Irrigated farming with desal

Water cliche alert.
The former mayor of Phoenix wants to see desalination plants lining the Sea of Cortez to supply future water needs in Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona because he says "water is going to become, if it’s not already, more valuable than gold or oil.”  Apparently the economy is humming along so nicely in Phoenix they believe they are going to be the next Saudi Arabia.  Why Saudi Arabia?  Because that is the only place I know of relying heavily on desalinated water for municipal and industrial (M&I) needs (it may have something to do with the cheap cost of power in that region).  If you're talking about using desal to supply irrigation water (which is where most of the water is used within areas that border the Sea of Cortez) you are in similarly sparse company.  Israel and Spain are about the only places currently using desalinated water for irrigation on anything resembling a large scale and much of that use involves treatment of brackish groundwater rather than seawater.  Those types of waters have a much lower dissolved mineral content than seawater, so production costs are also much lower, but it still isn't cheap water.

Some overdue follow-up

I've neglected to follow through on my promise to provide an update to the Arizona Dept. of Water Resources (ADWR) Non-Indian Agricultural (NIA) water re-allocation process, that I have previously discussed here and here.  Sure I waited until almost the last minute but I am keeping my promise.  ADWR did release their final process (pdf) for carrying out the water allocation last month, as they promised and they are having a meeting next week (3/12) to go over the rules with potential applicants.  I won't be at the meeting because I don't represent any potential applicants - Indian tribes are specifically excluded from receiving an allocation of this water - but I hope to keep track of how this program progresses.  The final process is not dramatically different from what they originally proposed.  Without having parsed the final document closely the only real difference I can come up with is that they shifted some of the water to the second phase of allocation.  Apparently there was some concern that the full amount they proposed to give away next year might not actually be contracted for under the set of qualifications they proposed.  Maybe there will be some movement toward market allocation of water by the time the second phase starts up in 2021.  Maybe.

The other item at ADWR I have been following is their proposal to modify certain aspects of the recharge program, which I previously discussed here.  This proposal was floated by the department as a possible idea to include in the upcoming 4th Management Plans (4MP) for the Active Management Areas (AMAs).  There has been pretty widespread acknowledgment for more than a decade that certain aspects of the regulatory regime that governs use of groundwater in the AMAs probably still permits too much groundwater pumping in certain areas to protect the overall health of the state's aquifers.  ADWR thought they might try to address this by making some changes to the recharge program that would encourage water users to do their recharging and recovery of that recharged water in closer proximity.  My point has been that the problem is not the proximity (or lack thereof) of recharging and recovery activities.  The problem is that the rules simply allow too much pumping, sometimes in places where we might like to see a lot less pumping.  I think something along these lines will show up in the 4MP, but it will just be a recommendation to study the issue further.  This will result in a stakeholder process to look at possible solutions.  I actually thought the current Safe Yield Task Force was supposed to be looking at this issue but maybe too many people involved are aware that the real solution is not a path they want to go down.  We'll see.

Enhancing the Management of Arizona's Aquifers - an Alternate Proposal to ADWR

Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) recently floated a proposal to change the formula is uses to grant groundwater credits to entities that artificially recharge renewable water into aquifers as a way to permit additional groundwater pumping.  The state recharge program is a somewhat complicated scheme that I can't explain in detail right here, but you can get lots of other information at ADWR's website here.  This proposal is being made as part of the 4th Management Plan process - a once-a-decade planning exercise that is intended to get Arizona's Active Management Areas to Safe Yield by 2025.

The gist of the proposal is that it would reward entities that locate their recharging activities closer to where they are actually pumping out groundwater.  A worthwhile endeavor to be sure. 

Cato Article - Downsizing the Federal Govt. - BuRec

There's definitely some Cato Institute stuff that's just too far out there for me, but when they take on federal control of water resources in the West and advocate for more use of markets to allocate a scarce resource, they can probably reel me in.  I enjoyed this article, mostly for its advocacy of water markets.  I think it's easy to find examples of where the federal government has screwed up in their long-standing management of Western water and they do a good job of chronicling those in the article.  But they largely overlook much of the good that has resulted from those efforts - the Colorado being a prime example of both the good and bad of what the Bureau has done. 

We would not have the infrastructure that is needed to weather extremes of climate, like we have been experiencing the last couple of decades in the Colorado basin were it not for the extensive infrastructure built by the Bureau and that infrastructure could not have been built by any smaller unit of government.  We also could probably be figuring out better ways to manage the water of the basin if it weren't for ongoing federal control of the basin and all that infrastructure.  But the Southwest that we currently have - good and bad - clearly wouldn't be around today if not for what the Bureau did with the Colorado.

And the article clearly does a much better job of chronicling what's wrong than of proposing workable solutions.  That's think-tank work for you.  But still a pretty good article if you swing toward the free-market side on water management.

hat-tip to Marginal Revolution for the link that eventually led me to this article.

Anniversary of a Tragedy

It was exactly one year ago that I posted something completely uncharacteristic for this blog.  It was an event that had a tremendous impact on me, but I'm still not sure it had the kind of impact it should have had on society-at-large.  This idea is well articulated in this piece by Jeff Biggers, posted on Salon today.

I don't want to initiate an ongoing discussion on this blog about these events, but didn't want to let the anniversary pass without at least mentioning it.  It's one of those events in our lives we should try to never forget because the lessons to be learned from them are just too important.  The most important of which is to be part of a community, know your neighbors, be nosy sometimes, and take care of each other.  Fear and suspicion are enemies of these ideas - they need to be fought.

I'm hoping to pick up the thread of my recent discussion of Indian water rights soon, so bear with me.

Enough already!

Something tragic forces me to speak to an issue other than water today.  Earlier this morning, my congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, along with several of her staff and bystanders were shot by a nut-job with a gun as she was meeting with constituents at a grocery store here in Tucson.  I didn't know Rep. Giffords personally, but I have supported her in the past and believed she was a good person, who did an excellent job of representing a district that is almost evenly divided among democrats, republicans, and independents.  What that means is she knew how to compromise and craft common-sense solutions.

First, I want to express my condolences as well as my thoughts and prayers for those injured and killed, their families, and those who worked with them and knew them for the good people they are.  While Rep. Giffords, at this point has a good chance of surviving despite being shot in the head at point blank range, it appears that among those killed were a federal district judge and a 9 year old girl.

Second, I want to note that while a part of me wishes that this were nothing more than another random, senseless acts of violence, the character of the political discourse that has evolved in this country, and especially some of the comments made about Rep. Giffords in the recent election, which she narrowly won over a republican candidate who ran a very negative campaign (supported by a lot of national conservative money that often used language against her that could be construed as advocating violence against those they oppose) makes me think there was more than that involved.  In this kind of political climate, common sense tells me that the acts of this individual, while clearly indicative of some degree of mental illness was surely motivated by political belief and may have been nurtured by strong statements against democrats from conservative commentators and bloggers.

It's time to return to more civilized discourse in this country.  If this tragedy can help us all realize that political power is not important enough to threaten or incite violence and focus our leaders in on doing what is truly important, then at least something good may come out of this tragedy.  But if it only leads to more anger and invective then we will have learned nothing and will be doomed to repeat tragedies like this.  I sure hope that's not the case.

Update:  A gunman is in custody and it appears that he was a very disturbed young man.  While his particular motivations are currently unclear, it's inevitable that the current state of politics will lead many to read a lot into his motivations and actions beyond the seeming prevalence of senseless violence in the world around us.  As I said before - if leads to some genuine discussion and redirection of our political discourse, that's great.  But if it will only add fuel to the flames, I'd prefer that we just call this more random, senseless violence.