Soon, life for 40M people who depend on the Colorado River will change | Hacker News Reader

Soon, life for 40M people who depend on the Colorado River will change

denverpost.com

113 pointsorionion135 comments

So my understanding here is that the largest consumer of water in most (all?) of the places served by the Colorado River is still agriculture. The article hints at fallout from this around 2/3 of the way through, when talking about grocery prices going up due to water scarcity (the hypothetical $14 head of lettuce).

Why do we still do so much farming in regions that have such marginal water supplies? Are there no better-irrigated places in the US to grow all these crops? Obviously all these farms can't move overnight, and presumably the owners of the farms wouldn't be happy with their revenue moving elsewhere, but it seems necessary.

Has farming been slowly (too slowly?) moving out of these water-strapped regions? Or are they just all sitting there, expecting someone else to bear the brunt of the problem? I know there have been shenanigans with farmers deliberately growing water-hungry crops because the water allocations have always been a "use it or lose it" system. That is apparently changing (far too late, IMO); do we expect this to have a meaningful impact?

Either way, I would suggest that it's a lot easier to move farming activities to regions with a more stable water supply (assuming such regions exist) than it is to move hundreds of cities of people.

I am not a farmer nor an expert.

My guess: Drier areas have fewer pests, less rain means there is less risk of flooding or crops washing away, and problems like mold or rot are rarer. Also, the sun is always shining. More photosynthesis means happier plants.

I hope someone here can share the details of the economics here. It's probably a very interesting cost-benefit analysis.

Historically these areas supported very low population densities so it wasn’t a problem.

The lab was fertile but arid: enter waterworks and irrigation. Great fecund farmland! For a few adventurous farmers.

And then came the droves upon droves upon droves of people who now live in what is arid but land of mild climate and desert land, but for artificial irrigation.

Add to that: proximity to major ports for international distribution and no tornadoes or hail

> Are there no better-irrigated places in the US to grow all these crops?

There are plenty of better irrigated places, but none so warm and bright. I think that's a major challenge; the amount of light and heat south and west from Colorado is incredible, and growing a lot of crops without that year-round opportunity and productivity is virtually impossible.

There is also the problem that places with naturally high amounts of rain tend to have more acidic, treed, less arable soils. Around the Colorado river there were of course dry, barely arable, hard-to-farm lands which required extensive conditioning, but a lot of it mostly required water to bring it to life. Some of the ecology was oak meadow or brush, which was far easier to convert to farm land than a cedar and fir forest.

Another thing to consider is that the rest of the USA, including places with more water, are already growing other crops. The centre of the USA from north to south is quite active in agriculture, and actually more so than the east and west. If you wanted to grow more things away from the Colorado River, where would you do it?

We need more arable land, we need to grow more climate-appropriate crops, and... Well, we need to eat more plants. We can get by just fine if we dedicate fewer crops and less water to raising meat. It's a hard solution psychologically, but an extremely effective one technically.

Well remember that 40% of the U.S. corn crop is used to produce ethanol. Ethanol use can be eliminated (electric cars and getting rid of the ethanol subsidies...). Land and climate good enough for corn is good enough for other crops.

Absolutely, corn is a very nutrient, heat, and light intensive crop.

The added buffer would allow for doing crop rotations including more legumes and cover crops to reduce fertilizer usage. If we need to grow less food, we can be less demanding from the soil as well. Perhaps we could build soil rather than destroy it.

Several studies show that these models yield excellent crops with fewer inputs, but it’s hard as hell to compete when you go low and slow with ag.

I suppose as long as we want to export food, we’ll need to continue our insane resource intensive methods, ignoring the externalities, in order to stay competitive.

> Well, we need to eat more plants. We can get by just fine if we dedicate fewer crops and less water to raising meat.

What? People raise meat animals because animals can make use of non-arable land. It has been this way for millennia. (E.g., raising animals is the only way to survive on mountainous rocky slopes.)

Apparently, your solution to scarcity of arable land is to keep using more and more of it? I know hating on meat is the politically correct position right now, but come on!

This hasn’t been true since decades now. 96% of cattle is raised on grain instead of grazing. Merely 4% in the US are allowed to be called „grass fed“ and that doesn’t even mean they are grazing year round.

So fix the laws so that economics aligns with ecology, no?

The solution is to stop wasting strategic reserves of water and fertilizer to make non-arable land into arable land. Grow grass on this land instead and turn it into pasture. (Okay, so meat will be 15% more expensive.)

Making use of non-arable land in a sustainable way is why humans invented livestock in the first place.

Humans aren't herbivores, and growing crops suitable for human consumption requires enormous amounts of resources and engineering. (Essentially, terraforming on a planetary scale.) The planet's ecology can't sustain a herbivore human race.

> The planet's ecology can't sustain a herbivore human race.

quotation needed. All scientific literature (that isn't sponsored by the livestock industry) is claiming the exact opposite.

Do you understand the sheer amount of effort mankind must spend on soil engineering, irrigation, fertilizers and genetic engineering just to make grains that can feed people?

If we were forced to eat only natural plants (not plants genetically engineered though thousands of years of unnatural selection) then 99.9 percent of mankind would starve.

Meanwhile cows eat natural grass on natural pastures.

We need livestock if we want to live in balance with nature without irreversibly changing the structure of the Earth's biosphere.

> We need livestock if we want to live in balance with nature without irreversibly changing the structure of the Earth's biosphere.

We need animals, including ruminants. There’s no requirement that we breed them on a massive scale and eat them.

Before Europeans colonized North America there were 30+ million bison roaming the plains. Today, we have have 30 million beef cattle. People make it out to be like the scale is unnatural but Mother Nature is quite capable of scale herself.

The key thing here is that those bison were eating grasses and leafy greens from the wild, not from extensive grass and grain farming operations (all of which largely exclude other plant, animal, and insect life). 30 million bison roaming and grazing makes sense, but sustaining them largely off of conventional farm outputs isn't the same thing.

I think you're misinformed. As parent request, you need citations to support your honestly pretty wild claims.

Land used for growing livestock feed would in a very large part be just as suitable for human food production, and we wouldn't even use that much of it. Ruminants are not any kind of necessary part of food security, on the contrary -- without livestock large parts of current farm land could be released back to nature.

Nobody is suggesting to eat "natural plants" as neolithic gatherers might have done.

I need to see the papers you're reading about this. I've never seen anything scientific suggesting this is true, and if anything, it's the complete opposite: we need to eat plants instead, because it would actually reduce burdens on arable land while reducing overall GHG emissions.

In North America the average farm is using massive amounts of inputs from other farms. Whether it's grass or grains, these inputs from from conventional farms using fertilizers and irrigation that we could be putting into human-friendly crops. That's an insane waste of energy and resources.

Sure there are farms using fewer inputs from arable land, and that's great. Perhaps those are the only ones which should raise livestock. The rest should stop, because the inefficiency comes with externalities our countries and the world literally cannot sustain.

Any sources for your claims? I thought most were pasture raised (grass) and finished with grains like corn to fatten them up.

I used this as a source: https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr...

I doubt that at current consumption rates that it would even be remotely feasible to have the majority of cattle grass fed.

That article does say that only 4% is "grass-fed", but I don't think that implies 96% of beef cattle never graze, merely that they don't graze enough to meet the "grass-fed" labeling requirements.

I grew up on a small farm and from there and the other beef producers I know the practice is as parent describes. Cattle are raised on pasture then eventually auctioned off to feedlots that fatten them them up with grain a couple months before slaughter.

It's still a tremendous amount of grain.

My understanding is that USDA grass-fed labelling is dubious at best since late 2016. You need to look at trusted 3rd party labels, looking for grass fed, grain finished, or grass finished to get a sense of what was actually fed. Most cows will eat grass at some point in their lives (especially as calfs, from what I've read).

One trouble too is that grass fed NEVER strictly means pastured, and in fact, it rarely does. It can even mean they've been fed grass-based feed, which isn't whole grass but a processed feed containing grass. This is a feed that might be implemented in a feed lot, for example.

That's the next issue. When consumers think of grass fed, they imagine open fields, space, etc. No, this is not how it works; grass is still used in feed lots, and the vast majority of beef in North America comes from feed lots (recent figures indicate 95% or more). Depending on the country and farm, animals may spend the beginning of their lives with pastures, but many don't. They may then spend anywhere from a couple months to over half a year in a feed lot for finishing. These conditions are absolutely brutal, and not worth supporting in my opinion. The externalities of feed lots are absolutely absurd.

> It's still a tremendous amount of grain.

Up to 10lb per day, apparently. Imagine, in a week you could have roughly ten pounds each of 7 nutritious grains and legumes saved for a human being to eat. Lentils, peas, millet, wheat, oats, etc. That would go really far for a human being, and actually provide a lot of nutrition as whole foods. Somehow we've meandered so far from that kind of diet, but science backs it up in spades: we should be eating those things instead of using that land for feeding soy and corn to cattle.

We feed the animals from our arable land.

I used to be in your camp until I did the research. Eating meat makes no sense outside of personal enjoyment.

Not so hypothetical: here's a $11.99 lettuce in Australia last month. (Admittedly 'only' $8.30 in freedom dollars.)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/jun/03/why-does-this-i...

The sun shines a lot more in California and Arizona (those are yer big Colorado river agricultural states) than it does other places. So, with enough water, the yield per acre of land per year is rather high.

The same sun shines during a lot more of the year in CA and AZ. Folks like their year-round fresh vegetables.

Even with a good hot house in the middle West or the north East, the yield per acre per year won't be as high. Until the water runs out in the Western states, after which I reckon it'll be quite a bit higher.

> Why do we still do so much farming in regions that have such marginal water supplies?

Often farmers don't pay for their water usage. Instead they paid once, long ago, for the right to some portion of the river (not sure how that's measured). As a result the amount that a farmer would save by halving their water usage is often $0, so they don't.

(This is my understanding. I heard it specifically in the context of California but assume it happens elsewhere too. Would be very interested to hear more from someone who knows the details.)

“First in time, first in right.” https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-drought-imper...

> As a result the amount that a farmer would save by halving their water usage is often $0, so they don't.

It’s even worse than that, these rights are on a “use it or lose it” basis, so not only do farmers pay very little for the water, they’re incentivised to use all they can on extremely water-intensive crops and methods, and waste the rest.

The Colorado water compact is complete insanity.

And acquirer management is no better.

We farm in Central Valley California because it has year round sunshine and good soil. California no doubt uses more water than it is allocated, but about 80% of water usage is in agriculture. And when we say agriculture it’s not just almonds that use a lot of water, it’s also Alfa Alfa and regular pastures that go in cattle feed. And despite having a much smaller percentage of the country’s farms, it produces the most amount of food. A third of the country’s vegetables and two thirds of fresh fruits and nuts are grown in California. If we could farm better elsewhere, we actually would.

Does the central valley use Colorado river water? I was under the impression they get all their water from California (esp northern areas).

> Does the central valley use Colorado river water?

No. Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountain water goes to L.A., Western Sierra water goes to the Central Valley and S.F. The Imperial Valley area of the lowest part of S. California uses Colorado River water.

No. Most Colorado river water is used for farming in the southern deserts of Imperial and Riverside counties.

Do they still have good soil? Somebody told me that Napa valley has killed its soil by using extremely aggressive grow techniques.

Good farmland also kinda turns into cities. I don't think anybody is really into bulldozing Orange County, but I think the humidity is enough that orange trees don't need a whole lot of extra water. Manhattan was also (apparently) pretty great farmland.

It would have been cool if we'd built the cities out in the desert - people need water, but it's just not the same scale. Then we could have left the great farmland for farming. We'd probably find a way to screw it up regardless. Tigris Euphrates was apparently paradise back in the day, same for the Nile. To my modern eye, they're all pretty much known for sand now.

Honestly it's pretty incredible we're, well let me rephrase that. It's incredible _you_ produce so much from a damn near desert. I get it's easier to move water than homes. Shame the good land with plenty of water got built over.

There are also perverse incentives in play here. For example, "use it or lose it" water rights.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtxew5XUVbQ @ around 8:30 mark.

> Why do we still do so much farming in regions that have such marginal water supplies?

Because they are ideal in other ways (potential growing season, soil, etc.) and people like to eat.

> Are there no better-irrigated places in the US to grow all these crops

Probably not that don't have other disadvantages, if they aren't already being used for agriculture. Note that about 52% of US land area is already used for that purpose.

Agriculture here means mostly feed for livestock. Decreasing meat production and consumption would do an immense amount.

> Why do we still do so much farming in regions that have such marginal water supplies?

You know how you can still buy fresh fruits and vegetables at the grocery store in the middle of winter? Lots of those are grown in the western deserts. If you’re willing to give up year-round fresh produce, we could consider removing farming from these areas. But most people wouldn’t want that.

> Why do we still do so much farming in regions that have such marginal water supplies?

If a region has surplus water, and is reasonably flat, it will get used for agriculture until it becomes marginal.

Also global warming is changing the distribution of rainfall and evaporation, so that there may be less water available in the first place.

> Are there no better-irrigated places in the US to grow all these crops?

"There's a great region for agriculture here, but we have nobody to farm it" -- a thing nobody has said in the US since about the foundation of Oklahoma

The article doesn't pay much attention to the draw-down of aquifers, trouble mentioned in stories earlier this year.

"Bessire says far more groundwater is being pumped out than can be replenished, and most dry-area aquifers are disappearing, including two primary groundwater systems in the United States: California’s Central Valley aquifer, and the Ogallala Aquifer underlying heartland states from South Dakota to Texas. “If we lose these aquifers,” he writes, “we lose nearly 20% of the world’s grain crop, more than 40% of America’s beef production, and about 40% of the vegetables, nuts, and fruits consumed in the U.S."

[https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/02/11/major-aquifers-in-tr...]

Head-in-the-sand? no, greed. "The [1922] compact negotiators also failed — or refused — to include the approximately 30 Native American tribes dependent on the river."

I've watched a number of friends, family, and acquaintances move out to Colorado over the past decade. Several of them even proclaimed that our home region, the upper midwest, was dying on their way out. I really try to avoid indulging in schadenfreude, but it's tough sometimes.

Colorado's where the river's headwaters are: this is probably an even bigger deal for those in Utah, Arizona, Las Vegas, and Southeastern California.

That is somewhat true, but also in Colorado there's a plethora of westslope vs front range issues.

Don’t forget Mexico who’s allocated 1.5 million acre-feet per year (59 cubic metres per second) by the Colorado River Compact [1].

Which I believe was drafted during the wettest decade in the Southwest’s history.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

time to cut mexicos water before anything else then. not like they can fight us on it.

Yes, because who gives a fuck about treaties. After all, when your neighbor can't fight you it's a-ok to take their stuff. /s

better they have problems then we do

No it's not. What do you think is going to happen to the migration or border once agriculture and clean water supplies evaporate down there?

Do the right thing, fulfill the obligations. The consequences suck for everyone.

why should we fulfil our obligations to the mexicans before the arizonans? we should keep our obligations to our own country first. we literally cant fulfill all the obligations so some has to go. im not saying "screw mexico" but its a governments job to care for its own people at least before others.

"Fuck you, got mine"

Sounds fair, as long as arizonians would stop culturing the crops painfully developped during thousands of years and generously shared with them by Mexicans (Tomatoes, pepper, corn), or Peruvians (Potatoes), or Argentinians and Bolivians (Peanuts), or Europeans (Onions, Lattice, Cabbage), or Africans (cup of coffee?), or Asians (return also the red jungle chicken please, and the apple native from Kazakhstan).

They can still culture the arizonian jackalope thistle and the sellfish redneck's muddy sweetgrass, and all the other members in the long list of wonderful crops developed there, of course.

That's a non sequitur if I've ever read one.

The fact is that the entire planet worked really hard so places like this can have an agriculture. Lets face it, Arizona didn't provided a lot in return to the science of agriculture.

And now some people is saying lets keep all the water, so people down the river don't have/don't deserve any?

A little understanding and maybe even gratitude would be a nice touch.

Think of it as a taste of what is to come when water will become more scarce. This is pretty much in line with predictions and the term 'water war' may well become commonplace in the near future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conflict

The entire planet worked really hard so they could survive, it had nothing to do with being generous to other cultures or particularly to benefit the good people of Arizona.

Focusing entirely on the short term wellbeing of your own can be a big mistake. Sure, giving all the water to Arizona and ignoring the deal with Mexico is better for Americans long term. But what happens next?

Short term thinking is what gets us into these problems in the first place.

Do you want a massive wave of unauthorized immigration? Because that's how you get a massive wave of unauthorized immigration.

Uhh, thing is, that’s been going on for the better part of two years now

And this is why we need nuclear proliferation.

Wait, Mexico’s share is (as seems from both your comment and the link) specified in absolute terms rather than as a percentage like the US states? Leaving no allowance for that amount not existing?

More specific link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact#Provisi...

I believe that the water to be supplied to Mexico via the river was of such poor quality that we ended up either trucking or directly purifying a set volume of water downstream to meet our treaty obligations.

Minute 319 [1] determines how water allocations will change during conditions of drought or surplus. This is also covered a little at the end of the Wikipedia article.

In a max drought scenario (Lake Mead surface elevation <1,025 feet) it looks like delivery requirements would be reduced by 125,000 acre-feet, with different delivery thresholds above that range.

1. https://www.ibwc.gov/Files/Minutes/Min319_Env_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Don’t get too excited.

The major population centers in Colorado don’t rely on the Colorado river. Everything east of the continental divide/the Rockies is in a different watershed

Rain and snow which fall on the western slope do not inevitably flow westward.

There are a number of trans-mountain diversions of Colorado River water eastward under the continental divide.

Denver Water alone collects 50% of its drinking water from the tributaries of the Colorado River on the west side of the continental divide.

Water diverted from the Colorado River Basin, through trans-mountain diversions, makes up 60-70% of the water used by Colorado Springs.

For example, see https://www.denverwater.org/your-water/water-supply-and-plan...

Much of the water used by Fort Collins and Greeley comes from the western slope through the Adams Tunnel under Rocky Mountain National Park.

https://www.northernwater.org/

Wow. I knew about the straws, but I didn't know just what a large percentage of the water was coming from Dillon, etc...

Still though, the original point stands. The front range where everyone lives has a lot less to worry about than downstream users like Nevada and California.

The Great Salt Lake is drying up: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/podcasts/the-daily/great-...

A complete ecological catastrophe. The local government has no plans to stop population growth to prevent overuse. They acknowledge the issue completely, but it is not politically viable to solve it. This a preview of what is to come.

I live in this area and I think it's important to provide a little context. Only this year did the Great Salt Lake set a record for the lowest level, and it's less than an inch lower than the last time it was at the lowest level we've measured, which was in 1962. Here's the interesting part: the highest point of the Great Salt Lake that has been measured was in 1985-86, so we don't really have enough data to know whether this is cyclical. Right now, it's just panic, but 25 years from now we could be firing up the pumps that are in the desert of the Great Salt Lake to pump out the water to keep the freeway from being flooded again, like it was in 1985.

You know, if I go out and spend my 401K on lottery tickets, I could be rich and then 25 years from now I could drive my jetski down that flooded freeway. You ever drive a jetski? It really is a blast and I'm willing to bet that driving one down the freeway would be even more fun.

I would listen to that podcast. The interviewer and interviewees were extremely sober about the situation. They described everything that was going on in detail. None of which is in dispute. The main problem is actually population increase which is driving overconsumption of water. That is not cyclic. Climate change is exacerbating the issue.

What caused the lake to fall to its second-lowest level ever recorded in 1962?

https://archive.ph/1LLnC

Thank you - I had to use

cache:<url> in Chrome to read it, and wish I had seen your link first.

TIL! Always did a search and use the cached option from the SERP. Thank you!

You can simply type “https://archive.ph/“ followed by a URL, like https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/21/colorado-river-drought..., and archives of the page will be shown:

https://archive.ph/https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/21/col...

I have https://archive.ph/ as autotext on my mobile device for convenience.

"We thought we could engineer nature… huge mistake," the general manager of the Colorado River District says

That's interesting. Here in NL that is also pretty much the attitude, and it so far seems to be working out reasonably well except that we get the occasional surprise. The latest large infrastructure project ("ruimte voor de rivier") is an unqualified success and has seen many other countries following the example.

I think one big difference is that it all happens on a much smaller scale in a much more densely populated country. What happens 'upstream' outside of the borders of NL could well have massive effect.

If by "Smaller Scale" you mean "17% of total land area"...

No, I mean that NL is simply much smaller than the US.

Wouldn't the more reasonable comparison be America to the EU or CO to NL?

There isn't a transnational unified water management policy in the EU. It would be nice but unfortunately I don't think that will happen any time soon. There are various treaties for particular rivers though.

For example: https://www.vnsc.eu/over-de-vnsc/scheldeverdragen-en-memoran...

It's similar in the US, AFIK. The Colorado River Compact was a treaty between nearby states that has nothing to do with the federal government.

I wouldn't really consider "Ruimte voor de rivier" to be engineering nature in the way that's discussed in the article. Most of the projects were about removing human-made constraints on the rivers and giving it more land to flow freely.

That's literally what it means. "Space for the river". In the past NL tried to contain the rivers in smaller basins so there would be more land to build on, but this backfires when there is a lot of water at once (such as two years ago). It's engineering nature but this time in favor of nature, rather than in favor of the humans occupying the borders next to the rivers, which falls under 'watermanagement', which includes controlling the flow and the level of water throughout the country.

Ah yeah, you're right, I do agree; I misread which comment your original comment was a reply too.

Well, to be perfectly honest, well-engineered projects manage rivers in the US as well - e.g. the system of locks and dams all along the Mississippi courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The two big problems with the management of the Colorado River water are big disincentives not to lose legal water rights, resulting in farmers growing water-hungry crops in the desert just to preserve those rights; and water allocations that were larger than even optimistic Colorado River flow rates during a very wet season in the 1930s. In order to preserve the river basin and reservoirs, both of those issues have to be addressed, concurrently, and there are a lot of stakeholders that are going to be very angry about whatever solution is proposed to them (or imposed on them very soon, out of necessity, to keep the lights on.)

Well, they might want to have their cake and eat it and find themselves without cake at all. That's mostly a matter of time at this point and irrigation for crops is secondary to drinking water.

On other hand moving people is much simpler than moving crop land... So why shouldn't the people be ones to move?

Oh they will move. Just not voluntarily, but move they will. That's one of the biggest effects of all this climate stuff: people will end up displaced. Millions / year already.

I think the NL is a more civilised place. (Sorry Mid West USA, but if the cap fits....) People have been eking out a living, together, in those swampy lands for so long they have learnt much more than even they realise.

In the Mid West USA the requirement for civilised behaviour (listening to reason, getting along with your neighbours, compromise) was much less.

But we can engineer nature. Beavers did it for tens of thousands of years before we showed up.

There are groups experimenting with reestablishing beavers on tributaries of the Columbia river, with positive results. We really need to be doing these on the upper reaches of the Colorado.

How much water does generating electric power waste? Or does the system suck everything dry?

Power generation doesn't generally waste water, it just extracts the potential energy from discharges that would've happened anyway.

It does however increase the carbon footprint of the river. Submerging forests to create reservoirs has created huge methane releases that nobody who thinks hydro is green power wants to talk about.

As someone living in the West, we have another reason to dislike dams: loss of salmon breeding grounds.

> loss of salmon breeding grounds.

There are technology available to alleviate this problem. Not easy, but solvable

The angel's share might account for a fair bit, most importantly if people are expecting water downstream. eg 20 kAF yearly at Lake Mojave with expectations in Mexico for the water.

you can build the largest reservoir in the world, but if water consumption and evaporation exceed precipitation in the watershed you're on borrowed time.

I wonder how beaver activity impacts evaporation rates versus human reservoir-building? Does lots of small ponds (perhaps mostly in wooded areas?) work better than a few massive reservoirs?

Wait, what? You'd need hundreds of thousands of "small ponds" in the woods to approximate a comparison with a human mega reservoir like Lake Mead and associated reservoirs. I don't really understand the comparison.

I think you're underestimating the extent of beaver altered terrain in the west. Estimates are between 60 and 400 million beaver before the fur trade started. We are currently sitting at 6-12 million and there are a number of watersheds where they have to be reintroduced because there are no populations in that area.

I was actually reading the other day about beavers and supposedly as much as 10% of North America was covered in beaver-built reservoirs and ponds. There were a lot of beavers.

Wet forest land cools the air. When humid air hits cold air you get rain. We don’t know the extent to which biological systems create their own rain, but we know it’s greater than zero. Also ground water recharging helps restore the water table, which helps keep the flow rate of the river higher for longer.

So yes, keeping water in the system longer doesn’t magically increase the rate you can draw it down… unless it does.

Seems like the problem is more "we thought we could do some stuff and then stop" while meanwhile adding a ton of population AND fucking with the atmosphere.

We're gonna have to do a lot more engineering of SOME sort soon.

If packing up and moving out of the Southwest is engineering, then I agree.

What a pessimistic view from the person managing the River District.

How many people would the river basin have supported without damming and irrigation? Far fewer than 40M. In other words, the engineers clearly engineered nature and made it much more hospitable to human life in the arid West.

Sounds like they might have overshot and can't meet tomorrow's demand, but even so, the status quo is certainly far superior to an un-engineered Colorado River Basin.

> but even so, the status quo is certainly far superior to an un-engineered Colorado River Basin.

Making an uninhabitable area, habitable, at the cost of a total destruction of natural resources does not seem like its "far superior".

That depends on your standard of value.

Do you justify things in terms of human life? Conversely, is your standard that nature should be left untouched?

As for me, I would say that flooding the valleys that are now Lake Mead and Lake Powell, enabling tens of millions of people to live, is worth far more than whichever critters and plants were displaced.

Besides, the issue here is not "total destruction" it is over-allocation. We have not destroyed the Colorado River. Rather, it seems like we just have too much demand for its supply. Did I misread that?

We have absolutely different perspectives here. I do not justify anything in terms of quantity of human life. The destruction of critters and wild plants to me is as painful as the destruction of human lives. Also, we rob future generations of that nature.

> Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

That quote is oft-posted, and cliche at this point, but it has a ring of truth to it. Life in an area that cannot sustain in long term (1000+ years?), in balance with nature, is not really life but an exploitation of the environment for short term gain. Why? Because what happens when, in your own (terribly chosen, btw) words, we run out of supply? What happens to those people? Do they die? or do they move on, like locusts, elsewhere? What's the endgame there?

> What a pessimistic view from the person managing the River District.

Good managers are honest about their ability to address a problem given the tools at their disposal.

I would love to know the quote's original context.

I think that the manager was speaking specifically about the Central Arizona Project, in the context that the negative impact of the project was already predicted.

That's what engineering means.

"We thought we'd had smarter officials in place." - me

I am thinking of placing a water re-use system (where essentially I can filter my own use water, to reduce use by ~75%) and convince my gardening wife to xeriscape.

Question for more broad group: Will politicians end up moving agriculture development elsewhere to preserve the water? Will they build a de-salination pipeline from the rising ocean to the river? Strategist with opinions?

Check out Earthships for inspiration: https://www.newmexico.org/earthships/

There is cool documentary episode on them on Amazon Prime, show called Off The Cuff and episode called Earthships.

Politicians, at least in the U.S., really don't have the power to move agriculture development elsewhere.

They can make the water more expensive / less available to encourage movement, but that's about it.

Viewed through that lens, I come back again and again to: We don't really have a water problem -- we have a water-pricing problem. Charge more for water, particularly marginal-use water, and a lot of problems in this space are reduced or eliminated.

> We don't really have a water problem -- we have a water-pricing problem. Charge more for water....

Marginal analysis. Must have done an economics course.

Marginal analysis only works on the margins. If the Colorado river is producing 2/3 of the water that is actually being used (if I read the article correctly) they are a long way from the margins and marginal analysis will not help.

If they had set the prices correctly at the beginning, but the silly people probably relied on market mechanisms, which only work on short time frames.

The actual problem, fundamentally, is that our engineering capabilities ran away from our economic and political control mechanisms a century ago, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

Even more fundamentally our problems are cause by the greed and hubris of a small but powerful section of the population tat will not listen to reason

Colorado River water is priced too low.

How do higher water prices not solve the problem? If farmers were beholden to trade offs about their water use they would likely be using substantially less water than they are now. Crops that use twice the water without a matching increase in profitability would disappear and water use would go down.

Do they even pay for their water? And can they sell it if they don’t want to use it? If neither of those is true, higher prices don’t do anything.

Higher water prices translate to higher food prices without replacement. The southwest has ideal growing conditions when irrigated. Replacement won’t be 1:1.

Changing the water prices in the southwest will hit consumers across the US.

> Replacement won’t be 1:1.

What do you mean by this? We would surely produce more calories per gallon of water if we, say, swapped beef with chicken (or plants). I guess we might not replace beef with beef, but that wouldn't be a replacement, so that wouldn't make sense.

I'm excited / interested in what replacement ("faux") meat will do for water savings.

Closing your eyes to the cost doesn't mean that the cost isn't there.

For example, maybe lettuce grown and sold from California can be bought at $2/head. If you were to truly factor in the misuse of water, maybe the cost should be $3. Maybe at $3, lettuce grown in Florida, Oregon, Vermont and Iowa is cost-competitive. A lot of maybes, sure, but the point is that if you were to charge for the water what the water actually should cost, then that cost actually gets built into the system, and the market can work. You can't have your cake and eat it - for a market system to work, you need to actually allow pricing to reflect the actual costs.

My prediction: The federal government will fund huge projects to build more water pipes from regions with water to regions without water. This will of course raise taxes and/or inflation, but it'll be worth it in the long run.

So Colorado, Utah and Wyoming - the states with the upper tributaries - were drawing water out at a much lower rate than they were entitled to by treaty, until about 2000, at which point the wheels started to come off.

I read it as the opposite: "lower basin"... CA, NV, AZ

Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d...

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Low confidence and presumably indistinguishable from noise.

John Oliver did a nice piece on this recently. Best clip I could find - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YykXkG2Mjz8

https://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ has more of it

The irony of putting a story like this behind a paywall.

I couldn't read the article either because of the paywall. As an anecdote, I remember when we lived in Colorado, they wouldn't allow collection of runoff from the roof of our house into barrels, e.g. for gardening, because that water was already accounted for downstream.

Now in North Carolina, we can't shed rainwater enough, fast enough, and our gutters overflow all the time. We spent $4000 on drains to prevent the lawn from being swampy. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium. :)

Yet the Los Angeles river, with sources diverted away from saline lakes, has been cut in half over the years for pretend ecological issues. This is how the climate control ideology gains power.

What do you mean by "pretend ecological issues?" Climate control isn't an ideology it's a necessity created by failed policies. Climate change doesn't care about your political or economic ideology.

Climate control ideology grows right out of "climate change doesn't care about you*". This happens precisely because people like yourself wield "climate change" politically, and thus give power to groups that pretend to care about your concerns.

Ecologies are important discussions, science is an important argument, and weaponizing climate change is basic ideology at work (same as all pseudo protectionist politics).

The idea that the Earth is warming and ecological systems are changing is Climate Change. There seems to be evidence and scientific consensus behind the fact that humans are playing a part.

On the other hand, the people proclaiming that humans are inherently bad for the planet, that we need to have fewer children, tear down our economic system and eat a plant-based diet aren’t practicing “Climate Science”. They are ideologues. You can spot them from a distance because they’re the ones against Nuclear Power, Desalination, GMOs, and other solutions don’t require require society to subscribe to their social framework. When people like me say we’re skeptical of Climate Science, we’re usually referring to the latter and not the former.

I'm downvoted for suggesting that the LA river was okay ecologically, extremely utilitarian, and that the cutting off its flow was a conspiracy with effects made obvious by this article about LA's other water source, the Colorado River.

The making of the LA river was a conspiracy! You people don't know anything, you just think yr smart.

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