Continue reading ‘Quoting Jeff Kightlinger and Jim Lochhead’ »]]>

As the former CEOs of two of the largest water utilities using water from the Colorado River, we have been deeply engaged in interstate and federal negotiations on the river for over 30 years. Those negotiations were tough, but the basin states ultimately reached agreement, including reducing California’s use of water by 800,000 acre-feet and adopting the current set of operating rules for the federal reservoirs.

Although we fought hard to protect our individual interests, we understood that the public interest is not always served by “winner-take-all” negotiating tactics. Agreements benefiting the river as a whole also benefit every individual water user, and the environment. We recognized the responsibility of the states, tribal nations, water users and conservation organizations in the basin to determine our own future, and not to have it dictated by interstate litigation or federally mandated solutions.

The clock is running out. Unfortunately, the current negotiations remain stuck, characterized by brinksmanship and talking points.

– Jeff Kightlinger, former head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Jim Lochhead, for head of Colorado Department of Natural Resources and Denver Water

Continue reading ‘In which my colleagues and I share thoughts on the future of Colorado River governance’ »]]> It is hard to know where to begin. The Department of the Interior’s Post-2026 Colorado River draft environmental impact statement, and the deep questions it raises, is an “everything including the kitchen sink” sort of process.

But at its root, the question it raises is simple: Tell us what you’re going to do.

It is easiest to quote the Draft EIS itself on the central question: “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” Roger that. Tell us what you’re going to do.

In the short run, with a meager snowpack and no clear explanation of how federal and state managers are going to operate the reservoir system, the basin’s dams and diversions now, we have no clear picture of what will happen in 2026. Tell us what you’re going to do.

Some specifics

The ad-hoc collective that Allen Best dubbed “the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River” – Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, Rin Tara, and me – took yet another stab at offering our suggestions in comments we submitted yesterday to Interior’s P26 EIS process.

I’ve been mentally largely elsewhere lately, finishing up the book and managing my health (I’m doing great! Thanks for asking!), so I mostly show up at the last minute on these things to dub my vocals, but my friends are very kind and inclusive, and they do good work. In particular, stuff like this full of both useful NEPA-speak and also substance:

The analyzed alternatives do not meet the purpose and need of the proposed federal action. “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” Therefore, the alternatives analyzed do not meet the purpose and need for the federal action as described in the DEIS. It is incumbent on Reclamation and Interior to provide at least one alternative that meets the purpose and need.

As I said: Tell us what you’re going to do.

The Final EIS and Record of Decision must specify how short-term operations will address the current vulnerability of the system and its critical infrastructure. The new operating regime for the Colorado River will be implemented at a time of unusually low storage volumes and unprecedented low flows. The vulnerability of the system in providing an adequate water supply is unprecedented. Regardless of the duration of the next set of guidelines, it is imperative that Reclamation provide a clear picture of what actions will be implemented in the near term (i.e., next year, next 3 years, next 5 years) to protect critical infrastructure, and to protect public health and safety.

As I said: Tell us what you’re going to do.

The preferred alternative should be based on the broadest possible interpretation of federal authority to ensure a sustainable water supply provided by the river. The DEIS states that, “The Basic Coordination Alternative is designed to be implementable without agreements among Basin water users regarding distributions of lower Colorado River mainstream shortages, storage and delivery of conserved water from system reservoirs, or other voluntary agreements….” Because the Basic Coordination alternative does not meet key performance objectives for a large percentage of the Dry and Critically Dry futures, it is incumbent on the Agency to explore and propose using the outer limits of their authority to achieve a system that provides a sustainable water supply. Reclamation and Interior should not default to a “safe” legal approach when those operations are insufficient to balance supply and demand and provide a prudent operating regime. Lawsuits over the operating guidelines adopted by the Department of the Interior are inevitable, regardless of which alternative is adopted, even a theoretically “safe” one. Therefore, the preferred alternative should utilize the broadest possible interpretation of Reclamation’s and Interior’s authority to provide a predictable and resilient Colorado River so that the system can continue to operate in a reasonable manner while the lawsuits proceed.

This one’s on you, Secretary Burgum. We do offer suggestions, but if you don’t like ours, then tell us your alternative: Tell us what you’re going to do.

This one has seemed for a long time like a no-brainer to me:

The Upper Basin demand scenarios utilized in the modeling are unrealistically high.… [T]he Upper Basin demand scenario utilized in modeling the impacts of the various alternatives is much higher than historical use and does not reflect likely future actual use. The 2016 UCRC demand scenario embedded in the DEIS modeling is approximately 40% to 50% higher than recent average demand. Public statements by representatives of the Upper Division states emphasize the limitations imposed on Upper Basin water users by annual hydrology, but the UCRC demand scenario fails to take those hydrologic limits into account.

Really?

This one’s on my Upper Basin leaders: Really?

Reclamation should specifically identify what additional authority is needed to implement an operating regime that meets the purpose and need for the EIS over the long term. There are no alternatives identified in the DEIS that meet the purpose and need and that Reclamation can implement without additional legal authority. This creates significant uncertainty around river management, despite the intended purpose of providing water users a greater degree of predictability about water availability in the future. Reclamation should describe specifically what additional legal authorities it believes would be required to implement desired operating provisions. Furthermore, Reclamation has indicated the intention to “seek additional authorities” to protect critical reservoir infrastructure. These additional authorities should be explained.

Again, Secretary Burgum: Tell us what you’re going to do.

The colossal failure of the Colorado River Basin leadership is on display in this simple sentence from the draft EIS: “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.”

You’ve spent the last few years telling us what you can’t do. It’s on you now: Tell us what you’re going to do.

(Lots more in the full comments, it’s a useful primer on the current state of play.)

Continue reading ‘Pitchers and catchers report’ »]]>

Tingley Field, courtesy Albuquerque Museum

The best Albuquerque baseball stories I heard are both about Willie Mays.

The first is that time at the old Tingley Field where, as a friend put it, “Willie Mays once broke a lady’s car windshield with a foul ball.” We’ll have to take my friend’s word for this, but he says he straight up heard it from a guy who was there.

The likely date was a spring exhibition game April 2, 1956, the New York Giants against the Cleveland Indians. The Giants won 7-6; Mays went 0-for-4 (we know from the Albuquerque Journal’s story that he drove in a run on a ground ball, RBI’s weren’t standard in box scores back then). There is no mention of the foul ball incident in the newspaper accounts, but why would there be? My friend straight up heard it from a guy who was there, which is good enough for me.

Tingley Field

No dogs on the field. Tingley Field circa 2026, Albuquerque, New Mexico

The inspiration for today’s bike ride was the start of major league spring training – pitchers and catchers reported to their Cactus League and Grapefruit League camps in Florida and Arizona.

We started the tour at the site of the old Tingley Field, home of the minor league Albuquerque Dukes from 1946 to 1968. The old stadium is long gone, replaced by a nice new stadium up the hill, then another nice newer stadium up the hill (another Willie Mays story there, hold on) now home to a team named after a joke from The Simpsons. (I guess all baseball history is storied, I sure like ours.)

Tingley Field today is a city park with a couple of softball fields, set below grade so it can double as a flood control retention basin, with a big drain in one corner out beyond the right field fence.

From there, we just hopscotched around town from ballfield to ballfield – some high school, some little league. We finally found an actual game of baseball being played at the UNM Lobos’ field, but it had that annoying metal bat sound, so we didn’t stay long. I’d tried to make a map of ballfields. It was a pretty lazy effort, both on my part, and on the part of the technology I was using, but it didn’t really matter. As we wandered the city, we realized there are ballfields everywhere, necessary urban infrastructure I suppose.

The other Willie Mays story

Sometimes we also call it “The Lab.”

The final stop was the big lopsided baseball in front of what we insist on calling “Duke Stadium,” despite the best efforts of the municipal and corporate overlords who would prefer we call it “Rio Grande Credit Union Field at Isotopes Park.” The Isotopes , the minor league team that plays here, were named after a joke in the Simpsons.

Sometimes we call the ballpark “The Lab,” which I’m pretty sure one of my other friends came up with, but like the earlier Willie Mays incident, this is not well documented, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Epistemology – your choice about whether to believe me.

But the final Willie Mays story is well documented. And how.

It was March 31, 1969, when once again the Giants and the Indians barnstormed through Albuquerque on a late spring training tour. And it was Mays himself who was the first player to bat at the newly completed Duke Stadium. It is said that Mays called it “the greatest minor league ball park I’ve ever played in.”

There’s another foul ball story, though it revolves around a kid who rode his Schwinn Stingray to the ballpark, got hit in the head with said line drive foul ball, but he was OK and ended up with a Willie Mays autographed ball. The Stingray is the best part, sweet rides. The game ended in a 5-5 tie, called because of darkness. The stadium has lights now. The novelist Don DeLillo wrote that, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.” I have always loved this about night games.

Mays went 0-for-3, which by my count makes him 0-for-7 lifetime in Albuquerque. Likely the altitude, though they used to say that Duke Stadium was a hitter’s park because of the thin air.

Continue reading ‘My career as an energy economics journalist in two figures’ »]]>

Hubbert’s peak

But the peak will inevitably come, perhaps later this decade, perhaps now. The signs Gerth wrote about Feb. 24 may be the first signal that it is starting. “We simply don’t know,” Goodstein said. This is a problem New Mexico oil and gas producers have thought about a lot. Here, production peaked in 1969 and has been generally declining ever since, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute

– John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, November 2004

Hubbert’s steady continuing climb

Continue reading ‘Colorado River news isn’t all bad!’ »]]> I’ve been pretty successfully checked out of Colorado River work while I put the finishing touches on the new book (pre-order now!) but my colleagues are on it with a new post looking at the over-winter storage at the big reservoirs behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams:

Key Points

• The rules that control releases from Lake Powell and Lake Mead are very different. Lake Powell’s releases are determined by an Annual Operating Plan that has little flexibility during the year. Lake Mead’s releases change each month in response to changing delivery requirements to Lower Basin users. The impact of these different release rules on each reservoir’s storage was illustrated this autumn and early winter when Lake Powell steadily declined and Lake Mead steadily increased. The magnitude of Powell’s decline and Mead’s increase compensated for one another, and the total combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead did not change.
• During the four months between October 1 and February 1, Lake Mead’s releases were reduced in response to decreasing Lower Basin demands, but Lake Powell’s releases were not similarly reduced. Lake Powell lost 615,000 af during the four-month study period, and Lake Mead gained the same amount.
• On February 1, Lake Mead had 2,714,000 af more water than Lake Powell, the largest difference between the two reservoirs since April 2022.
• Modest flood inflows in early October delayed drawdown of Lake Powell by six weeks. Releases during the four-month study period were the second smallest since at least 2010[1]. Releases from Lake Mead were the smallest since at least 2010. Despite the small inflows to Lake Mead, the increase in storage in Lake Mead during the study period was the largest since 2019.
• The four-month delay in depletion of the combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead saved between 400,000 to 900,000 af.
• Forecasts for spring snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell are not encouraging and have been declining all winter, because Rocky Mountain snowpack remains meager.

[1]We compared the inflows, outflows, changes in storage, and Lower Basin consumptive uses between 2010 and 2026.

This feels like good news, or least not bad news, except for that last bullet. The Upper Basin median forecast is just 40 percent of the median.

Continue reading ‘Craig Mod on Books’ »]]>

That’s what we’re here for. The books. Nothing we do is more durable or meaningful. I believe this more and more with all my heart. The weirder the world gets, the less meaning there seems to be in public discourse, the more I feel: BOOOOOOOOOOOKS. Printed, hefty suckers, immutable and offline. Moar. I trust books as a medium. I trust how they get me to collate my thoughts in a way no other medium does. Their arc can be long and infuriating (years from conception to release), but there is a density of committed effort present in a book held in hand that cannot exist in a YouTube video or a thousand Instagram Reels.

– Craig Mod

I’m working my way through the page proofs of Ribbons of Green, the new Fleck/Berrens joint, on shelves in June. We’ve got a Feb. 20 deadline to get stuff back to our friends at UNM Press. It’s a project to be savored, this final run through the page proofs, the last step in the chain from manuscript->pdf-page-proofs->”printed, hefty.”

The number of public words I have written in my life is large. I recently had occasion to download the corpus of this blog, dating to 2003: 6,500+ posts, 1.4 million words not counting the comment threads, which used to have a lot of my words in them too. 37 years of daily newspaper work is likely another 2 million words (big error bars on that second number, but it’s likely in the ballpark, maybe +/- 500k?). I loved all of that writing. I never didn’t love doing it, learning stuff, crafting strings of words to share what I learned with y’all – the constraints of the structure of a newspaper story traded off against the utility of being handed a sizeable audience right out of the gate; the elbow room of the blog, to break out of the constraints of the newspaper form and say “fuck” sometimes and also be fully opinionated and weird. Writing about bike rides and stuff.

The books – Water is For Fighting Over, Science Be Dammed (with Eric Kuhn), and Ribbons of Green, (with Bob Berrens) are tiny in comparison, but it’s in the density that they become the thing Mod is talking about, pursuing/sustaining a line of thought for 75,000 words, the drive to say something useful and new at scale.

I’ve got nothing against, as Mod put it, “a YouTube video or a thousand Instagram Reels.” I’m a blogger! One of the surprises of my Inkstain data analysis project has been the volume of stuff I wrote on the the blog in 2014-15 when I was using the blog really aggressively as a sketchbook for the work that became Water is for Fighting Over – three words on the blog for every word in the book. The ephemeral stuff has value too, I could not have lasted through a 37-year newspaper career if I didn’t believe that.

But the book’s the thing.

Continue reading ‘Quoting Rolf Schmidt-Petersen on water management in New Mexico in 2002’ »]]>

2002 snowpack and runoff were terrible on the Rio Grande and San Juan. Think the San Juan Chama Project diverted about 6,000 acre-feet into the Rio Grande that year (normal would be between 80,0000 and 120,000 acre-feet. Heck, for Colorado on the mainstem Rio Grande, we had to negotiate a new delivery by Colorado to New Mexico because the actual inflow that year was lower than any contemplated in the Rio Grande Compact. Only thing that allowed us to manage thru the year was releases of water stored in previous years. If this dryness continues, with no storage to speak of, 2026 will be a very difficult year of water management/flows and, unfortunately, possibly fires.

– Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, pulled out of the comments here.

Inspired by Rolf’s comments, I ran some numbers to get a feel for what reservoir storage looked in 2002. Here’s the most useful graph – total water in storage above New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley this year, compared to 2002:

2002 compared to 2026, reservoir storage in Northern New Mexico. Data USBR, graph by John Fleck

Watch the dotted line. That’s storage declining in 2002 as water managers drained water out of El Vado and Heron reservoirs (primarily) to keep the Rio Grande flowing. We don’t have that option this year.

Continue reading ‘Colorado River Assigned Water: Quoting Sorensen et al’ »]]>

For more than a century of development, Colorado River governance has lived under a
tension between individual communities’ desires to use more water and the collective
need to balance basin-scale supply and use for the benefit of the region as a whole.
Incentives favoring individual communities at the expense of the collective good have
brought us to the edge of the current crisis.

– Considerations for Assigned Water after Expiration of the 2007 Guidelines, Kathryn Sorensen, Sarah Porter, Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Katherine Tara

The latest project from our little Colorado River working group takes a deep dive into the arcane rules governing what Arizona State University’s Kathryn Sorensen has dubbed “assigned water” – water that results of conservation efforts, set aside in the Colorado River Basin’s reservoir storage accounts for the future use of whoever did the conserving. Sort of.

While most of of the attention right now is focused on the top line conflict among the basin states, there remains a need to get the down-in-the-weeds details right.

Originally developed as a tool called “Intentionally Created Surplus” in the 2007 Colorado River operating guidelines (who names these things?), Assigned Water has become a critical tool for managing water use reductions in a way that helps ensure reliability for the water users to whom the tool is available. It’s extremely valuable, but is not without its drawbacks – crowding out conservation efforts that might benefit the basin as a whole, inadvertently shifting system water that again might benefit the basin as a whole into an individual water agency’s savings account, and delaying shortage declarations that might have enforced deeper cuts, sooner.

Continue reading ‘Marsh Buggies in the Desert’ »]]>

Marsh buggy in the desert, Elephant Butte Delta Channel, January 2026.

I was crammed into the back seat of a Subaru wagon Friday, bouncing down the tail end of the last dirt road along New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande when the big marsh buggies emerged in the distance, blocking up the road’s end.

In the lexicon of the river’s “maintainers,” we were somewhere around “River Mile 55,” 32 river miles down the Rio Grande from San Antonio, which is the last reliably populated human habitation on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande; 55 river miles upstream from Caballo Reservoir, where the river mile counting begins. The marsh buggies, transplants from oil field work in coastal Louisiana, were a bizarre sight, perched on the edge of a desert river.

It was an odd party of adventurers, armed with a drone, some binoculars, cameras, a notebook, and the most important tool of our trade, a cheerful curiosity.

This stretch of the Rio Grande is not quite as forgotten as what we capitalize as “The Forgotten Reach,” the stretch of the river south of Fort Quitman, Texas. But it feels pretty forgotten, other than the odd Bureau of Reclamation or Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District maintenance crew, a few intrepid birders (and those paid to do Endangered Species Act bird surveys), the very occasional bike rider, and those skilled in finding out-of-the-way BLM camping spots.

Twenty-eight rivers miles downstream, Elephant Butte Dam plugs this stretch of the Rio Grande, an engineering feature completed in 1916 that defines the geomorphology of what I’m going to start calling my “forgotten reach.” The spot where we parked for lunch among the marsh buggies was underwater back in the late 1990s, representing the upper end of Elephant Butte’s near-full pool. The resulting sediment backup defines the strange back-and-forth of river behavior – what I love to call “the Rio Grande doin’ river stuff” – and “river maintenance.”

Beginning soon after Elephant Butte was built, the sediment backup here plugged the river channel, heavy flows of silt from the Rio Puerco, the Rio Salado, and myriad smaller desert arroyos filling the main channel, washing down until it hit the new base level established by Elephant Butte’s full pool, raising the valley floor, plugging the river.

In the 1950s, Reclamation dug a canal through the reach to move the water down more “efficiently,” where efficiency, perhaps rightly, was defined as getting water to the folks downstream who need it.

The pas de deux between the Low Flow Conveyance Channel and the main river channel has been going on ever since, not always happily from the point of view of the above-mentioned definition of efficiency. For nearly twenty years, the Reclamation and the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission have hired the marsh buggy operators to dig a channel through all the muck so the river has a place to be.

Beginning sometime in the late 1990s (further research needed) a secondary channel formed along the western bluffs on this stretch of the river, originating in a leak in the human-built Conveyance Channel, which has become very popular with the birds – with the efficiency-minded water managers not so much. There’s a bit of a war of words about what to call it. My vote is for “Rito de Fray Cristóbal”, with “Fray Cristóbal” the name of the mountains to the east, but my Spanish is weak, drop your suggestions in the comments.

Reclamation is in the environmental review stage of a big project called the “Lower San Acacia Research Improvements (LSARI, and yes we try to pronounce it like a word that looks weird when you type it out – “el-sorry”) Project. The idea is to effectively rebuild this stretch of the Rio Grande at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

For the purpose of the new book idea Bob Berrens and I are exploring, LSARI’s goals reflect, for storytelling purposes, a perfect mix of competing and conflicting goals:

• improve the efficiency of getting water to Elephant Butte for downstream users
• “enhance ecosystem health”
• manage future maintenance costs by getting the river itself to do most of the geomorphic work

For the purposes of the new book project, it’s also a delightful place to have lunch with one’s fellow river nerds.