16 ms·

The Colorado River is shrinking

166 points by SquibblesRedux 5y ago

walrus01 5y ago
Highly recommended post apocalyptic scifi book on this subject: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+water+knife+novel https://www.google.com/search?q=the+water+knife+novel
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://openlibrary.org/books/OL29128049M/Water_Knife https://openlibrary.org/books/OL29128049M/Water_Knife
briga 5y ago
Just like we fight deforestation by planting trees maybe we should fight drought by re-watering our land. It's a massive logistical problem, to be sure, but it seems like humans already have a pretty good handle on draining water from the land. They could start by banning lawns and golf courses in the desert. No reason someone living in Phoenix needs a verdant green lawn. Maybe place some limits on unsustainable agriculture in the desert. I imagine such bans would be a tough sell in most parts but it's hard to imagine how else the land can recover.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  But "Muh house!" https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/default/files/files/2017/08/Screen-Shot-2017-08-04-at-11.14.12-AM-qfv3q8.png https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/default/files/files/2017/08/Sc...
  - briga 5y ago
    Yeaaaaaah, if cities could stop doing that endless unsustainable sprawl thing that would be great
    - Niglodonicus 5y ago
      Yeaaaaah, if our whole society could stop doing that endless unsustainable growth thing that would be great.
      - blooalien 5y ago
        The whole "unsustainable" part is what gets me. Why is "growth" so important that we must do it to a point where it becomes unsustainable and risks literally all life everywhere on Earth becoming extinct (or at least knocked back to pre-stone age levels)?
        Niglodonicus 5y ago
        https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
      - imtringued 5y ago
        It's only necessary because people think deposits are sacred. The problem isn't some capitalist cabal. Every single individual is responsible.
- dleslie 5y ago
  The lawns and golf courses are a small fraction of use compared to farming.
  - briga 5y ago
    Definitely, but highly wasteful nonetheless. Easier to tell someone to stop growing their lawn than telling a farmer to stop growing their crops
    - kevinmgranger 5y ago
      Depends on the definition of easier. Telling a multitude of voters they don't get to have their Normal Rockwell painting of a life, versus telling a handful (relatively) of farmers that their water usage is now restricted? Lawmakers will choose their interpretation based off of that.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      Is it? Farming represents 3% of California's GDP, but 40% of the water. If California decided to simply sell that water to other states and then give the money to the farmers in exchange for not farming, the farmers would probably come out ahead. It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns.
      - blooalien 5y ago
        > It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns. It might be easier to convince people to not grow lawns if we'd do away with some of the stupid laws and ordinances that require people to have "well groomed" lawns in places where such grass is an unnatural imported occurrence. Perhaps even offer some tax breaks or other incentives to "zeroscape" or landscape their yards using native plant life suited to the climate. A yard without a lush verdant lawn need not be an ugly yard. It can still have plants and look nice without grass, if we'd "normalize" more nature/planet friendly practices instead of punishing people for not being destructive to their environment. I bring this point up because here in Utah many neighborhoods will actually fine you if you don't have a lush green lawn in your yard. (Unless of course you're rich, then somehow you magically get approval to go the zeroscape route if you so desire.)
- mkhpalm 5y ago
  Phoenix is a desert but it wasn't ever devoid of water like people think. Its more like a "green desert" of sorts. Its very existence is the result of the sheer amount of water naturally running through the area. Was once the alfalfla capital of the US due to the water and the number of growing seasons. The only reason it started growing so quickly is because A/C became available. Prior to that they couldn't use swamp coolers mid summer due to the monsoon season making it too humid to work. Water, power, etc, all of that was already there. A better example is someplace like Las Vegas.
01100011 5y ago
The choice is pretty clear to me. We need a national water grid. Desalinization is great and a piece of the puzzle, but we need a way to distribute water across the country. It could also be leveraged as an energy storage device if we continue to add more reservoirs at various elevations. It's not going to be cheap or easy, but we'd be stupid not to start on it now. The climate changes, and we need to plan for it. Places in the west have historically, long before humans started increasing carbon dioxide, seen extended droughts lasting tens or hundreds of years. Human driven climate change could exacerbate this issue. If we want to be a people that lasts thousands of years we need to plan for events that happen in a thousand years.
- selectodude 5y ago
  No. The Great Lakes are not leaving the Great Lakes area. Ever.
  - 01100011 5y ago
    What does this even mean? What does a national water grid have to do with the Great Lakes? Is there some sort of regional paranoia that the rest of the country is coming for "your water"? If you look at a map you'll notice that there is quite a lot of water available beyond the great lakes. Is there a reason freshwater can't be pulled from the mouths of great rivers like the St. Lawrence, the Columbia, and the Mississippi right before it reaches the sea? Is there a reason why flood control systems can't be built to sequester excess precipitation so that it can be reclaimed?
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      It would be extremely energy intensive to push water from sea level to upland farms, basically you'd be running hydro plants in reverse.
      - 01100011 5y ago
        Desalination is also energy intensive. Shipping food from foreign countries is energy intensive. Starving because those countries also experience the effects of global warming and decide to feed their populations first is economically and socially expensive. Choose your costs. You're going to spend energy one way or another, or you're going to sacrifice your quality of life(or potentially your life). I don't see this as being a convincing argument against a nationwide hydro grid, just one of many tradeoffs.
jb775 5y ago
This reminds me of how the glaciers were supposed to be gone by 2020[1]. [1] https://lidblog.com/national-park-service-glaciers/ https://lidblog.com/national-park-service-glaciers/
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Are you saying the aquifers aren't actually drying up? That Lake Mead and Lake Powell aren't actually at historic lows? This is talking about the facts on the ground today, not some projection of the future.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    He's citing a source that's less reliable because it is compulsively agenda-driven - that is, a site that chooses it's conclusion first and then seeks out info appears to support it.
- downismorefun 5y ago
  Across the board reductions in glacier size looks pretty grim to me https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers-glacier-national-park?qt-science_center_objects=1#qt-science_center_objects https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers...
- jdcaron 5y ago
  Worldwide glaciers are shrinking: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-glacier-mass-balance https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... I don't know about your example or your source. When you refer to climate changes, you can't use one local sample as your proof.
julienb_sea 5y ago
Water supply and runoff efficiency has been quite stable over the past 50 years, according to charts in that article. The main factor in shrinking is that our water usage has ramped up dramatically as population and agriculture demands grow. One approach might be to implement surcharges associated with water from these reservoirs, to reduce economic viability of overuse, and create incentives to enable other sources of water.
dogman144 5y ago
Does anyone have educated views on desalinization tech? That seems to be the few ways out of this that's totally within our control. I imagine we'll rob Peter to pay Paul with it via extincting a bunch fish we didn't mean to in desal turbines or something unexpected like that, but that aside..
- mdorazio 5y ago
  It works just fine, but it's expensive and requires a lot of power as well as access to an ocean. You can read about the one that San Diego uses for something like 7% of total water needs here: https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/ https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/ and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
  - dogman144 5y ago
    thanks!
- blooalien 5y ago
  I've read about some pretty interesting recent developments in desalination and other water "cleaning" technologies lately, but they're all still "in the lab" as it were. Nothing of the newest and most amazing stuff I've read about has yet progressed to the point of being in any widespread use. As another reply mentions, existing technologies that are in use tend to be quite expensive (in terms of cost and power/resource usage required to get the job done on any sort of large scale).
  - dogman144 5y ago
    my sense as well
- bsder 5y ago
  > That seems to be the few ways out of this that's totally within our control. Desalinization works just fine--if you have an ocean nearby. In California, desalinization plants keep getting built and will eventually be able to handle the water needs of people near the coasts. However, there is no way desalinization can ever support farming. And that's 80+% of the water consumption. Either you shut down the farms now or when the water runs out--that's the only option.
tomc1985 5y ago
Maybe we need to look at cloud-seeding or other rainmaking solutions like the UAE is doing
- KittenInABox 5y ago
  This means water will be taken away from other areas, unpredictably, we may not know where. Removing water from the atmosphere above Utah may have wide reaching national, if not international consequences.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  It works, but it requires tons of precious metals to get to work and we could never recover the amount of water or even the metals themselves to make it efficient. Do-able, just going to cost money like no tomorrow. Literally the definition of throwing money at the problem. When you have a uber rich oil state with plenty of cash to burn, it'll work until they run out of cash or desire.
  - VLM 5y ago
    The UAE does not have a Mississippi river. One side of the country is a desert unsuitable for growing crops, naturally stubborn Americans grow crops there anyway at staggering economic and environmental cost. Meanwhile on the other side of the Mississippi, where I live, we get around three to four feet of rain per year for free, and corn grows pretty well most years without artificial irrigation. It makes a lot more sense to move the farmers and their farms than to move the water or implement other hyper-high tech nonsense. The UAE of course has no choice so best of luck to them, but it probably won't work as well as simply moving the farms. "We" do something similar with cows. In some states it costs 100000 gallons of irrigation water per pound of produced beef or whatever nonsense. In my state, we just call it rain water, and its free, LOL. Americans being Americans naturally we go to enormous expensive effort to make sure we grow cows where cows should not be grown, rather than simply moving the cows. "We" also do something similar with humans. There's nothing special about a job done by humans in a desert, other than its an environmental, and eventually economic, disaster. Americans being Americans, we will spend everything we got and then some, to make sure that people can work from home in an uninhabitable unimaginably expensive desert rather than working from home in a nice easy place to live. We'll destroy the entire planet before we make people move from Vegas to Chicago. Which I guess says something about Chicago (LOL just kidding)
minikites 5y ago
We're not going to make any of these hard choices. We're going to keep assuming some nameless person in the future will come up with a way to solve these problems without any sacrifice from us because we're under the collective delusion that the future is always better than the past. Instead, the future is going to be grim because we're refusing to do anything active here in the present to make the future better.
avgDev 5y ago
I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered by trucks due to shortages. At some point it is going to be pointless to live there and housing market in those areas will collapse. Coastal areas will be flooded due to increasing sea levels. Places with little to no rain will experience more extreme fires(happening now). I'm sure Midwest will also experience more severe weather but you can make it work, living under water or without water is impossible.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I don't think it's silly, it's honestly why my wife and I keep deciding to keep our family here in Ontario despite the rest of my family being out west. We keep talking about moving to British Columbia for lifestyle and social reasons (skiing, family, scenery, politics etc.) but every time I go out west to visit family in Alberta & BC there's forest fires, talk of drought, shrinking glaciers (that supply all drinking and irrigation water to that whole half of the continent) and I come back thinking that the great lakes region is ideal, particularly here on the Canadian side: politically stable, lots of fresh water, arable land, few forest fires, etc. For now, anyways. EDIT: and yeah, amazing you're getting downvoted. I've been downvoted here for expressing the same sentiment before.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    BC has no lack of water; it rains _heavily_ most of the year along the coast. What BC lacks is a water storage plan; as you've mentioned, our glaciers and snow pack are no longer reliable. And there's the impact from less water in rivers and streams to consider, and how that will effect the ecology.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      There's really three different ecozones we're talking about here. Coastal, interior, and northern. Yes, there's lots of rain along the coast, but that doesn't help the interior. And it's pretty damned hard to build the infrastructure for rain storage on the scale we're talking about. That said, the recent heat wave hit the coast pretty badly, too.
ngngngng 5y ago
Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River and 60% of Utahans benefit from the river. 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Significant amounts of that water usage is to grow Cotton and Alfalfa. Two water intensive crops that are largely exported out of the country. In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, especially just to ship them out of the country. Unfortunately the Governor of Utah makes his money (you guessed it) growing Alfalfa in a desert, and he recently gave an impassioned speech about how those of us asking for certain types of agriculture to stop in our desert don't understand how important farming is.
- mcot2 5y ago
  And Utah wants to build a pipeline to divert even more water.
- fooey 5y ago
  In Southern Utah, which is part of the Mojave Desert, the farmers still doing plain old flood irrigation. It's so staggeringly wasteful it's hard to understand
  - User23 5y ago
    Are there good figures on how much of that water is “wasted” and how much ends up replenishing groundwater reservoirs? Utah isn’t that close to the Pacific so that water has a lot of opportunities to do something other than flow into the ocean.
    - fooey 5y ago
      I don't know any numbers, but we're over 100 all summer, so I imagine it mostly evaporates. Flood irrigation here is just as bad as if they were doing it in Phoenix or Las Vegas
      - brewdad 5y ago
        Many of the old neighborhoods and a few remaining urban farms are flood irrigated in Phoenix. The small city park in my old neighborhood was also flooded once a week to keep the grass green all summer.
jasode 5y ago
Came across a recent 10-minute VICE video about the desert area of Washington County, Utah trying to build a new pipeline to pump water from the Colorado River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY Although the Utah officials are aware that the Colorado River is drying up, they basically justify it saying (paraphrase), "Utah hasn't gotten its fair share yet". Also as trivia... if you're familiar with the popular Youtube channel "What's Inside", the family lives in St George UT which is the growing city the VICE video is about. The family often mentions the advantages of St. George after recently moving from SLC. (https://www.youtube.com/c/WhatsInside/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhatsInside/videos)
legitster 5y ago
My parents own some land in the west zoned for farming. For $100/acre/year they get unlimited irrigation water on that parcel. And now I understand why farms waste so much of it.
MengerSponge 5y ago
Previously (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-west-was-lost/569365/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-we...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hyperion2010 5y ago
Time for my usual post on water in the western United States. We have know this for more than 140 years [0]. Since my previous post I can now also strongly recommend that everyone (yes, everyone) living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region. I fully expect the western water related engineering projects of the 20th century to fail in this century because you can't store what never falls from the sky, and you cannot refill a depleted aquifer. Powell presented us with the reality of the ecological and political situation, maybe some day we will finally get around to implementing the solution [3,4]. Edit: for a special treat RE the thread on water usage in Utah as see the discussion of page 84 (96) of [0] where Powell writes the following: "In general, there is a great wastage, due to badly constructed canals, from which the water either percolates away or breaks away from time to time; due, also, to too rapid flow, and also to an excessive use of the water, as there is a tendency among the farmers to irrigate too frequently and too copiously, errors corrected only by long experience." Apparently long experience is more than 140 years. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878 1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.php https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954 2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954 3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john-wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visio... 4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Water_Sheds_of_Arid_Region_of_United_States_by_John_Wesley_Powell.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Water_Sheds_o...
kevwil 5y ago
Given the severe drought and fire danger conditions in the southwest over the last decade or two, it's not surprising.
willmadden 5y ago
Someone wants grant money.
Ericson2314 5y ago
I sometimes wish someone would just blow the top 2/3 of thoover damn away. If we can't be proactive about the real problem let's fake it being reactive to artificial acceleration.

Highly recommended post apocalyptic scifi book on this subject: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+water+knife+novel https://www.google.com/search?q=the+water+knife+novel

toomuchtodo 5y ago
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL29128049M/Water_Knife https://openlibrary.org/books/OL29128049M/Water_Knife

briga 5y ago

Just like we fight deforestation by planting trees maybe we should fight drought by re-watering our land. It's a massive logistical problem, to be sure, but it seems like humans already have a pretty good handle on draining water from the land. They could start by banning lawns and golf courses in the desert. No reason someone living in Phoenix needs a verdant green lawn. Maybe place some limits on unsustainable agriculture in the desert. I imagine such bans would be a tough sell in most parts but it's hard to imagine how else the land can recover.

Koshkin 5y ago
But "Muh house!" https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/default/files/files/2017/08/Screen-Shot-2017-08-04-at-11.14.12-AM-qfv3q8.png https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/default/files/files/2017/08/Sc...
- briga 5y ago
  Yeaaaaaah, if cities could stop doing that endless unsustainable sprawl thing that would be great
  - Niglodonicus 5y ago
    Yeaaaaah, if our whole society could stop doing that endless unsustainable growth thing that would be great.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      The whole "unsustainable" part is what gets me. Why is "growth" so important that we must do it to a point where it becomes unsustainable and risks literally all life everywhere on Earth becoming extinct (or at least knocked back to pre-stone age levels)?
      - Niglodonicus 5y ago
        https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
    - imtringued 5y ago
      It's only necessary because people think deposits are sacred. The problem isn't some capitalist cabal. Every single individual is responsible.
dleslie 5y ago
The lawns and golf courses are a small fraction of use compared to farming.
- briga 5y ago
  Definitely, but highly wasteful nonetheless. Easier to tell someone to stop growing their lawn than telling a farmer to stop growing their crops
  - kevinmgranger 5y ago
    Depends on the definition of easier. Telling a multitude of voters they don't get to have their Normal Rockwell painting of a life, versus telling a handful (relatively) of farmers that their water usage is now restricted? Lawmakers will choose their interpretation based off of that.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Is it? Farming represents 3% of California's GDP, but 40% of the water. If California decided to simply sell that water to other states and then give the money to the farmers in exchange for not farming, the farmers would probably come out ahead. It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      > It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns. It might be easier to convince people to not grow lawns if we'd do away with some of the stupid laws and ordinances that require people to have "well groomed" lawns in places where such grass is an unnatural imported occurrence. Perhaps even offer some tax breaks or other incentives to "zeroscape" or landscape their yards using native plant life suited to the climate. A yard without a lush verdant lawn need not be an ugly yard. It can still have plants and look nice without grass, if we'd "normalize" more nature/planet friendly practices instead of punishing people for not being destructive to their environment. I bring this point up because here in Utah many neighborhoods will actually fine you if you don't have a lush green lawn in your yard. (Unless of course you're rich, then somehow you magically get approval to go the zeroscape route if you so desire.)
mkhpalm 5y ago
Phoenix is a desert but it wasn't ever devoid of water like people think. Its more like a "green desert" of sorts. Its very existence is the result of the sheer amount of water naturally running through the area. Was once the alfalfla capital of the US due to the water and the number of growing seasons. The only reason it started growing so quickly is because A/C became available. Prior to that they couldn't use swamp coolers mid summer due to the monsoon season making it too humid to work. Water, power, etc, all of that was already there. A better example is someplace like Las Vegas.

01100011 5y ago

The choice is pretty clear to me. We need a national water grid. Desalinization is great and a piece of the puzzle, but we need a way to distribute water across the country. It could also be leveraged as an energy storage device if we continue to add more reservoirs at various elevations. It's not going to be cheap or easy, but we'd be stupid not to start on it now. The climate changes, and we need to plan for it. Places in the west have historically, long before humans started increasing carbon dioxide, seen extended droughts lasting tens or hundreds of years. Human driven climate change could exacerbate this issue. If we want to be a people that lasts thousands of years we need to plan for events that happen in a thousand years.

selectodude 5y ago
No. The Great Lakes are not leaving the Great Lakes area. Ever.
- 01100011 5y ago
  What does this even mean? What does a national water grid have to do with the Great Lakes? Is there some sort of regional paranoia that the rest of the country is coming for "your water"? If you look at a map you'll notice that there is quite a lot of water available beyond the great lakes. Is there a reason freshwater can't be pulled from the mouths of great rivers like the St. Lawrence, the Columbia, and the Mississippi right before it reaches the sea? Is there a reason why flood control systems can't be built to sequester excess precipitation so that it can be reclaimed?
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    It would be extremely energy intensive to push water from sea level to upland farms, basically you'd be running hydro plants in reverse.
    - 01100011 5y ago
      Desalination is also energy intensive. Shipping food from foreign countries is energy intensive. Starving because those countries also experience the effects of global warming and decide to feed their populations first is economically and socially expensive. Choose your costs. You're going to spend energy one way or another, or you're going to sacrifice your quality of life(or potentially your life). I don't see this as being a convincing argument against a nationwide hydro grid, just one of many tradeoffs.

jb775 5y ago

This reminds me of how the glaciers were supposed to be gone by 2020[1]. [1] https://lidblog.com/national-park-service-glaciers/ https://lidblog.com/national-park-service-glaciers/

D13Fd 5y ago
Are you saying the aquifers aren't actually drying up? That Lake Mead and Lake Powell aren't actually at historic lows? This is talking about the facts on the ground today, not some projection of the future.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  He's citing a source that's less reliable because it is compulsively agenda-driven - that is, a site that chooses it's conclusion first and then seeks out info appears to support it.
downismorefun 5y ago
Across the board reductions in glacier size looks pretty grim to me https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers-glacier-national-park?qt-science_center_objects=1#qt-science_center_objects https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/retreat-glaciers...
jdcaron 5y ago
Worldwide glaciers are shrinking: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-glacier-mass-balance https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... I don't know about your example or your source. When you refer to climate changes, you can't use one local sample as your proof.

julienb_sea 5y ago

Water supply and runoff efficiency has been quite stable over the past 50 years, according to charts in that article. The main factor in shrinking is that our water usage has ramped up dramatically as population and agriculture demands grow. One approach might be to implement surcharges associated with water from these reservoirs, to reduce economic viability of overuse, and create incentives to enable other sources of water.

dogman144 5y ago

Does anyone have educated views on desalinization tech? That seems to be the few ways out of this that's totally within our control. I imagine we'll rob Peter to pay Paul with it via extincting a bunch fish we didn't mean to in desal turbines or something unexpected like that, but that aside..

mdorazio 5y ago
It works just fine, but it's expensive and requires a lot of power as well as access to an ocean. You can read about the one that San Diego uses for something like 7% of total water needs here: https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/ https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/ and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
- dogman144 5y ago
  thanks!
blooalien 5y ago
I've read about some pretty interesting recent developments in desalination and other water "cleaning" technologies lately, but they're all still "in the lab" as it were. Nothing of the newest and most amazing stuff I've read about has yet progressed to the point of being in any widespread use. As another reply mentions, existing technologies that are in use tend to be quite expensive (in terms of cost and power/resource usage required to get the job done on any sort of large scale).
- dogman144 5y ago
  my sense as well
bsder 5y ago
> That seems to be the few ways out of this that's totally within our control. Desalinization works just fine--if you have an ocean nearby. In California, desalinization plants keep getting built and will eventually be able to handle the water needs of people near the coasts. However, there is no way desalinization can ever support farming. And that's 80+% of the water consumption. Either you shut down the farms now or when the water runs out--that's the only option.

tomc1985 5y ago

Maybe we need to look at cloud-seeding or other rainmaking solutions like the UAE is doing

KittenInABox 5y ago
This means water will be taken away from other areas, unpredictably, we may not know where. Removing water from the atmosphere above Utah may have wide reaching national, if not international consequences.
downrightmike 5y ago
It works, but it requires tons of precious metals to get to work and we could never recover the amount of water or even the metals themselves to make it efficient. Do-able, just going to cost money like no tomorrow. Literally the definition of throwing money at the problem. When you have a uber rich oil state with plenty of cash to burn, it'll work until they run out of cash or desire.
- VLM 5y ago
  The UAE does not have a Mississippi river. One side of the country is a desert unsuitable for growing crops, naturally stubborn Americans grow crops there anyway at staggering economic and environmental cost. Meanwhile on the other side of the Mississippi, where I live, we get around three to four feet of rain per year for free, and corn grows pretty well most years without artificial irrigation. It makes a lot more sense to move the farmers and their farms than to move the water or implement other hyper-high tech nonsense. The UAE of course has no choice so best of luck to them, but it probably won't work as well as simply moving the farms. "We" do something similar with cows. In some states it costs 100000 gallons of irrigation water per pound of produced beef or whatever nonsense. In my state, we just call it rain water, and its free, LOL. Americans being Americans naturally we go to enormous expensive effort to make sure we grow cows where cows should not be grown, rather than simply moving the cows. "We" also do something similar with humans. There's nothing special about a job done by humans in a desert, other than its an environmental, and eventually economic, disaster. Americans being Americans, we will spend everything we got and then some, to make sure that people can work from home in an uninhabitable unimaginably expensive desert rather than working from home in a nice easy place to live. We'll destroy the entire planet before we make people move from Vegas to Chicago. Which I guess says something about Chicago (LOL just kidding)

minikites 5y ago

We're not going to make any of these hard choices. We're going to keep assuming some nameless person in the future will come up with a way to solve these problems without any sacrifice from us because we're under the collective delusion that the future is always better than the past. Instead, the future is going to be grim because we're refusing to do anything active here in the present to make the future better.

avgDev 5y ago

I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered by trucks due to shortages. At some point it is going to be pointless to live there and housing market in those areas will collapse. Coastal areas will be flooded due to increasing sea levels. Places with little to no rain will experience more extreme fires(happening now). I'm sure Midwest will also experience more severe weather but you can make it work, living under water or without water is impossible.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I don't think it's silly, it's honestly why my wife and I keep deciding to keep our family here in Ontario despite the rest of my family being out west. We keep talking about moving to British Columbia for lifestyle and social reasons (skiing, family, scenery, politics etc.) but every time I go out west to visit family in Alberta & BC there's forest fires, talk of drought, shrinking glaciers (that supply all drinking and irrigation water to that whole half of the continent) and I come back thinking that the great lakes region is ideal, particularly here on the Canadian side: politically stable, lots of fresh water, arable land, few forest fires, etc. For now, anyways. EDIT: and yeah, amazing you're getting downvoted. I've been downvoted here for expressing the same sentiment before.
- dleslie 5y ago
  BC has no lack of water; it rains _heavily_ most of the year along the coast. What BC lacks is a water storage plan; as you've mentioned, our glaciers and snow pack are no longer reliable. And there's the impact from less water in rivers and streams to consider, and how that will effect the ecology.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    There's really three different ecozones we're talking about here. Coastal, interior, and northern. Yes, there's lots of rain along the coast, but that doesn't help the interior. And it's pretty damned hard to build the infrastructure for rain storage on the scale we're talking about. That said, the recent heat wave hit the coast pretty badly, too.

ngngngng 5y ago

Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River and 60% of Utahans benefit from the river. 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Significant amounts of that water usage is to grow Cotton and Alfalfa. Two water intensive crops that are largely exported out of the country. In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, especially just to ship them out of the country. Unfortunately the Governor of Utah makes his money (you guessed it) growing Alfalfa in a desert, and he recently gave an impassioned speech about how those of us asking for certain types of agriculture to stop in our desert don't understand how important farming is.

mcot2 5y ago
And Utah wants to build a pipeline to divert even more water.
fooey 5y ago
In Southern Utah, which is part of the Mojave Desert, the farmers still doing plain old flood irrigation. It's so staggeringly wasteful it's hard to understand
- User23 5y ago
  Are there good figures on how much of that water is “wasted” and how much ends up replenishing groundwater reservoirs? Utah isn’t that close to the Pacific so that water has a lot of opportunities to do something other than flow into the ocean.
  - fooey 5y ago
    I don't know any numbers, but we're over 100 all summer, so I imagine it mostly evaporates. Flood irrigation here is just as bad as if they were doing it in Phoenix or Las Vegas
    - brewdad 5y ago
      Many of the old neighborhoods and a few remaining urban farms are flood irrigated in Phoenix. The small city park in my old neighborhood was also flooded once a week to keep the grass green all summer.

jasode 5y ago

Came across a recent 10-minute VICE video about the desert area of Washington County, Utah trying to build a new pipeline to pump water from the Colorado River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY Although the Utah officials are aware that the Colorado River is drying up, they basically justify it saying (paraphrase), "Utah hasn't gotten its fair share yet". Also as trivia... if you're familiar with the popular Youtube channel "What's Inside", the family lives in St George UT which is the growing city the VICE video is about. The family often mentions the advantages of St. George after recently moving from SLC. (https://www.youtube.com/c/WhatsInside/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/WhatsInside/videos)

legitster 5y ago

My parents own some land in the west zoned for farming. For $100/acre/year they get unlimited irrigation water on that parcel. And now I understand why farms waste so much of it.

MengerSponge 5y ago

Previously (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-west-was-lost/569365/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-we...

deleted 5y ago

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hyperion2010 5y ago

Time for my usual post on water in the western United States. We have know this for more than 140 years [0]. Since my previous post I can now also strongly recommend that everyone (yes, everyone) living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region. I fully expect the western water related engineering projects of the 20th century to fail in this century because you can't store what never falls from the sky, and you cannot refill a depleted aquifer. Powell presented us with the reality of the ecological and political situation, maybe some day we will finally get around to implementing the solution [3,4]. Edit: for a special treat RE the thread on water usage in Utah as see the discussion of page 84 (96) of [0] where Powell writes the following: "In general, there is a great wastage, due to badly constructed canals, from which the water either percolates away or breaks away from time to time; due, also, to too rapid flow, and also to an excessive use of the water, as there is a tendency among the farmers to irrigate too frequently and too copiously, errors corrected only by long experience." Apparently long experience is more than 140 years. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166 0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878 1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.php https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954 2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954 3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john-wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visio... 4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Water_Sheds_of_Arid_Region_of_United_States_by_John_Wesley_Powell.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Water_Sheds_o...

kevwil 5y ago

Given the severe drought and fire danger conditions in the southwest over the last decade or two, it's not surprising.

willmadden 5y ago

Someone wants grant money.

Ericson2314 5y ago

I sometimes wish someone would just blow the top 2/3 of thoover damn away. If we can't be proactive about the real problem let's fake it being reactive to artificial acceleration.