The Colorado river system is completely fucked, every state reliant on that water is… basically in a mega-drought, and going to fairly rapidly desertify / dustbowlify.
In a worst case scenario… there isn’t enough water to power dams, such as the Hoover Dam.
… if something like that happens, well, now you’ve lost water and power.
Broadly speaking, the Colorado River Compact is based around being able to allocate 15 MAF (million acre feet) of water each year.
Between 2000 and 2019, the average actual water consumption was ~19.3 MAF, and the average actual amount of allocatable water was ~12.7 MAF.
Thats a ‘water debt’ of 132 MAF, 20 years of an average ‘water deficit’ of 6.6 MAF.
So, that is about 25% overconsumption of water, for two decades, compared to what was supposed to be going on, as well as the actual existing water being about 20% less than what it ‘should’ have been.
So, if you assume the … conditions don’t get worse (which is probably a stupid assumption) for the river… and it evens out for the next 20 years at 13.5 MAF… well you have to pay off that water debt too, if you want to return to sustainability.
So that means you’re looking at about 7 MAF for the next 20 years, for the whole system.
Thats roughly a 50% cut in water usage.
For AZ, CA, CO, NV, NM, UT, WY.
… Trying to implement that is almost certainly politically impossible as it would basically destroy the economies of every involved area.
So uh yeah, yeah.
Water wars are here, this particular one is I guess more like a intra-country water civil war? I dunno.
excellent points. just want to help people contextualize here. roughly 3/4 of all that water you’re talking about is for industrial scale agriculture. we could almost halve the water usage with restrictions on which crops can or can’t be grown.
Irrigated agriculture is responsible for 74% of direct human uses and 52% of overall water consumption. Water consumed for agriculture amounts to three times all other direct uses combined. Cattle feed crops including alfalfa and other grass hays account for 46% of all direct water consumption.
in other words, there’s a fuckton of water available for human use… but not enough for humans AND cows. not enough to satiate the endless global demand for cheeseburgers and steaks. our mis management of the water supply is steering the entire southwestern US into a man made disaster with catastrophic knock on effects for global meat consumption. some folks say "cattle ranching made The West. seems fitting that cattle will be it’s unmaking.
Maybe that’s what it will take to fix these ridiculous legacy water rights and the whole “use it or lose it” system we have in place that actively discourages water conservation for these farms. It doesn’t help that these are also the biggest MAGA folks in these states, and thereby climate change deniers.
How about we also slap on a big export tax on any food products being grown in this region that are being sold internationally? Add on a complete ban on foreign ownership of water rights.
How about we also slap on a big export tax on any food products being grown in this region that are being sold internationally? Add on a complete ban on foreign ownership of water rights.
See, your problem here is that those ideas … well…
They make sense.
Because they’d force people to change the way they are doing things, to be doing better things, that make more sense.
MAGA folks are very much not into making sense, nor being told what to do.
You’d have to trick them or scam them.
… maybe we could try to convince them that water is gay, and … only Satan grows soybeans and alfalfa.
You don’t want to grow homosexual devil beans and grass, do you?
Also, the most populated part of Utah runs on water that ends up in the Great Salt Lake which has been slowly drying up the last few decades and is close to pushing out all the toxic heavy metals it’s stored up over the centuries into the air for everyone in the valley to breathe in.
All of which could’ve been avoided if they limited their agriculture industry and their suburban sprawl.
The Colorado river system is completely fucked, every state reliant on that water is… basically in a mega-drought, and going to fairly rapidly desertify / dustbowlify.
In a worst case scenario… there isn’t enough water to power dams, such as the Hoover Dam.
… if something like that happens, well, now you’ve lost water and power.
Broadly speaking, the Colorado River Compact is based around being able to allocate 15 MAF (million acre feet) of water each year.
Between 2000 and 2019, the average actual water consumption was ~19.3 MAF, and the average actual amount of allocatable water was ~12.7 MAF.
Thats a ‘water debt’ of 132 MAF, 20 years of an average ‘water deficit’ of 6.6 MAF.
So, that is about 25% overconsumption of water, for two decades, compared to what was supposed to be going on, as well as the actual existing water being about 20% less than what it ‘should’ have been.
So, if you assume the … conditions don’t get worse (which is probably a stupid assumption) for the river… and it evens out for the next 20 years at 13.5 MAF… well you have to pay off that water debt too, if you want to return to sustainability.
So that means you’re looking at about 7 MAF for the next 20 years, for the whole system.
Thats roughly a 50% cut in water usage.
For AZ, CA, CO, NV, NM, UT, WY.
… Trying to implement that is almost certainly politically impossible as it would basically destroy the economies of every involved area.
So uh yeah, yeah.
Water wars are here, this particular one is I guess more like a intra-country water civil war? I dunno.
excellent points. just want to help people contextualize here. roughly 3/4 of all that water you’re talking about is for industrial scale agriculture. we could almost halve the water usage with restrictions on which crops can or can’t be grown.
source
in other words, there’s a fuckton of water available for human use… but not enough for humans AND cows. not enough to satiate the endless global demand for cheeseburgers and steaks. our mis management of the water supply is steering the entire southwestern US into a man made disaster with catastrophic knock on effects for global meat consumption. some folks say "cattle ranching made The West. seems fitting that cattle will be it’s unmaking.
Maybe that’s what it will take to fix these ridiculous legacy water rights and the whole “use it or lose it” system we have in place that actively discourages water conservation for these farms. It doesn’t help that these are also the biggest MAGA folks in these states, and thereby climate change deniers.
How about we also slap on a big export tax on any food products being grown in this region that are being sold internationally? Add on a complete ban on foreign ownership of water rights.
See, your problem here is that those ideas … well…
They make sense.
Because they’d force people to change the way they are doing things, to be doing better things, that make more sense.
MAGA folks are very much not into making sense, nor being told what to do.
You’d have to trick them or scam them.
… maybe we could try to convince them that water is gay, and … only Satan grows soybeans and alfalfa.
You don’t want to grow homosexual devil beans and grass, do you?
???
Also, the most populated part of Utah runs on water that ends up in the Great Salt Lake which has been slowly drying up the last few decades and is close to pushing out all the toxic heavy metals it’s stored up over the centuries into the air for everyone in the valley to breathe in. All of which could’ve been avoided if they limited their agriculture industry and their suburban sprawl.
Yeah, thats a whole fun thing that is going on as well.
Last I heard it was airborne arsenic that was the primary problem.
So…thats just not a phrase you should ever want to read.
I also have no idea what you could even do to meaningfully mitigate or solve the problem.
… Hazmat suits for being outside, and scrub down room entrances for every building?