The Coming Dust Bowl

Certainly you are right. If all the golf courses are closed and agriculture is transitioned to more stable locales, the Southwest would have a fighting chance.

However, when you take into account human nature, especially American human nature, the forecast seems darker. More and more, I believe that Collapse seems to be hard-wired into the human collective. It almost seems as if there is a number of humans (n) that serves as an under/over for inevitable collapse. One person can have foresight. Two people, 10 people, 1000 people even. But once you hit 10,000 or so the ability to sway public opinion with money and media becomes too strong. All it takes is a certain percentage of people to be convinced the problem is a conspiracy or a mirage. That is enough to sow doubt more widely, and to sink any efforts towards a reasonable conservation of resources.

The Southwest will collapse, and soon. And the number of people denying the existence of a problem will be non-trivial even as the last reservoir dries up. It’s a shame, but it was as Cadillac Desert proves imminently avoidable.

If California would put its nice long coastline to use with some proper desal capacity, it would permanently end its own drought and no longer be reliant on the Colorado River. That would in and of itself solve most of the water-related issues in Arizona and Nevada.

Or maybe young people have more opportunities to move away from undesirable locations?

Yep… my grandparents, who left Oklahoma because of the Dust Bowl, used to go on and on about how it was a conspiracy theory. /s

And Arizona had a proposition on the ballot 20 years ago proposing that all new development needs to show where its water would come from because there wasn’t enough to sustain the amount of development.

I’ve seen the writing on the wall and have decided to leave Arizona for greener pastures.