Arizona’s dry future begins as Colorado River shrinks
wsj.com
wsj.com
I will add that there is decades old research on how to plant trees in the desert in their own local catchment to help them survive on rainwater and Earthships are a known technology for living lightly on the land. My recollection is you can adequately supply an earth ship with water for as little as 10 inches of local rainfall annually.
http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2015/07/if-you-read-two-books-...
Taos, heart of the Earthship movement, gets 12".
It definitely made me sure I'd never want to move to Arizona or New Mexico.
It's a little unclear to me how realistic the scenario painted there is, for the simple reason that the main problem with water in the US southwest is commercial agriculture, which uses 75% or more of all the water in these areas. This is the result of ideas promulgated in the first 3-4 decades of the 20th century (the Bureau of Reclamation) which touted the idea of a garden paradise, based largely on the unusually wet couple of decades that had just happened.
If you eliminated commercial agriculture in the US southwest (let's conveniently pretend that this doesn't cover the Central Valley of CA), there's plenty of water for everything else, even in the middle of the worst drought in 1200 years.
The book doesn't appear to deal with this very well. Still, great story and very imaginative.
[ EDIT: one idea I did really like in the book was the part about the federal government allowing states to ban inter-state migration, so that the "Zoners" (people from AZ) could not move, and would effectively become refugees within their own state and nation ]
Now, maybe if the snowpack is gone and the rivers are dry someone could set up a gigantic solar desalination plant on the California coast and start producing water to be piped to Nevada and Arizona... which would need more gigantic solar plants to produce the electricity to power the pumps. Someone will have to pay for that, and the costs will be pretty high. Probably higher than the revenue from the tourism or agriculture in the region. What happens then? People leave the region.
To your point, the book specifically floats a "vision" of a new kind of housing development in Las Vegas and Phoenix that the book calls "arcologies" but you might think of them as high-end earthships for the ultra-wealthy. They use very little outside water, endlessly internally recycling almost every drop of moisture within them. Accessible only to the ultra rich. I personally find this a much more believable idea and much less sci-fi than the notion that Nevada, Arizona etc. will receive water via a multi-thousand mile long, multi-thousand foot elevation spanning pipeline.
I think you may be underestimating the challenge of bringing water to the US southwest. Also, as I've mentioned several times in this thread, without commercial agriculture, there essentially would be no water issues here. When 77% of your water is being used to irrigate crops, most of which are exported from your region ... you've got a different kind of problem.
Wallace Stegner, quoted from:
https://bensonian.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/you-have-to-get-o...
Also worth reading:
https://aarondenham.com/2021/09/04/getting-over-the-color-gr...
Is there no way states can like...organize a trade? Clean power for clean water? Or is piping that much water around not realistic? I know it's a naive take, just felt weird seeing and living on both sides.
None of which helps with establishing the actual cost of the water.
Granted, the situation with the CA and AZ irrigation projects is somewhat different, since the water arrives on your land thanks to a massive federal government project. In this case, while it might not be accurate, determining and defining some sort of price is feasible.
I know the compacts with other states have trigger points that invalidate them during shortages. I wonder if the NM allotments work that way too. (If not, and they're fixed for all time, then NM is probably headed to a situation where there simply isn't any water.)
The well water in CA mostly arrives due to snow pack melting and sinking into the aquifer.
There are state projects to allow faster spring melts (thanks, climate change!) to reach the aquifer. They basically slow the flood water and cut ruts that let it drain into the aquifer instead of the ocean.
Your "massive federal project" is probably referring to the California aquaducts and reservoirs, which are a separate water delivery network.
The interstate compacts for the Colorado and Rio Grande (also the Pecos) don't have anything directly to do with intra-state water rights. Obviously they are connected in some implicit way because it's all the same water. But this is why in general you can't fulfill water rights by pumping from rivers directly (its not impossible to do legally, just hard). Every drop of rain or snow that falls on NM is effectively pre-alloted (and the federal government already controls a large chunk of it).
AFAIU, it's only the water delivered via aquaducts that can really be said to have a controllable cost. I know that CA generally prefers that farmers use that water and not pull from the acquifer, but my impression has been that they can't prevent farmers from using wells if they stay within the water rights associated with the land.
https://www.abqjournal.com/2383522/nm-may-lose-ownership-of-...
The concept here, which is clearly and correctly communicated by the article, is simple.
New Mexico believes that it has the final say on its water. New Mexico believes that every drop of water that falls in New Mexico is under New Mexico's final control.
For 50 years, New Mexico has been "negotiating" with the Native Americans in their land, by running their own courts and deciding in their own favor, over and over again.
This is blatantly illegal. The entities they are dealing with are soveirgn nations - entirely distinct countries - and we have been very, very clear with the states that they do not have dominion. If you're American, just think about all those casino fights. Every single one, lost. All of them.
Why?
Because *the states are not the owners of that land.* Those are other countries, and they get to set their own rules.
The problem is that New Mexico has been robbing the Native Americans of their water for almost a century, and has become entirely dependant on water that does not belong to them.
Over the last fifteen years, the Navajo have been saying "this is going too far, we don't have electricity or sewage or schools, you can't keep taking our resources for free." So New Mexico offered them about five cents on the dollar for their water, which amounted to about $1.3 billion.
Then New Mexico took three times as much water as they purchased, and reneged on half the money.
The Navajo finally said "enough" and took them to court, because New Mexico in 2019 took so much water that Navajo people started dying of thirst.
New Mexico runs sprinklers on lawns in the open air, while taking away so much water from the Native Americans that they're dying.
Every one of those beautiful trees in the near forest city of Santa Fe is built on the corpses of Navajo who died of thirst.
The Navajo won.
The State Engineer's Office immediately paniced, because more than 70% of New Mexico's water is stolen from the other countries that New Mexico thought it owned. They will all win too, if they try.
The State Engineer's Office went to the court of appeals and said "please let us continue to steal the Native Americans' water, we know they're dying and we know they're another country and we're just a state, but the trees in our city parks are thirsty."
For once, the US courts did the right thing. They said "no, and you're not allowed to raise it further."
It's the whole state. The reason this is important is that every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
If they all take the route that the Navajo did, then Santa Fe no longer has a water supply at all.
This article, that you said was incredibly poorly written, got all of these topics correct.
I'm sorry you felt the need to insult the writer. It also makes me feel pretty bad for having brought it up, because I thought this would be worth your time.
In the balance, it seems like you didn't learn what the real situation is.
Good luck to you.
The article in the ABQ Journal does not, in fact, state any of the things you've mentioned above. I appreciate that you cited the article, I just think it was poorly written.
What the article describes is this: a Court of Appeals judge said that because Congress was involved in the settlement between (at least) the Navajo and the state of NM, Congress is now in charge of water in NM and not the state (at least, this is one reasonable interpretation of the opinion). The SE Office appealed this on the basis that it contradicts decades of clear precedent. NMSC declined to hear the appeal, which potentially leaves the door to someone (potentially one of the tribes) forcing administrative action that forces Congress into active oversight of water allocation etc.
I said it was poorly written because it lacks sufficient context, uses short out-of-context quotes from the court's opinion, and because it completely fails to explain the relationship between the SE Office/State, the tribes and the US Congress. The article does not describe the settlement reached with the Navajo, for example, it does not describe the general situation with water in the state, it does not describe the context of the settlement.
In addition, I do not believe it is the true to say:
> The entities they are dealing with are soveirgn nations - entirely distinct countries
While the US (and to some extent, the Spanish) did grant significant sovereignty to (some of the) the nations already here during European colonization, the sovereignty of the tribes today is far more complex than is indicated by calling them "entirely distinct countries". Any serious challenge to the authority of the federal government would be harshly dealt with (challenges to state government, not so much). The Navajo and the Hopi utilized the federal government in their attempts to resolve their own disputes over land and access. While I believe that the tribes deserve more autonomy, more power and definitely more water, the actual legal situation is far more complex than the one that exists, for example, between the USA and Mexico or the USA and Canada.
> every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
I think (but am not certain) that you're describing inflows to the area of the state. This does not describe the Pecos River, nor the rainfall nor the snow.
In general, I think you might be imagining that I'm not aware of or sympathetic to the tribes' arguments in this matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. I entirely agree with the terms of the settlement, and think it should likely go further.
> Last month, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed 10-year intergovernmental agreements with the leaders of two pueblos — Picuris and Pojoaque — but other tribes are still not allowed by the federal government to grow marijuana.
There's no "complex soverignity" here. US marijuana law entrenches a great many casually illegal things because nobody's powerful enough to fix them through the DEA budget.
Highlights include that marijuana is on the schedule 1 list under two different names, and extacy 3; that marijuana is also on the schedule 2 list, despite that nothing is permitted to be on multiple schedules ever; and that the entire prohibition was never legal in the first place, as it's just Nixon's extension of the illegal tax stamp scheme.
You'll have a very hard time convincing anyone with even a passing familiarity with the law that American marijuana laws are a good example of a system working as expected.
Also, since you seem to be holding yourself up as a knowledgeable expert, the state level requirement was stricken in 2020, and a pact with the tribes was signed a month and a half ago
Not only is your example incorrect; it's also not true anymore
Yes. And when you finish reading the article you keep criticizing, you may learn that these are what the Navajo just successfully sued back from the state, after the state tried to lay claim to them.
.
> I said it was poorly written because
I already told you once that you made me feel bad by trying to say this.
I'm not interested. Thanks.
.
> > In addition, I do not believe it is the true to say:
> The entities they are dealing with are soveirgn nations - entirely distinct countries
That's nice. It is, though.
.
> > every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
> I think (but am not certain) that you're describing inflows to the area of the state.
No, I meant the words I said
.
> I think you might be imagining that I'm not aware of ... the tribes' arguments in this matter.
The things you are saying are directly contradictory to a correct understanding of the matter, so I don't believe "imagining" is actually the right word here. I think it's "discovering."
.
> I entirely agree with the terms of the settlement
Sir, the settlement is what was overturned. The thing that we're discussing is a judgment, not a settlement.
This is like someone suing someone for breach of contract, and in attempting to support them, saying "I agree with the contract."
If you support the settlement, that's saying New Mexico is right, and the water should continue to be taken.
It's very difficult to take legal discussions seriously with someone when they misuse basic concepts.
https://www.abqjournal.com/1186369/state-appealing-navajo-wa...
> State government recently got a big legal victory when the New Mexico Court of Appeals upheld a landmark water rights settlement with the Navajo Nation. [ ... ] Although the “result” of the April appeals court decision authored by Judge Pro Tem Bruce Black was correctly in favor of settlement, Black’s opinion held incorrectly that water in the San Juan River through New Mexico “is ultimately subject” to federal government control and “denies the State’s jurisdiction over its own waters,” says the petition filed Friday at the high court.
From the 2021 article that you cited:
> The New Mexico Supreme Court recently decided to let stand a Court of Appeals decision that the Engineer’s Office says would rob the state of its ability to regulate water rights in New Mexico.
Here's you, just now:
> Sir, the settlement is what was overturned. The thing that we're discussing is a judgment, not a settlement.
I do not see to square the reporting in the ABQ Journal with your claim that the settlement was overturned.
Do you have some links to the suit you're saying was brought by the Navajo Nation? I have been unable to find anything about such a suit. The only one I can see is the suit against the federal government regarding access to water from the Colorado
https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizona-news/2021-04-29/navajo...
Note the paragraph at the end of the piece also:
> It’s the second recent court victory for Navajo Nation water rights. Last month, all challenges were dropped from a settlement over the tribe’s access to the San Juan River.
which, like the ABQ Journal pieces, suggests that the settlement was upheld, and the challenges to the settlement were denied.
Separately, if you literally meant this:
> every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
then I'd appreciate gaining an understanding of which of the tribal nations you've named, or any that you haven't named, lay claim to the source or basin of the Pecos. In my research on this, I couldn't see any sign of those tribes holding claims on that land. The same question would apply to the other rivers that flow out of the Sangre de Cristo. If any native people had a claim to that, I would expect it to be some/all of the Puebloans.
This is not good faith and I have no interest in arguing with your most recent use of a search engine
If you had no web browser you wouldn't be able to write a word about this
You haven't read the articles about the lawsuit, much less the lawsuit itself
No understanding is coming for you, because you'll just argue with it then ask for more until someone gives up, so that you can feel like you were right all along
The quotation literally verbatim agrees with what I said about your error, word for word, and you're still pushing
My quote from the ABQ Journal said "upheld a landmark water rights settlement with the Navajo Nation". You said "Sir, the settlement is what was overturned". Then you avoid explaining this by claiming bad faith.
Having now read a good chunk of your comment history on HN, I think it's time to bow out of any attempt to discuss this with you. A persistent failure to provide citations, frequent bad-faith style of discussion, hand-waving assertion-from-self-invented authority seem common.
That said, if there actually is a lawuit by the Navajo Nation that overturns the settlement reached with NM, I would actually like to know more about it.
I expect it is more complicated than that, and less adversarial. The states really could make life more unpleasant for the reservations if they wanted, and the feds couldn't necessarily keep that from happening. It's in everyone's best interest to play along.
> I expect it is more complicated than that, and less adversarial.
It is neither.
You think there was a low amount of adversary in clawing water back to prevent further deaths?
If you are in any way interested, stop arguing and go look it up
The UP of Michigan indeed has land and lots of water, but you're not going to be growing a lot there in January.
Except for one thing:
> In 2019, there were a total of 838 commercial greenhouse vegetable operations with 17.6 million square metres of production area which produced nearly 664,450 metric tons of vegetables.
https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/canadas-agriculture-sectors...
By contrast, just California alone produced 173500 metric tonnes of just bell peppers. California alone produced almost 1000000 metric tonnes of sugarbeets.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...
So while there's no doubt that agricultural production, even in winter, even in the great white north, is viable, the scale doesn't really come close to what is happening in the US southwest.
California exports a lot of stuff. Canada may simply be trying to feed itself, so the 'extra' volume may not be considered a major consideration.
> […] the scale doesn't really come close to what is happening in the US southwest.
How useful is scale if it can't be sustained?
Regions like Arizona are just inimical to large-scale human habitation and agriculture. The good news is that Arizona is projected to get more humid thanks to climate change. The bad news is that Arizona isn't projected to get any less hot, so look forward to an increasing frequency of wet bulb events in the future.
Piping water long distances isn't particularly hard, true. But ... piping water uphill consumes extraordinary amounts of energy. Where I live in NM (between 6000 and 7000'), it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that we'd ever see water pumped from within a few hundred feet of sea level up here.
Thus “pump water from the east coast into a tributary of the Mississippi”
The way these kind of projects work is to divert water at the border between multiple catchment basins. You might need to pump water up a minimal distance or even simply cut a channel at one end which lets you extract the same amount of water without negativity impacting anyones water rights.
As to pumping water up, users downstream of the Mississippi don’t care where their water comes from as long as they can get it. Thus you can now move water upstream on the western edge of the Mississippi to Nevada because that’s been offset but adding water to the eastern edge of the Mississippi catchment basin.
Of course the more water you want to move to Nevada the more complicated this gets. Also, it would be much more convenient to start from the Great Lakes than the east coast but the basic principle works.
Interestingly Colorado river water is diverted to the east side of the continental divide this way, e.g. for Denver water supply (and others). Which ultimately deprives Los Angeles, which is also diverting water from the Colorado river in much the same way. Actually to be fair it’s ultimately depriving the Mexicans of a Colorado river....
Don’t think that one will fly.
That isn't right. Doubling diameter should drop flow rate to 1/4. Area scales with the square of the diameter.
Analysts say that the costs of the $25 billion groundwater extraction system are 10% those of desalination.
It is the largest underground network of pipes (2820km / 1750 miles) and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere. The late Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi described it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".
FWIW in Portland water isn't at all a cheap resource which speaks to the costs of even fairly local transport and delivery. (Portland's water source is ~60 miles east at Mt. Hood.) To me it suggests attempting to share water with very distant areas would be an extremely expensive/complex engineering feat that would dwarf construction of the new Panama canal. Even a project of such scale is by comparison merely a backyard ditch.
This is the same technology that is used to raise groundwater to the surface, and to distribute water from many reservoirs. It is in economic use today.
The aqueduct I mentioned, that which brings water from the Colorado river to Southern California, uses several pumps to raise the elevation of theaqueduct along its course.
There is no known way around the fact that energy = force times distance = mass times acceleration times distance.
You want to move a lot of mass a lot of distance? You will need a lot of energy.
Scottsdale's population is 268,000, and they use 63.2 million gallons per day. That's 235 gallons per day per person.
Californians average 85 gallons per day. Arizonans average about 100 gallons.
Anyway, the snowpack is increasingly a thing of the past, and so is the Colorado river. I'm guessing Phoenix and or Scottsdale will be mostly abandoned in the next few decades. California cities can at least desalinate.
References for the water usage stats:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/scottsdale-az-po...
That's about 180 billion gallons a year. Divide by days per year and LA's population you get 123 gallons a day. But that includes industrial.
Either way guesstimating the cost of desalinization, I think it'd be about $170/per person a year. Call it $500/year per household. Water bill $40/month. Steep but not impossible.
There's no need to guesstimate. San Diego desalinates. They're almost the cheapest in the country, at about five times your estimate cost
It's a large nuclear heat source. You can just boil it down to sea salt, then sell it or put it into a cave
https://www.lcra.org/water/water-supply-planning/water-use-s...
[0] https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/agriculture#:~:text=Irr....
Some of the oldest laws in the US are water distribution agreements.
US water law in the west is also based on private water rights, a "first in time, first in right" approach that is completely different from the east (say, east of the 100th meridian). Out here, governments have no authority to dictate patterns of water usage across a watershed (for example) in times when such regulation might be to the benefit of everyone. If I have 3 acre feet of water rights, then if I can actually get 3 acre feet out of my well(s), I get to use it regardless of the general water situation.
These laws discarded (in NM at least) much older water management practices imported by the Spanish who had learned them from the Moors. These allowed for a "majordomo" who would regulate water usage on a community-wide basis, depending on the availability, need and community benefit. The US almost completely overthrew these systems after taking control here.
1. Colorado was, is, and remains in the future committed to the Union.
2. Colorado has no access to the sea but most downstream neighbors do, to which Colorado needs access. Worst case, these downstream partners can use desalination to obtain drinking water. War is always a choice for them. Colorado has no such choice.
3. Colorado is reasonable. We still need these United States to be at least somewhat self sufficient in food production. All I am asking is Colorado doesn't suffer alone while downstream neighbors waste water.
4. As a matter of principle, the water belongs to Colorado. Downstream partners must recognize this. Alternatively, they must realize we have a right to audit their water use.
All of this is my personal (uneducated, unqualified) opinion and does not reflect the will of the people of Colorado. Please correct me if you think I am wrong.
Basic survival there already requires artificial means; adding water to the requirements list only makes sense.
Yes, Phoenix in summer is close to uninhabitable without cooling, even with adobe/stone construction and properly designed ventilation. But head north to Flagstaff and the story is entirely different. Well designed structures are entirely comfortable there even in the middle of summer. On the other hand, it is also cold enough to require significant heating during winter.
Humans lived in Arizona thousands of years before air conditioning was invented.
It's also fair to say that the temps, even as few as 500 years ago, were much different than they are now.