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Fears of ‘dead pool’ on Colorado River as drought threatens Hoover Dam water
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/HmJZh https://archive.ph/HmJZh http://web.archive.org/web/20221216221543/https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-12-16/risk-of-dead-pool-looms-at-colorado-river-meeting http://web.archive.org/web/20221216221543/https://www.latime...
- throw0101c 4y agoFrom a 2020 paper: > Human consumption of freshwater is now approaching or surpassing the rate at which water sources are being naturally replenished in many regions, creating water shortage risks for people and ecosystems. Here we assess the impact of human water uses and their connection to water scarcity and ecological damage across the United States, identify primary causes of river dewatering and explore ways to ameliorate them. We find irrigation of cattle-feed crops to be the greatest consumer of river water in the western United States, implicating beef and dairy consumption as the leading driver of water shortages and fish imperilment in the region. We assess opportunities for alleviating water scarcity by reducing cattle-feed production, finding that temporary, rotational fallowing of irrigated feed crops can markedly reduce water shortage risks and improve ecological sustainability. Long-term water security and river ecosystem health will ultimately require Americans to consume less beef that depends on irrigated feed crops. * https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0483-z https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0483-z * PDF: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/323061602.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/323061602.pdf > Irrigation of cattle feed crops is the single largest consumptive user at both regional and national scales, accounting for 23 percent of all water consumption nationally, 32 percent in the Western U.S. and 55 percent in the Colorado River basin. * https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2020/march/beef-dairy-consumption-water-shortages-fish-imperilment/ https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2020/march/beef-dairy-consumptio...
- urspx 4y agoThank you. Incredible that 'cattle' isn't even mentioned once in the newspaper article.
- imchillyb 4y agoWatch 2-3 episodes of 'How it's Made' and you can see how much water use is industrial. Add the industrial and cattle together and one can quickly see that it's not humans that are consuming the vast majority of potable water, but companies and industry that are depleting what's available for the rest of us.
- gernb 4y ago> it's not humans that are consuming the vast majority of potable water, but companies and industry that are depleting what's available for the rest of us. companies only make what they can sell. The sell what consumers want. So it is humans. Humans want meat. If they stop wanting meat companies will stop making meat.
- rurp 4y agoA huge reason companies use so much water is that it's artificially cheap. Companies typically pay 10% or less of the cost per gallon a resident does in their home.
- lazide 4y agoUsually because the grade and location of the water is not suitable for residential use.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoFarmers don't need drinking-safe water but that doesn't justify the price difference. There should be three grades of water: 1) Untreated. 2) Salty (desalinated, but not to full freshwater standards), used for toilets, showers and the like. 3) Potable. What you're doing with the water should have no bearing on the price and the price difference should only reflect the additional cost of going from #1 or #2 to #3. You also pay a separate charge for delivering water to your place, this is omitted if you're getting it from a well and don't need delivery. The base rates are standardized across a watershed (in this case, every place served by the Colorado river), the delivery charge is based on the cost to provide it to you. (Thus the cabins on the other side of the mountain here that lost their water in a wildfire--when the trees burned it not only damaged the pipe but caused land slippage that destroyed said pipe--pay a whopping delivery charge, but otherwise the same price per cubic foot we do.)
- jt2190 4y agoThe article is coverage of the Colorado River Water Users Association 2022 Conference in Las Vegas: https://www.crwua.org/annual-conference-2022.html https://www.crwua.org/annual-conference-2022.html Edit: Their 2022 Resolutions are interesting (PDF): https://www.crwua.org/assets/downloads/resolutions/2022-resolutions-crwua.pdf https://www.crwua.org/assets/downloads/resolutions/2022-reso...
- mabbo 4y agoThis is the downside of a more decentralized country. In many nations with more centralized control, the federal government would simply come up with a plan and each smaller jurisdiction would have to do what they were told. But the USA requires a meeting of "officials from seven states, water agencies, tribes and the federal government" to negotiate, and continually fail to come to any agreement. Each will blame the others, nothing will get done, and everyone will lose, all to avoid not getting the best deal for themselves.
- eesmith 4y agoCounter-example: The Aral Sea didn't do so well under more centralized Soviet control.
- ancapsfascists 4y agoFederal lawmakers need to get over the history of water rights here. The system was built on assumptions that just don't hold (more water was apportioned than ever flows). You can give each state an amount and let them figure it out, or take all existing rights and re allocate them federally. But it needs to happen, and urgently. "But people will lose their income!" - Thats a symptom of requiring these people to work so wastefully to survive. UBI and other safety nets reduce the need to do this specific work for profit. "But my luxuries will be more expensive!" - No, your luxuries are just being priced at what they cost, and the burden of the environmental damage is no longer hidden from you "Big government bad!" - I get it, I'm an anarchist. But when you have to protect a massive river, it's clear we cannot rely on all the individuals to do the right thing.
- andrei_says_ 4y agoAlso, UBI is often the cheapest and most efficient way to prop people out of poverty and (surprised?) to support their ambitions in education, starting business etc.
- slashdev 4y agoThere isn’t enough data to make that claim with any confidence yet. It could just easily be the start of a spiral into an Argentina style socialist nightmare. The ability to vote for the party offering you a raise may be too dangerous. There’s no real way to know, because it’s never been tried at enough scale, or real enough, to have any data one way or the other.
- QuantumGood 4y agoUBI has long-term challenges in that organizations will try everything they can to siphon off the money ("rent seeking") until they succeed. UBI needs to deal with this reality to succeed even in the medium term.
- eikenberry 4y agoI've also never seen anyone address the high chance that post UBI the #1 issue for every politician will become "I will raise the UBI" and if they don't their opposition will. How will we deal with an ever increasing UBI and where will that every increasing source of money come from?
- bcrosby95 4y agoI was surprised how slow the Metro Water District of SoCal took to move on this. They restricted water use for residents relying on the state water project back in June. But they've sat on their hands for the Colorado River until just a few days ago.
- ancorevard 4y agoWhat water infrastructure has California invested in the last decade? As far as I can tell, all that CA Gov has done is to prohibit any desalination plants from getting built.
- leoh 4y agoYeah, it's not a good look, especially since California is the only state that is adjacent to the ocean. Not only that, renewables like solar are perfect for desalination as you don't really need one of these systems to be running around the clock.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago>> California is the only state that is adjacent to the ocean That's interesting, I had no idea.
- grogenaut 4y agobest intent assumption that they meant "of the states having water shortages in the southwest". The other 2 on the coast are OR and WA and they are not dependent on the colorado for water, they have their own massive river.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoThanks for the clarification, I honestly didn't know what they were asserting.
- ceejayoz 4y agoIt's the only state in the Colorado River Compact adjacent to the ocean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact Places like Hawaii and Florida are, for obvious reasons, not relevant to the Colorado River.
- burritas 4y agoThe big showstopper is what to do with the hypersalinated byproduct. You'd kill anything that was near where it's let out. It's also very corrosive and I imagine the would be a problem moving it far from the plant.
- ineptech 4y agoWow, this has gotten bad fast. I did some reading on the water shortage in the Southwest the last time I saw a story about it on the FP, and came away with the idea that this is a classic coordination trap, and the only solutions are a) everyone involved spontaneously decides to conserve water in unison, and b) the Feds enact quick, decisive regulations that almost no one (the states involved, counties and cities, developers, industrial corporations, big agriculture, etc) likes and enforce them harshly. The former is a fantasy and I'm not sure the latter isn't either. It's hard to draw any conclusion other than: don't move there. Previous article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-water-wars-come-to-the-suburbs https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987408
- lazide 4y agoNone of the players want the feds involved, including the feds near as I can tell. It’s got lose-lose-lose written all over it.
- bagels 4y agoCan't wait to see what silly signs get put up along 5 in the central valley soon.
- ethanbond 4y agoJust to be crystal clear this has not gotten bad fast. This has been a loud, obvious, well known issue at least since I was born in Arizona almost 30 years ago. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard sentiments to the effect of, “well you know there’s no water, so that’s why we’re building on a lot further up the basin and we’ll just have to drill the well deeper than the other folks.”
- eesmith 4y agoEven older. "Cadillac Desert" was published in 1986 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert .
- tzs 4y agoI wonder if it is possible to take two or more high water using industries and combine them in a way that would all the combination to work on substantially less water than they were using individually? For example we've all read that it takes a little over a gallon to grow an almond. And it takes about 10 gallons to make one integrated circuit. But that almond does not contain a gallon of water. The almond only contains about 0.0003 gallons of water. And my computer, which contains dozen of integrated circuits, certainly does not actually contain hundreds of gallons of water. So could we put almond farms and semiconductor fabs next to each other and arrange that much of the 0.9997 gallons that does not go into the almond is available to the semiconductor fab? (Or maybe the other way around--start with the fab and then do the almonds?) And could we put some other agricultural or manufacturer after all that, and so on? Some of these uses might contaminate the water so some cleanup might be needed before it could be used downstream, but there are a lot of agricultural and industrial processes that need water with varying requirements as to how clean it needs to be so it seems plausible that there should be some combinations that would work well together.
- retrac 4y agoPlants respire, as we do, so much of that water goes into the air. Water + CO2 + light -> sugar + oxygen. Metabolized sugar -> water vapour + heat + CO2. Also, much of that water, now in the form of sugar, is used to grow the plant. Cellulose, in particular, in the cell walls, etc. There are certainly pathways to unlock the water again; burning cellulose releases water vapour, for example. But how much are you going to get for the work involved? 1 tonne of dry hay would release a few hundred litres of water if you burned it, very roughly. Conceivably, you could grow them in a greenhouse and capture much of the exhaust, but it'd probably be cheaper and easier to desalinate, or just dehumidify air directly. Just growing them in a greenhouse at all -- with humidity and gas exchange under control -- would allow water consumption to be cut enormously.
- a9h74j 4y agoI associate Lester Brown with the observation: It is too expensive to ship water, but when you ship wheat, you are in effect shipping water.
- leoh 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- eesmith 4y agoVery irrelevant as water rights use on the Colorado isn't a commons, and has been governed under the Colorado River Compact for the last century. Note also the paper's historical inaccuracy of attributing commons failure to users of the commons, rather than owners enclosing and appropriating land from common use.
- sidewndr46 4y agoAren't there passageways left over from the dam's construction that could be dynamited to restore the normal flow of the river? Given that the reservoir no longer serves a purpose it seems like that would be the most sensible approach at this point.
- lazide 4y agoIt has no purpose right now. Next year might be flooding, and then you’d better believe everyone wants it.
- sidewndr46 4y agoIsn't that what Glen Canyon Dam exists for?
- lazide 4y agoNope, though it helps. On a flood year, the Colorado is pretty nuts.
- sidewndr46 4y agoWhat's the real impact of a downpour year (like the 1980s had) downstream of Glen canyon dam without the Hoover dam in place? It looks like Yuma is the only population center before you get to Mexico. Mexico historically gets basically 0 water from the river from what I understand.
- lazide 4y agoThere are some interesting studies on it, but practically ‘it depends’. Mostly water capture infra, bridges, etc. right now I imagine. We’d want to capture as much of that water though, most likely.
- avandermeulen 4y ago“One way or another, physics and Mother Nature are going to dictate outcomes if we don’t come up with some solutions,” Entsminger said. “I would like every water user on the Colorado River to recognize that the 21st century has substantially less water than the 20th century. And all of the institutions we built in the 20th century need to be adjusted — in months, not years — in order to face the reality of less water for every user, in every sector, in every state.”
- lazide 4y agoAka, won’t happen voluntarily, but may happen anyway - with associated pain and complaints for this impacted. Sounds about right.