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Soon, life for 40M people who depend on the Colorado River will change
- MarcScott 4y agoJohn Oliver did a nice piece on this recently. Best clip I could find - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YykXkG2Mjz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YykXkG2Mjz8
- worik 4y agohttps://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ https://youtu.be/jtxew5XUVbQ has more of it
- orionion 4y ago"We thought we could engineer nature… huge mistake," the general manager of the Colorado River District says
- jacquesm 4y agoThat'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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- GauntletWizard 4y agoIf by "Smaller Scale" you mean "17% of total land area"...
- jacquesm 4y agoNo, I mean that NL is simply much smaller than the US.
- AlchemistCamp 4y agoWouldn't the more reasonable comparison be America to the EU or CO to NL?
- jacquesm 4y agoThere 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-memoranda/ https://www.vnsc.eu/over-de-vnsc/scheldeverdragen-en-memoran...
- AlchemistCamp 4y agoIt'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.
- Denvercoder9 4y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 4y agoThat'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.
- Denvercoder9 4y agoAh yeah, you're right, I do agree; I misread which comment your original comment was a reply too.
- WkndTriathlete 4y agoWell, 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.)
- jacquesm 4y agoWell, 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.
- Ekaros 4y agoOn other hand moving people is much simpler than moving crop land... So why shouldn't the people be ones to move?
- jacquesm 4y agoOh 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.
- worik 4y agoI 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.
- hinkley 4y agoBut 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.
- orionion 4y agoHow much water does generating electric power waste? Or does the system suck everything dry?
- Denvercoder9 4y agoPower generation doesn't generally waste water, it just extracts the potential energy from discharges that would've happened anyway.
- hinkley 4y agoIt 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.
- pvaldes 4y ago> loss of salmon breeding grounds. There are technology available to alleviate this problem. Not easy, but solvable
- googlryas 4y agoThe 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.
- stirbot 4y agoyou can build the largest reservoir in the world, but if water consumption and evaporation exceed precipitation in the watershed you're on borrowed time.
- majormajor 4y agoSeems 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.
- xbar 4y agoIf packing up and moving out of the Southwest is engineering, then I agree.
- Aarostotle 4y agoWhat 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.
- voz_ 4y ago> 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".
- Aarostotle 4y agoThat 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?
- voz_ 4y agoWe 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?
- icegreentea2 4y agoI 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.
- drewcoo 4y agoThat's what engineering means. "We thought we'd had smarter officials in place." - me
- gardenfelder 4y agohttps://archive.ph/1LLnC https://archive.ph/1LLnC
- czbond 4y agoThank you - I had to use cache:<url> in Chrome to read it, and wish I had seen your link first.
- qaz_plm 4y agoTIL! Always did a search and use the cached option from the SERP. Thank you!
- oxfeed65261 4y agoYou can simply type “https://archive.ph/“ https://archive.ph/“ followed by a URL, like https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/21/colorado-river-drought-water-crisis-west/ 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/colorado-river-drought-water-crisis-west/ https://archive.ph/https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/21/col... I have https://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/ as autotext on my mobile device for convenience.
- hinkley 4y agoSo 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.
- czbond 4y agoI read it as the opposite: "lower basin"... CA, NV, AZ
- rustybelt 4y agoI'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.
- goo 4y agoColorado's where the river's headwaters are: this is probably an even bigger deal for those in Utah, Arizona, Las Vegas, and Southeastern California.
- cmurf 4y agoThat is somewhat true, but also in Colorado there's a plethora of westslope vs front range issues.
- xyzwave 4y agoDon’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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact
- collegeburner 4y agotime to cut mexicos water before anything else then. not like they can fight us on it.
- jacquesm 4y agoYes, 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
- collegeburner 4y ago
- slotrans 4y agoRelevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d...
- czbond 4y agoI 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?
- e9 4y agoCheck out Earthships for inspiration: https://www.newmexico.org/earthships/ https://www.newmexico.org/earthships/ There is cool documentary episode on them on Amazon Prime, show called Off The Cuff and episode called Earthships.
- gwbrooks 4y agoPoliticians, 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.
- worik 4y ago> 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
- kelnos 4y agoSo 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.
- Aarostotle 4y agoI 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.
- mc32 4y agoHistorically 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.
- bloudermilk 4y agoAdd to that: proximity to major ports for international distribution and no tornadoes or hail
- 8bitsrule 4y agoThe 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-trouble-as-western-u-s-adapts-to-water-scarcity/ 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."
- racl101 4y agoThe irony of putting a story like this behind a paywall.
- stew-j 4y agoI 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. :)
- NHQ 4y agoYet 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.
- sorethescore 4y agoWhat 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.
- NHQ 4y agoClimate 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).
- oceanplexian 4y agoThe 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.
- NHQ 4y agoI'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.
- phendrenad2 4y agoMy 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.