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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Really starting to feel dangerous to live anywhere in the US southwest. Lake Meade approaching deadpool and massive wildfire nearing my house this summer. Plus the government is led by people who refer to much of the southwest as “fly over country” doesn’t help.

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Maybe the Southwest should elect representatives that believe in climate change.

Man, we are trying.

All eight Senators from CA, AZ, NV, and NM are Democrats, and I assume they "believe in climate change," although I'm not sure whether simply believing is going to make much of a difference.

Senators don't make local policy.

that was a reply to the suggestion that "maybe" the area should elect senators who believe in climate change. we already have. it wasn't a suggestion that this is actually the answer.

They said representatives not senators.

There are state senators who are the relevant representatives here not federal ones.

CA and NM both have Democratic "trifectas", and it can reasonably be assumed that they are dominated by anthropogenic climate change believers.

However, I would dispute your claim. The majority of the land (and thus resources) in the SW is under federal, not state control. Ergo, federal representatives play an outsize role in deciding questions central to the SW role in and sufferer of climate change.

I'm not posturing when I say there is no way people are going to be able to vote their way out of this in a sensible fashion. Not only are smart people in a minority, some of them are in the 'fuck you' bloc which is the most sizeable and quite motivated.

Rather cause and effect. We need efficient mitigations to problems occurring right now, not gestures that would have an effect 50 years from now, if only the rest of the world followed suit.

The mitigations are to stop development and water intensive agriculture, and anyone who runs on that platform won’t be elected. The problem will, painfully, solve itself when water supplies are exhausted.

Agriculture typically uses 75-80% of the water in southwestern states.

Residential is around 7% (similar to losses from evaporation).

Residential per-capita use has been declining for decades. Agricultural use per acre or flat or rising.

Stopping development has little to do with the water issues in the SW (it might still be a good idea, but this is not the main reason why)

I agree with you regarding the ratios you mention. Importantly, the Colorado River Compact was established during an atypically wet cycle, and even with ag reductions, I’d argue no additional pressure should be placed on the watershed due to long duration droughts becoming more frequent. We might yet have to bring water from elsewhere, no further pressure should be incurred.

The CRT was established after an atypically wet cycle, by people who were decidedly incurious about long term precipitation patterns.

http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2022/01/a-lack-of-curiosity-ab...

We would barely have to cut agricultural use in order to completely cover the water needs of doubling the entire population of the US southwest. Yes, surface and ground water sources are "stressed", but residential use is only going to get more and more efficient on a per-capita basis. Even though growing population creates more absolute need, in as world where agriculture is flood-irrigating fields or spray irrigating alfalfa (losing an outrageous amount to evaporation), we should start with the "easy" problems first. Pay farmers to install drip systems, for a start.

It does not change the fact that the area is becoming unliveable without massive investment.

Why should the rest of the country subsidize these people lifestyle choices to live in an inhospitable area?

I’d be willing to support subsidizing moving them to a new location that’s better suited to living in, but I have no interest in helping pay for people to spit in reality’s eye so they can live in a place they have emotional/cultural ties to

Unfortunately this thinking applies to many places in the US when it comes to weather and climate disasters.

Midwest river flooding, hurricanes all through the gulf coast, rising sea levels, tornadoes, New York was flooded from a hurricane, and Texas was pretty ravaged by some cold weather recently.

What place is so perfect for people to live in that doesn't face any challenges from climate change?

Probably no where permanent. They’ll have to move to the locations that fit their current needs much as I and many other economic migrants.

If they do not have the resources to make the move, I have complete empathy for them and am willing to vote for politicians who will allocate my tax dollars towards helping those people out of their current issue.

If, however, they refuse to move because of some non economic reason then that is a lifestyle choice they will have to shoulder the burden of. If one of my representative politicians tries to use my tax dollars to help them continue their untenable lifestyle choices I will vote for their competitor.

Also

> Midwest river flooding, hurricanes all through the gulf coast, rising sea levels, tornadoes, New York was flooded from a hurricane, and Texas was pretty ravaged by some cold weather recently

Don’t include Texas in that. The other groups have had weather systems of increasing severity that are massively expensive to build against. Texas had weather they declared was unforseeable when they had hit the temperature multiple times in the previous 20-30 years and refused to spend a relatively small amount of money to winterize their generators and mitigate the problem.

1. "the area" is not homogenous. the northern parts of AZ and NM (even CA) to some extent are climactically and geologically quite unlike the southern parts.

2. humans have lived in the area for thousands of years. Yes, it doesn't fit into a northern European notion of "the kind of place humans should live", but it fits entirely into the southern European, north African and Arabic culture and living patterns. These cultures (along with the native Americans ones that flourished here for millenia) have developed sophisticated ways of living in this sort of climate and landscape.

3. it's not unlivable, it's just unfarmable (note that this is different from subsistence ag. or gardening).

> “the area" is not homogenous. the northern parts of AZ and NM (even CA) to some extent are climactically and geologically quite unlike the southern parts

Well then it sounds like they have a local solution to the issue and don’t need to bother us

> humans have lived in the area for thousands of years.

And then humans changed the environment.

> it's not unlivable

If it’s not unliveable then they should be able to support themselves, no?

What are you talking about?

Move Phoenix and Tucson to Flagstaff.

Problem solved?

Residential is only 7% if you put the burden on the producer (agriculture) and not the consumer (people). Every time that such numbers are shared, most people quickly jumps to "farmers should pay more attention / switch cultures". Very rarely someone will talk about the impacts: a change of diet for consumers, most likely with less meat (though depends on the area). It is easy to assume that the water you consume only comes from the tap, but 1kg of beef meat costs 15,000 litres of water to produce [1]. Moreover, at a larger scale: "One third of this volume is for the beef cattle sector; another 19% for the dairy cattle sector." [1]. So instead of trying to find the scapegoat that supposedly consumes most of our water, we should all remember that we, meat eaters, are one of the main culprits here !

[1] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...

Not really.

I live in NM. The agriculture sector here produces less than 8% of both the calories and pounds of food consumed within the state. Most of the beef production in NM is exported out of state (and country).

So if the "burden is on the consumer", it's on people who don't live in US southwest, and that has to stop. The fever dreams of the 1930s/40s bureau of reclamation have done so much damage.

We need to compare the imported water from food and the exported water from food. Also, considering NM is a bit tricky. With 7 inhabitants /km2, NM is a very rural state, so it is expected that it would export its food. I would be very interested in the water balance for the US, knowing that we import a lot of soy for cattle.

People will buy roughly the same amount of almonds whether they're produced in California or Ohio[0]. Claiming that we have to attribute agricultural water (ab)use to the consumer is just absolving the producers of any and all responsibility for destructive, short-sighted decisions about where and how to produce.

[0] Or any other place with a reasonable natural amount of rainfall. Nothing special about Ohio for this purpose.

They said the same thing 50 years ago.

You need both, as it's only going to get worse, and we can do something about how quickly.

Yeah exactly. We need to solve this current problem with immediate solutions (if those exist), but we need need need to start thinking 50 years into the future now with the choices we make.

Maybe, and you're making more of a cynical statement than a question, but if there's a crisis then it's worth asking if the government controlling the water supply of the Southwest isn't working out at all. I believe that's the case. I'd like to try full privatization.

I've seen the pictures of the "bathtub" lines on Lake Meade and agree it looks scary however I keep seeing conflicting reports of how imminent the dead pool threat is. Here's an example I came across a few weeks ago. I don't know what the politics of this newspaper are but the person speaking is public affairs officer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin Region. It's hard for me to reconcile the math provided with this individuals rather sanguine statement.

>"Lake Mead would reach dead pool if the water level dropped to 895 feet, said Patti Aaron, public affairs officer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Lower Colorado Basin Region. As of Wednesday, the level of Lake Mead is 1,049.65 feet, she said."

>“We’re not in danger of hitting dead pool,” Aaron said. “It’s not an imminent problem. It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow, and it’s something we don’t think is going to happen at all. We would take every action to not have that happen.”[1]

Perhaps this is also politics? There doesn't seem to be a lot of slack in that system and it almost seems like this person is doing a disservice with that statement.

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/may/26/understanding-dead-...

I think this is the raw data

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/lakemead_line.pdf

Edit-I know far too little to extrapolate from that. It looks like this time of year and into the fall is when the water recedes due to agricultural use. It’ll be interesting to see the elevation at that lowest point.

> Plus the government is led by people who refer to much of the southwest as “fly over country” doesn’t help.

The people who (you assume) don't use the term "flyover country" are the people stopping Congress from spending money to fix environmental crises like drought.

Even so, the White House has ordered studies and gotten Congress to spend a lot of money on the Southwest already[1].

What else are you looking for, exactly? My understanding is that the current crisis is mostly due to agriculture and water rights, and I don't know how they could legally legislate agriculture in a state. That is the responsibility of the state's own government.

1. https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2022/06/01/biden-h...

The bureau of reclamation started building dams and irrigation systems in the 1940s. They enabled current patterns of agriculture. They could disable them too,

Desalinization plants built by California or the Federal Government.

Desal can work for residential use in cities. But desal for agriculture is supplied by mother nature and it's called "rain." Replacing agricultural rain with man-made desal would require a 10x-1000x scaleup in cost and energy and area over the desal plants now feasible. In most cases it would probably be cheaper to move the farms to rainier areas.

I still don't think I understand how that helps Midwestern and Southwestern states other than California, unless you mean the goal is to give California a way to stop using as much.

I thought the 9 most terrifying words were, "I'm from the government and I’m here to help"? What do you expect the Feds to do about the weather?

> What do you expect the Feds to do about the weather?

Intervene and rebalance the water markets, which are currently unsustainable based on bad decades-old science.

Water markets are broken primarily because of water rights, some of which were allocated centuries ago via local and regional contracts. They are nearly impossible to untangle, and state governments are required by law to honor them.

Congress can use eminent domain to untangle them.

Can you walk me through how the Federal Government could use eminent domain to untangle the water rights? What exactly is the Government going to expropriate as part of eminent domain? There are seven states that depend on the water from the Colorado River.

> Can you walk me through how the Federal Government could use eminent domain to untangle the water rights?

Eminent domaining the water?

The federal government at the highest level(SCOTUS) have no problem using eminent domain for things as frivolous as an unfinanced mall with no strings attached for the _private_ developer. They certainly wouldn't pause to eminent domain this if they cared.

Unfortunately these are regions of the country that are populated by large groups of people who continually elect local politicians who will blame any convenient boogeyman on their problems. Look at this in 2021 their AG sued the Biden government over not doing enough to stop pollution causing climate change because his administration didn’t crack down on _immigrants_[1].

What exactly is political leadership supposed to do here? Kowtow to the demands that will cost money and absolutely not solve the problem? Or ignore it until the people living with the issue decide to accept that it’s real rather than blaming whatever let’s them continue their lifestyle without any change?

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.huffpost.com/entry/arizona-...

You didn't actually answer my question. It sounds like you might be confused on what eminent domain is. Eminent domain provides the Federal government with the power to take private property and convert it into public use. There is no single piece of land here. This is not only not land it's literally water that flows across the land. Further it's not private property. The Colorado River basin covers 250,000 square is almost 1,400 miles long. Not only do seven states depend on it but Mexico also has rights to it under The Mexican Water Treaty of 1944. To compare it to appropriating land for a mall is absurd.

Then eminent domain multiple pieces of land.

You’re ignoring that they have the power to do so, they just don’t have the will. We have built mega projects before and taken land for it. This would be no different

I'm not ignoring anything. Eminent domain is not at all applicable here. You seem to be ignoring that eminent domain applies to private land in order to make it available for public use. The land involved is already public, it belongs to the states. Honestly you really don't seem to have much of any meaningful argument or explanation other than repeatedly using the phrase "eminent domain" incorrectly.

That is incorrect. The federal government can exercise eminent domain against the states, and that is not an old idea. I found it last referenced in a 2021 opinion authored by Roberts[1]

The pertinent text is

>Early cases also reflected the understanding that state property was not immune from the exercise of delegated federal eminent domain power. See Stockton v. Baltimore & N. Y. R. Co., 32 F. 9 (Bradley, Cir. J.). The contrary position—that a federal delegatee could not condemn a State’s land without the State’s consent—would give rise to the “dilemma of requiring the consent of the state” in virtually every infrastructure project authorized by the Federal Government.

It literally calls out that major infrastructure projects would not have been feasible without this power

[1]https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/19-1039

Water rights were not allocated centuries ago. All water managements systems (more or less) in place when the US took control of the southwest were overridden and replaced by US-style private property rights, a totally different system than exists east of the 100th parallel/the Mississippi. Consequently, they date back at most 1.5 centuries, and in general, less than that.

> 100th parallel/the Mississippi.

Small point, but longitudinal lines aren't typically called parallels because they're not parallel to each other.

More specifically: there are parallels of lattitude and meridians of longitude.

https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-paralle...

Meridian from "of the noon time, midday":

https://www.etymonline.com/word/meridian

As a mnemonic, the lines of longitude are all equally long (running from pole to pole).

The main agreement affecting the SW today is the Colorado River Compact, which dates back only the 1930s/40s. It is far, far from ancient history, and was demonstrably created in a state of willful ignorance of actual precipitation patterns in the region.

Geoengineering. I know that if they won’t do it someone will. Iron fertilization in particular looks cheap enough to try at the non-state level.

> Geoengineering. I know that if they won’t do it someone will.

that's true for any terrible idea. in many way's terrible ideas is how humanity progresses. but it seems bad to double down on the same old ("more engineering") to solve the problem. Guess the alternative "spend less" is very unpopular because it's something anyone can do but it actually hurts.

I'm all in favor of "spend less / consume less / grow less / be more sustainable" ... trouble is: seems like most decision makers are not ... wildcat geoengineering is no longer a matter of if, but when.

Do you even know what you're talking about? Are you referring to iron rust being randomly distributed in the ocean or along the coast? All that will do is cause an algal bloom and die off, killing off even more of the depleted marine life. That won't sequester any carbon, at best 0.05% if you do it in a way that forms the sediment. Otherwise, you're just killing what little marine life is left for giggles.

Pay farmers not to grow almonds or raise cattle - prioritize humans!

I don't know what news you're plugged in to but I'm not worried at all living in the SW US. Phoenix and Tucson had by far their wettest rainy season in decades last year and are projected to have another wet season this year. And the state of AZ uses less water for 10x the population than it did in the 1950s.

It doesn't matter if historical per-capita water usage is down if the lower basin states are continuing to overdraw their water allocations from the Colorado river system.

If and when the Colorado River Compact implodes, it's going to be immensely painful to all the states -- but especially Arizona, which doesn't have the same senior rights as other states under prior appropriation.

Knowing nothing about Phoenix or Tuscon water management... are there reservoirs for Phoenix or Tuscon that stored this rainfall coming off the local mountains from your wet rainy season? It's hard to untangle where the water comes from, but if not, I'm not sure how it helps.

Isn't flyover country Kansas, not Arizona?

Correct. And most of the time, the federal government is controlled by the politics of flyover country. It has the Supreme Court, has a pretty solid grip on the senate, wins about half of the presidencies, and is looking to sweep the upcoming election.

It's go-to solution for dealing with climate change is pretending it doesn't exist (and punishing state employees who say otherwise), and with freak weather events by blaming renewable energy, so I can only expect that things in that region can only get worse, before they can get better.

Not in the future it won't be.

If you live near the wilderness urban interface expect this. Spreading out into mountain/desert suburbs causes issues that you would've never noticed before because well... millions and millions of people never lived there before.

This especially applies to any sort of libertarian psycho who wants to live in the middle of nowhere with minimal govt and then when nature shtf they bitch about the govt.

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