Water Education Foundation
This is just one post in the Aquafornia News & Exclusives Category
Click here to view all posts

Odds and ends: FOR blasts the peripheral canal, more on the Public Water Coalition, ag subsidies distort the market, urban runoff that’s not urban, free online course in watershed management, your chance to be the ultimate worldwide water God, plus pictures & more!

Posted by: Maven on April 23, 2009 at 12:16 pm

There’s so much here in this jam-packed edition of Odds and Ends, I simply cannot list it all in the title!

If you’re for the peripheral canal, you’re for river destruction, says the Friends of the River blog, because a peripheral canal only makes sense in conjunction with more dams. Let’s also be honest about the PC’s potential. It COULD be run well and it could reduce the negative impacts of Delta pumping. The problem is that with water in California the potential for good is often overwhelmed by the political necessities of harmful decisions. If the PC is built, water WILL be shipped south at times that more fresh water is needed in the Delta. It will happen and if you think otherwise, well, I have a great investment opportunity for you with Madoff Investments. From the Friends of the River blog: The Peripheral Canal … Let’s Be Honest

More on the Public Water Coalition: The On the Public Record blog tracks down their position paper and checks it out. What is this coalition about? Every recommendation in the report is a way to protect the power of the already powerful water interests in the state. If you want to know the water buffalo party line, this is it. (Given that, I’m impressed with the extent to which they have conceded that environmental management is necessary. I’m thinking that is Tim Quinn’s influence.) This position paper heavily favors the upper Sacramento Valley water users, which doesn’t surprise me, because it looks as if they were the organizers for this coalition. They are throwing the in-Delta farmers TO THE WOLVES. Advocates for maintaining the Delta in its current state, know that the big dogs have turned on you. More analysis and commentary on the paper from the On The Public Record blog: Introduction, I got mine, II. e. Real Time Operations/Monitoring/Reporting

Subsidies distort the market, says the Environmental Working Group’s Mulch Blog, responding to the recent AP article. These subsidies encourage inefficient water uses by encouraging farmers to grown water-thirsty crops in arid places: The AP reporter made highly conservative assumptions, resulting in a subsidies estimate at the low end of the range calculated by EWG. But even AP’s numbers show that taxpayers have paid huge amounts to double-dippers – and for what? Countless farm communities are facing disaster. So we have to wonder — what if just half of that money had gone towards supporting farmers to implement water conservation practices? More from the Environmental Working Group’s Mulch Blog: Federal Subsidies Worsen California Drought

All ‘urban runoff’ is not necessarily ‘urban’, discovers the LA Creek Freak in a mapping project of local streams.  While mapping streams past and present in the Hollywood Hills, she discovers a stream not dry – and feeding into the local storm drain system.  She ponders how much ‘urban runoff’ is generated from urban sources:  True, we have no shortage of waste from poor water management, and plenty of it is polluted.  But here is interesting evidence that some runoff is from a stream just being a stream – and that it would still be flowing in a stream if we hadn’t rammed a street through it.  Suggestive to me, anyway, that we might want to have a policy for managing this urban runoff a little differently than treating it like wastewater.More from the LA Creek Freak: Urban runoff?

Free online course in watershed management from the U.S. EPA: Complete 15 modules and you can earn a signed certificate. The course requires no registration, admission, or tuition is necessary, is open to everyone worldwide, at any time, and is completely Internet-based. Get more details from the EPA by clicking here.

Your chance to be the ultimate water God – play the World Water Game: You can download this free game from Delft Hydraulics: The WWG is a computer game with a double purpose. One, to be played as a game in the spirit of challenge, tension and fun. Two, to show students and other non-professionals the relationship between four extremely important elements: population growth; water supply (and use); food demand and production; and measures taken and investments made to avoid hunger, and even starvation, situations in the coming century. WWG players become World Water Managers with incalculably more power and responsibility than any single person will ever have in the real world. They have to manage the world’s precious water resources and public funds sensibly and ensure that the 19 World Water Regions remain reasonably self-sufficient in food production. Hat tip to the Sisweb for this one! Delft Hydraulics presents the World Water Game

Pictures and other fun stuff: Is this not a rather obscene water tower? and The Top 10 Water Idioms from the Thirsty in Suburbia blog, Astronauts photograph water flowing to Southern California from the Science Dude, and On Walkabout blog posts about the Hoover dam tour, with plenty of pictures and information. Here’s three new water blogs (AWRA blog) and not this guy again with his Plasma Incubator Reactor Desalination System again (why am I thinking of that Bugs Bunny cartoon with the little Martian guy…?)

And here’s even more: Tim Brick discussing the federal stimulus money on the KCRA News: Capitol Corner: California’s Drought Woes Continue, Westchester Parents notes that the LA City Council skipped Phase II restrictions and jumped to Phase III, and the New Yorker Magazine on the shrinking of Lake Mead.

April 23, 2009 · Filed Under Aquafornia News & Exclusives

Comments

Leave a Reply