by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
As appearing in the Daily Sentinel

“Why does she keep bringing that up?” “Why won’t he just let it go?” Studies show those are among the most common questions people ask therapists. Therapists respond with impressive words that cost several hundred dollars an hour. I am no doctor, but the simple answer is: because you haven’t fixed the problem yet.

I get the same criticism. Every time I write about a common issue, such as water, someone invariably points out that I’ve written about it numerous times, and asks if I haven’t already made my point. Possibly so, except that others continue to raise it, almost always with a “new” angle, invariably helpful to California, but threatening to the economic future of Colorado.

A couple of months ago it was the New York Times, bragging that Wall Street investors were going to buy western water and make a killing selling it to California, not caring that it would permanently dry out Western Colorado. This month it was a feature article in an Aspen newspaper, repeating the fiction that global warming has rendered future Colorado water development all but impossible. The article relied ostensibly on another new study. Talk about continuing to bring something up. How many more studies about this do we need? This one came from Utah State University’s “Center for Colorado River Studies.” That is a grant-funded program, describing itself as “a nexus for innovative research, teaching, and outreach that informs management of the Colorado River system…” Self-indulgence and grandiloquence notwithstanding, management of the Colorado River system is “informed” by a series of laws, not white papers published by college professors.