now. Have your children see it.
What’s Aaron Million’s Water For?
Posted on | December 18, 2011 | 2 Comments
Not being up in Colorado, I don’t have a good feel for how seriously to take Aaron Million’s Flaming Gorge pipeline proposal. My hallway conversations at CRWUA left me with the feeling that not a lot of people in the basin take it very seriously, but I don’t know water issues in the state of Colorado well enough to know if I was talking to the right people.
Bruce Finley’s latest Denver Post story on the project gave me pause:
The pipeline to move up to 200,000 acre-feet of water a year could sustain water-intensive hydraulic-fracturing operations in Wyoming and Colorado, Million said.
“We’ve heard rough figures of 15,000 to 20,000 acre-feet annually for fracking needs,” Million said. “If this new water supply helps with the fracking issues, then, without question, we would consider delivering water for the industry.”
Here’s the puzzle. During the tangled federal approval process last year (at the time, the project was before the US Army Corps of Engineers), Million delivered a list of potential users that was mostly front range municipal water users, with some ag thrown in. (pdf here) Now that fracking is hot, Million’s talking fracking and energy with the Denver Post. Does this kind of changeability mean this is a flakey project I should ignore? Or, conversely, does this mean that water demand from multiple sources on the front range is such that I should take it even more seriously?
keep looking »
