Breakthrough deal to prevent Colorado River from drying up

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/22/colorado-river-states-california-arizona-nevada

by toomuchtodo • 3 years ago

222 216 3 years ago

causi2• 3 years ago

I'm interested to see the details of the deal. With the Supreme Court ruling on the Colorado Compact that basically lets all the other states wither up and die before California has to go from watering its golf courses every three hours to every six hours, I'd be very surprised if they're cutting the same percentage as everyone else.

bcrosby954• 3 years ago

Most of the water California gets from the Colorado is funneled into the imperial valley for growing food (in a literal desert, not a hyperbolic one like most of California), which has extremely senior water rights.

blululu2• 3 years ago

Imperial County receives a lubricous allotment from the Colorado River, but it is a better use than most of the claims to this water. The Central Arizona project, for instance, requires a coal plant to pump water uphill into a (even hotter) desert. Much as golf in the desert is a wasteful use of resources, golf courses generally pay market rate for their water and don't require federal subsidies to turn a profit. This is more than you can say for a lot of Colorado River water.

causi2• 3 years ago

Right, and the problem with water rights seniority is that the amounts were allocated based on 16.5 million acre-feet per year when the modern average annual flow is 11 million acre-feet.

bilbo0s3• 3 years ago

California could care less if the Colorado Compact is changed. Their use of it is limited to a small area south of LA. Mostly for farming. Which they shouldn't be doing there anyway.

It's states like Arizona that will have the problem. I lived in Scottsdale. Saw the writing on the wall and we sold the Scottsdale place for an insane amount of money. Having said that, if you can get a place just inside the border of the city of Phoenix, you'll probably be good. Phoenix has been socking away water forever and has about 70 to 100 years worth of it under the city. As a matter of water availability, I'd stay away from places out in the suburban areas though. If you've been paying attention down there, you probably kind of already know that if it comes to a head, Phoenix will take care of Phoenix. Places like Scottsdale, Mesa, or Tempe would be expected to solve their own problems.

I firmly believe things are gonna get heated out in Arizona if the drought persists. No pun intended.

throwaway17774• 3 years ago

Counterpoint is that imperial valley farming is very productive because the climate is great for many crops other than the lack of water.

blululu2• 3 years ago

The small area in the South you are talking about has more than half the State's population and is the largest constituency of the Colorado Compact. While the Imperial County claim is the bulk of California's claim to the Colorado, the water finds its way to cities as well. Thus California has a very large stake in the Colorado Compact (arguably the largest in terms of people and served and dollars made). If these people don't get water from the Colorado, they will look for it in the northern half of the state. It is cheaper and easier to collectively defend the very legitimate claims to the Colorado than to try to reallocate the state's other water resources.

m4632• 3 years ago

makes me think of "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi

buzzert3• 3 years ago

By law, anyone who wants to sell or lease land in Scottsdale needs to prove that there's a water supply for at least 100 years[0].

Is that phony or something? What was the writing on the wall that you saw that made you leave Scottsdale? Curious as a Phoenix-native who maybe one day might want to move back to the valley.

[0] https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/water/water-supply

p_j_w• 3 years ago

Their use of it is limited to a small area south of LA. Mostly for farming. Which they shouldn't be doing there anyway.

People say this all the time, but where else do you propose this be done? Where's the empty land that can be as productive as the Imperial Valley? If you want to stop farming there, we're going to have to reduce our population or it'll happen naturally in an unpleasant way.

sidewndr462• 3 years ago

How does Phoenix manage to store water?

dragonwriter2• 3 years ago

California could care less if the Colorado Compact is changed.

It's behavior everytime the issue comes up suggest you are very wrong.

Their use of it is limited to a small area south of LA.

No, its not; while most of it is used in the Imperial Valley, L.A. (by far the largest city in the State) itself also uses it for about half of its municipal supply, (as does San Diego, but I guess that could technically be considered part of the “small area south of LA”.)

mech4222• 3 years ago

I live in Mesa - Scottsdale will be less impacted then the rest of the state. SRP serves Mesa and Scottsdale as well as PHX. There's an unincorporated area north of Scottsdale, that's already screwed - and people are still buying houses there! I think PHX Metro will be fine, but the rest of the state doesn't have the resources PHX does.

PS - and due to there being less agriculture in the area now, PHX metro is down to 1950s levels of water usage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/us/arizona-water-rio-verd...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands...

prottog3• 3 years ago

Which part of the country (or the world) did you move to, out of curiosity? Is it one with a much more stable outlook on water supply?

kibwen3• 3 years ago

In the context of California, note that the Colorado River does not irrigate the Central Valley. Instead, the Colorado River is used to water the areas around (mostly south) of Los Angeles.

pgwhalen• 3 years ago

The article has a good picture of what areas are affected.

eschulz• 3 years ago

Interesting that this deal apparently only includes CA, AZ, and NV, and it averts the federal government imposing water cuts on a total of seven states which enjoy water from the Colorado River.

The three states agreeing to this deal are down river (excluding two Mexican states that are further down river), and I suppose they are the ones most reliant on the river.

zie3• 3 years ago

(excluding two Mexican states that are further down river)

The Mexican states/Mexican govt don't need to, they have a treaty with the US govt. The US govt is required to send X amount of water across the border. I forget the # and am not willing to look it up right now. The US govt has been supplementing water across the border for a while now with wells. Nothing new here.

hanniabu• 3 years ago

And I'm sure Mexico knows that the US can stop sending water at any point and there's not much they can do about it

ccooffee• 3 years ago

I forget the # and am not willing to look it up right now.

I gotchu.

1944's "UTILIZATION OF WATERS OF THE COLORADO AND TIJUANA RIVERS AND OF THE RIO GRANDE" treaty between the US and Mexico established the "International Boundary and Water Commission" (IBWC). The text of the 1944 treaty is available from IBWC's website[0][1].

According to the text of the 1944 treaty (article 10 deals with the Colorado River), Mexico is entitled to at minimum 1.5 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River, and in wet years is entitled to 1.7 million acre-feet of water.

Based on the submitted article, which says "3m acre-feet of water is expected to be conserved over the next three years". If that comes down to 1m acre-feet per year, that's 2/3 of the quantity of water guaranteed to Mexico.

[0] https://www.ibwc.gov/Treaties_Minutes/treaties.html [all treaties overseen by IBWC] [1] https://www.ibwc.gov/Files/1944Treaty.pdf [PDF of 1944 treaty]

0xB31B1B• 3 years ago

the issue with water rights is that CA/AZ/NV have the most senior rights on the river and the highest usage of river water IIRC

InTheArena3• 3 years ago

This is incorrect. The water usage is split 50/50 between the upper basin and lower basin, where rights are senior to each pool. The upper basin states are also well below their allocation right now, as opposed to the southern states.

I've been following this very closely for a while - the primary issue here is still agricultural businesses in California consuming more then their water rights permit.

chatmasta2• 3 years ago

For context, the river starts in Colorado and passes through Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California.

I wonder why Colorado and Utah were not involved in the deal? If one of them had a problem with it, would they have standing to sue?

What if, hypothetically, Colorado built a dam and stopped the flow of water to the downstream states?

slashdev• 3 years ago

I don’t see how they have standing being up river. The deal can’t affect them thanks to gravity.

If Colorado wanted to build a dam, that’s completely different and the other states would likely challenge it in court.

TinyRick• 3 years ago

These states follow prior appropriation doctrine for water rights, which states that upstream owners can use/divert water for "beneficial use". Building a dam to intentionally stop the flow to downstream consumers is not a beneficial use.

RegularOpossum• 3 years ago

The vast majority of Utah relies on snow melt for water as the Colorado bypass most of the population so it's not as much of an issue.

InTheArena3• 3 years ago

The upper basin states have already hit their targets (and then some) in terms of water usage. The problem is that California has been consuming the surplus, and there is no longer enough water flow to sustain the surplus.

toast0• 3 years ago

I'm sure all seven states in the compact were involved in this deal. They're all signatories on the compact. The way the compact is structured, the upper basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona (a smidgen)) are supposed to deliver 7.5 million acre feet per year to the lower basin states (California, Nevada and Arizona (bulk)), but they can use whatever they want other than that amount; this amount was supposed to be about even between upper and lower, but it isn't. It sounds like this deal is reducing the required delivery by 1 million acre feet per year, although I don't know if that's from the original target or the lowered targets from the 2007 interim agreement, so somewhere between 6 and 6.5 million acre feet; and the upper basin states get the rest.

jcranmer• 3 years ago

I wonder why Colorado and Utah were not involved in the deal? If one of them had a problem with it, would they have standing to sue?

The Colorado River Compact effectively divides states into two buckets, the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states. The Upper Basin states already came to an agreement a while ago; the Lower Basin states only came to an agreement today.

Tangurena25• 3 years ago

The laws you want to learn about are called "water rights". Western water rights laws (which are the predominate legal framework in the US West) basically say "first in time, first in right". The people who used that water first have the ownership rights of that water flow.

So it would be illegal in Colorado to build such a dam because you would be blocking the water that belongs to someone else.

In Colorado, it is illegal to collect the rainwater that lands on your roof because that water would normally flow into a river and that river water belongs to someone else. I used to live in Colorado and about 10-15 years ago, there was a change in the state law that the media proclaimed made it legal for you to collect the rainfall that landed on your roof. They left out the conditions that the statute required: you had to have an existing well permit, you could only use the rainwater for the same purposes that your well permit allowed (so if the permit only allowed watering livestock, you could not use the water for your garden), then there was another stickler - there could not be a water utility adjacent to your property (even if you were not connected to that water company). There were 3 other requirements, but those 3 were so narrowly focused that the law basically upheld the illegality of collecting rainfall.

InTheArena3• 3 years ago

The treaty water rights separate upper basin states and lower basin river states, with the capacity split. In theory, Colorado has almost as much water rights as California does, but the uper basic states have been actively managing and reducing their footprint on the river (unlike California, which has mostly been in violation of it's usage).

bombcar7• 3 years ago

Some of the other states are "upriver" from the Colorado and so they would be exceptionally unhappy about restrictions.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

So this seems like a stopgap measure so it's not done yet. I'm disappointed to see how people will equally bear the cost of this given we all know what needs to change here: we need to reduce agricultural usage. Although cutting off gold courses will propbably help too.

Farms have a "use it or lose it" system for water allocation, which leads farms to grow water-intensive crops to keep their allocation, most notably alfalfa. We just need to stop growing such crops.

One bone of contention: while climate change is obvviously very real, neither it nor a "historic drought" is the cause of the problem. The problem is, quite simply, overuse based on unrealistic projections of water inflows to the Colorado River basin (see Figure 2 [1]).

Blaming it on climate change is washing hands of responsibility. Poor modeling and mismanagement is the real problem.

[1] https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...

xp843• 3 years ago

Driving through the Central Valley on a regular basis, it's interesting the entirely different beliefs/expectations about water that seems to drive politics there. There are signs everywhere railing against the state government for "dumping our dam water into the ocean" which is apparently a political memeification based on a Trump quip. It makes it sound like from the perspective of the Central Valley farming interests, California's cities should just shut off water to homes and businesses, plus allow rivers to be completely run dry by farming to the point saltwater flows inland in the delta, to make it possible for farms to always get unlimited cheap water to grow their choice of crops. The signs also say "Is growing food wasting water????" as though the choice is to either allow unlimited irrigation, or end all farming, ignoring the option that they 'spend' water on crops within a realistic budget even when that doesn't allow full maximization of crops every year.

It seems like this lack of realism due to people's desire for very simple good-guy/bad-guy partisan narratives will continue affecting internal CA water politics, which are based on the Sierra Nevada-sourced water that flows in the California Water Project to Los Angeles.

s1artibartfast16• 3 years ago

If you are curious and want to learn, Central Valley in California and Farmers have a lot of legitimate grievances.

Wanting unlimited water is a pretty biased take.

The start of the whole issue was that many Central Valley Farms and counties raised bonds to put in aqueducts and entered into purchase agreements with the state of California. The California legislature then passed environmental regulation and stopped providing the water. In many instances this water was already paid for, or the state decided that farmers must continue to pay while the state doesn't hold up their side of the contract.

The farmer's position is that the state needs to fulfill it's half of the contract or buy its way out of the obligations it made.

A similar legal battle is playing out all throughout California over groundwater. In those cases, the state passed environmental regulation bypassing the eminent domain process.

I know dozens of families that have lost their life's work and savings overnight because the state thinks it found a loophole to stop them from using water without using eminent domain to buy it.

The closest analogy for the groundwater situation is if you owned a farm in a migratory bird path and the state passed a law for minimum roosting land. Then, instead of buying your farmland, they made a law that you aren't allowed to step foot on it.

freeopinion2• 3 years ago

You make a very simple statement without any real justification: "We just need to stop growing such crops." I'm guessing that you have all sorts of justification for this and assume that those justifications are well-known and generally agreed. But for those of us less educated, what is the justification? Why shouldn't agriculture be given priority in these regions?

Why is water different than land in this regard? When a developer wants to put up a new subdivision, they buy property from the current owner. Why shouldn't water shares be the same?

dymk• 3 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...

Alfalfa and almonds are thirsty yet we grow them by the square mile in the desert. It doesn't take much googling to realize this is not a smart thing to do in a drought area.

bcrosby954• 3 years ago

If you eliminate 100% of suburban water use you will still have a water problem. If you want a land analogy, it would be like looking at people in San Jose and saying they're the reason for a lack of farmland in California.

Plentiful and subsidized year-around food is a security issue on the federal level - but when compared to other industries it brings in comparatively little for the states involved. You can't reasonably expect a few water starved states to export the majority of its water via crops while sacrificing its own economic prosperity for the sake of the broader country.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

There are various measures of water usage for various crops. Commonly you have "water usage per kilogram of crops" and "acre feet of irrigation water per acre of farming land" but these aren't that useful (IMHO). A far more useful measure if "water usage per kilocalorie" since that's really waht matters and this varies a ton from food source to food source [1].

The "use it or lose it" system of water rights for agriculture in the Colorado River basin creates warped incentives, which is to maximize water usage rather than the economic value of the crop or the calorie content of that crop.

It's clear we can use a ton less water and still feed people in a way that's economically viable for the farmers. But no one wants to give up the water because once it's gone, it's gone.

This situation has real impacts where some in California, for example, were floating the iea of using desalination to provide potable water for people rather than the far cheaper and more obvious solution of just using less water on water-intensive crops.

All of this is just superficial responsibility shifting.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/scarcity-water-use-kcals

Tangurena25• 3 years ago

In Utah, 80% of water use goes to agriculture. And farmers pay about 1% of what residential customers pay for water.

As a nation, we have this fantasy of turning the desert green. The book Cadillac Desert lists our national obsession with massive water projects that never pay for themselves and that always require massive tax subsidies.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...

yboris• 3 years ago

Biden Admin Boosts Big Oil’s Colorado River Scheme

https://www.levernews.com/biden-admin-boosts-big-oils-colora...

Really problematic stuff going on.

njovin2• 3 years ago

Environmental issues aside, allocating $80m in bonds so that a private company can increase profits seems insane.

The largest oil producer in the Uinta Basin, Finley Resources (which operates in Utah through its subsidiary Uinta Wax), has been promoting the project while claiming it cannot afford to contribute to construction costs

So they can't build it and presumably can't maintain it, so we should foot the bill and hope nothing goes wrong?

bombcar7• 3 years ago

Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting!

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix/AZ100/1950/whiskey_drinking_...

One of the hard things with "looking in from the outside" is that these numbers are just so batshit insane that we cannot really grasp it. An "acre-foot" is huge, and what we personally consume appears so small (and what does "consume" mean anyway? If I pull water from a well and then put it back in the ground with a septic, how much is "consumed"?)

Perhaps we need federal labelling for things that puts some "water used" on things so you can compare, though water used in some areas is critical and in others is not a bit deal at all.

arcticbull• 3 years ago

The vast majority of the consumption isn't personal, it's silly agricultural use like growing alfalfa and almonds in the desert.

80% of the Colorado River water usage is agricultural. [1]

Forget not drinking water or taking a shower - eat one less steak or skip a handful of almonds. That's where all the water is actually going.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...

rektide• 3 years ago

As horrible usages of water ad those are, it seems like significantly more water is used on also very inefficient meat production.

I would love a better breakdown of what exactly California & the west's agricultural water usage is.

DennisP• 3 years ago

In Arizona, it's not even the US consumption. They're selling the alfafa to Saudi Arabia, which won't grow it itself because it uses too much water.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-company-fondomonte-arizon...

Infernal• 3 years ago

eat one less steak or skip a handful of almonds

At least in the case of Arizonan desert alfalfa, this is a result of sweetheart lease deals offered to Saudis with no limits on groundwater access, who are effectively exporting Arizona’s aquifers in the form of livestock feed.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-company-fondomonte-arizon...

grumple• 3 years ago

Farmers seem to disagree with the "almonds bad" narrative: https://farmtogether.com/learn/blog/dispelling-miconceptions...

In addition to the reasons they list, I'd like to point out that Almonds are actually native to the desert in Iran and the Levant. I've found them in the wild while hiking in the desert in the middle east.

Tangurena25• 3 years ago

Utah has a similar problem. The governor has an alfalfa farm yet has gotten on TV to demand that Utahns pray for rain. 80% of Utah's water consumption is agricultural. If the governor wanted to reduce Utah's water problem, he should start by putting his money where his mouth is, and stop growing such an abusive crop.

Unlike Arizona, it appears that much of Utah's alfalfa crop gets exported to China.

bluGill3• 3 years ago

If I pull water from a well and then put it back in the ground with a septic

Get your septic system fixed if this is happening. Septic systems are supposed to evaporate the water into the air, not put it back into ground water.

Of course you won't actually see it working like that in a properly functioning system. However that is how it should work.

bombcar7• 3 years ago

How do they evaporate into the air? https://www.epa.gov/septic/types-septic-systems "conventional system" is the one I know most common, and I've never seen an evapotranspiration system.

Ah:

Evapotranspiration systems are only useful in specific environmental conditions. The climate must be arid and have adequate heat and sunlight. These systems work well in shallow soil; however, they are at risk of failure if it rains or snows too much.

So it's a desert thing, I am not in a desert.

dboyd• 3 years ago

Leach fields are not uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septic_drain_field

aardvarkr• 3 years ago

I’m fully onboard with this. Silicon manufacturing is one example that consumes an insane amount of water (100’s of thousands of gallons each day) but has to ultra purify it for their processes and then returns it back to the city water supply cleaner than when it came in. The water treatment plant has to have the capacity to feed it but to say that the water was “consumed” is a misnomer.

tomp• 3 years ago

If it's so clean and pure, why not just reuse it?

exabrial2• 3 years ago

The long term solution is to stop growing things in the fricken desert.

Open a nuclear reactor in Canada and power greenhouses there. Desalinate some water while you’re at it.

xienze• 3 years ago

I believe the environmentalists aren’t fond of desalination because you have to dump the extra super salty sludge that’s extracted back into the ocean somewhere, thus increasing salinity levels in a particular area.

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

Are there too many pollutants not to just evaporate the sea salt sludge until it's sea salt for cooking and sell it?

adolph• 3 years ago

Maybe it could be used for the fluid used in hydraulic fracturing operations?

https://oilandgasinfo.ca/know-fracking/what-is-frac-fluid-ma...

sologoub2• 3 years ago

Are there any credible studies in the net effects of the added salinity vs how much water is dumped back in from rain run off, reclaimed sewage and other land based sources?

skybrian• 3 years ago

Well, not just dumped. It's diluted first. Or should be.

As I understand it, San Diego's plant dilutes the effluent by mixing it with additional ocean water, but I don't have a good handle on how well that works.

bsder• 3 years ago

You simply can't desalinate water at a rate sufficient for agriculture.

The only solution is to let the water price rise so that the agribusinesses quit growing crap like alfalfa.

stonemetal122• 3 years ago

They could repair the Bonneville Salt Flats. They have lost quite a bit of salt, more than 50 million tons.

Edit: I bet that only covers a few years of farming use though.

cyberax4• 3 years ago

This is just BS. The amount of desalinated water is completely dwarfed by normal evaporation. If we replace _all_ the water used in agriculture by desalinated water, we won't even make a dent in the global saltwater balance.

Some local effects are certainly possible, but they can be mitigated by pre-diluting the brine.

hosh3• 3 years ago

You can grow things in an arid region (desertification has more to do with being unable to retain water in poor soil). Whether those things are what people want to buy at the market is something else.

There are many design patterns and practices for better water management. Some of them are only just being implemented — California is now just starting to credit growers with putting water back into aquifers during seasons of excess rain (and mitigates flood risks). But there are a lot more to be done, including water harvesting structures that slow down water (converting surface water to ground water).

idiotsecant2• 3 years ago

this is not the first time recently i've heard about how part of the solution is slowing water to return some to the aquifer but it's essential to understand that changing the rate of flow of water also changes sediment deposition rates, which can have enormous impacts on ecosystems, power production, agriculture, and a bunch of other things. It isn't a dial you get to just arbitrarily tweak.

LarryDarrell• 3 years ago

This is very much true in NM where I live. Agriculture accounts for 79% of yearly water use. We're known for our chile (63,000 tons) but that's dwarfed by alfalfa (784,000 tons).

I'm not sure what the answer is. The farmers have their own water rights, and as a group are pretty well politically connected.

We could try Eminent Domain or unilaterally breaking those old water contracts... but that's guaranteed to make the Supreme Court. Given the current make up of the SC, I don't see any decision coming that might curtail property rights. I'm guessing it'll be perpetual subsidies for letting land go fallow.

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

If the court returns land to Native title that might do it

dsr_• 3 years ago

The chiles only get grown there. Alfalfa is alfafa, nobody cares about the terroir.

colechristensen• 3 years ago

It's pretty simple, put small, but yearly growing taxes on "stupid to grow in the desert" crops like alfalfa. Slow enough to make the transition away from them reasonable for the farmers, but high enough to pressure them into no longer producing the crops.

cyberax4• 3 years ago

The state can prohibit growing certain types of water-hungry agriculture. This won't be an infringement of water rights.

scythe3• 3 years ago

Much of the Imperial Valley — which uses a lot of Colorado water — is below sea level and could (in theory) be fed by desalinated water with very little pumping. But it's not economically viable. Still, quite a bit more viable than nuclear greenhouses!

idiotsecant2• 3 years ago

Is desalinating enough water to irrigate an entire valley less viable than nuclear greenhouses? I'm not so sure. Both would be extraordinarily expensive

exabrial2• 3 years ago

Nuclear powered Desalination!

lekanwang2• 3 years ago

The unfortunate thing is that large stretches of California desert (and much of the Central Valley to the north) used to be lake bottoms and have incredibly rich and fertile soils. Between that and a long growing season that's nearly cloudless, you get ideal growing conditions -- rich soil, lots of sun, low moisture (i.e. low disease load), and H2A labor -- provided you can control the irrigation. Ah the problems caused by mispriced externalities...

mateo4112• 3 years ago

Most of the water that goes to farms in the Central Valley does not come from the Colorado river. It comes the Sierra and Owens Valley. The farm lands that would be impacted by this are in Imperial County.

cwp2• 3 years ago

California has an unlimited supply of water along its western border. We ought to tap that rather than the Colorado river.

chaostheory2• 3 years ago

San Diego is already has a desalination plant and Santa Barbara is about to turn on their own. However, it’s still not enough. Building desalination plants takes a lot of capital and time. Unfortunately, leverage is no longer cheap and the economy is about to suffer a deeper downturn

Also, people especially farmers have been complaining about San Diego’s pricing to pay for their plant. Still, like you I don’t see any other long term solution since CA provides 1/3 of the US food supply. Maybe stop exporting live stock feed grown from the desert (ie water) to Asia?

rednerrus• 3 years ago

It's a lot easier to move water than it is to move sunshine and soil.

cloudripper• 3 years ago

Cadillac Desert [0] remains as relevant as always.

The state of water security is California - and the US West more broadly - is a fascinating history problem in my mind. I focus on California due to the enormity of its investments to attempt to sustain its massive population. And within California, I think a lot responsibility for the current state of affairs falls on the head of Los Angeles.

The City of Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power serves a population of over 4 million. Only 13% of that water is from local/recycles water supplies. That approximates to a natural water supply that can sustain around 500,000 people. To sustain the current and forecast populations, ~40% of water is pulled from the SF Bay Area Delta and another ~40% is pulled from the Eastern Sierra. The remainder is pulled from the Colorado River. From my last study of the subject over a decade ago, effective desalination strategies were still forthcoming.

The survival of Los Angeles - and the broader Southern California region - is heavily dependent on these outside sources. And each sources has it's own threats and challenges.

Receiving water from the Bay Area Delta is the result of the State Water Project (SWP) - which happens to be the single largest energy consumer in the state of California (it takes a lot of juice to pump all that water up and over the mountain ranges that separate Southern California from the Central Valley). One threat that water/government agencies have been concerned about is the affect of a major Bay Area earthquake on the SWP and on the water supply of Southern California. If the levees scattered throughout the Bay Area Delta were to fail in significant quantity, salt water would be pulled in from the Pacific and would contaminate 40% of Los Angeles's fresh water supply (affecting over 1.6 million people). To avert this potential crisis - there have been talks for 20-some years to build a tunnel and divert the SWP-bound water from the Delta. The State of CA has put forth plans to proceed with the tunnel bypass [1] - at an estimated cost of 16 billion.

Then we have the Eastern Sierra - which, again, contributes nearly 40% of water to Los Angeles. The historic extraction of water from that region has resulted in a least one massive (mostly) dried lakebed (Owen's Lake) [2]. It should be pointed out that this dried lakebed became one of the single largest sources of particulate pollution (PM-10 - sand/dust) in the United States. While Owen's Lake is no longer the largest single source, Mono Lake (also in the Eastern Sierra) now is. While that lake has not been drained, is has had it's natural water sources diverted to supply Los Angeles (I can dig for those data points if need be). The extraction of water in that region has been directly attributed to the desertification of the landscape and the changing of the ecosystem.

Beyond the situation with the Colorado River, California has much to grapple with. Balancing decades of unruly development and population growth is an issue that will need to be handled for generations to come.

For a 'fun' read on the development of Los Angeles, check out the aptly named book, "Reluctant Metropolis" [3].

[0] https://archive.org/details/cadillacdesertam00reis/

[1] https://www.deltaconveyanceproject.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owens_Lake

[3] https://archive.org/details/reluctantmetropo0000fult

gen220• 3 years ago

Really appreciate the thorough deep dive! In your research, did you find any populous corner of California, the American SW, or the U.S. in general that has a good story to address problems like these?

Out east, it seems like upstate NY has a decent shot at long-term water security, depending on how thirsty NYC becomes and how influential that thirst is in the scheme of NY state politics.

l3mure• 3 years ago

Reluctant Metropolis looks interesting, thanks. I'd also recommend Mike Davis' City of Quartz.

MarcScott• 3 years ago

John Oliver did a pretty good piece on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtxew5XUVbQ

reducesuffering3• 3 years ago

Long term, does this effectively mean just more expensive produce for LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix regions while agro business in the rural farming areas suffer? I assume population increases will be mostly unaffected because of the relatively smaller fraction of usage compared to agro.

jiggyjace• 3 years ago

As someone who grew up in Phoenix and just bought a house here, I've been trying to responsibly educate myself in terms of how big of a crisis this might be. But I've found that a lot of comments, headlines, and judgment calls on this topic are just hilarious. Mainly because it's one of the simplest topics with which to find appropriate historical context and data. I'll show two examples.

Picking apart this particular headline, perhaps a few of us are wondering how close the Colorado River is from drying up? My subjective measurement is that a river drying up would constitute 5% of its average discharge, or even less. The USGS tracks multiple key indicators on the Colorado River, including discharge at certain gauges along the river. From 1952 to 2022, the average is about 5,900 cubic feet per second. The worst year in the history of tracking the Colorado was 21 years ago, 2,417 cubic feet per second, or 40% of average discharge. That's 8 times what I would personally qualify as a dried up river. Compare that to the mighty Mississippi, which averages 208,833 cubic feet per second each year. Now their worst year was 1956, 93,990 cubic feet per second, or 45% of their average discharge. So the Mississippi is statistically fairly as variable in its discharge as the Colorado river, albeit with much more water. And anyway, that's only 9 times my personal qualification. I know these aren't universal measurements, but I hope this allows me to prove a point. The Mississippi River and the Colorado River aren't all that different in variability, and neither of them are even close to drying up. But it's the cities that are closer to the Mississippi River that are actually having water problems -- not Arizona (e.g. Jackson, MS had a water crisis where the National Guard was mobilized to help 150k residents with drinking water just last year). [1]

In the last two decades, the SW has been experiencing extreme drought, and all the while it's one of the fastest growing regions in the US. For example, since the 1950s, Arizona has grown from 700,000 to over 7,000,000, all while using less water. Yep, it's true. Remember that when people point to more neighborhoods, golf courses, and "cities in the desert" as the reason for this 'crisis'. [2]

With all that being said, my personal judgment is that there's a very real drought that is just about to conclude, as seen from recent projections of El Nińo, heavy snowpack and rainfall this winter in the region, and water conservation technology improving at an exponential scale. The Southwest will continue growing, especially due to immigration from South America and Mexico and recent onshoring due to the China/Russia crisis into the next few decades. And the water situation is going to be fine the whole way.

[1] https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/annual/?referred_module=sw&a... [2] - https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...

bsimpson• 3 years ago

Of these savings, 2.3m acre-feet will be compensated by the federal government

I'd like to know more about what that means.

The whole problem is that there isn't enough water. How does the federal government magically supply 76% of the shortfall?

amanaplanacanal• 3 years ago

I was assuming that compensation was cash rather than water, but perhaps I misunderstood it.

raldi• 3 years ago

It doesn't; it attacks the demand side instead, by paying farmers to not grow things.

pedalpete• 3 years ago

Can somebody enlighten me as to why the native tribes are considered a large user of water? The article mentions them as a part of this agreement a few times, but not why they would have a more significant impact on the water use than any other town or city (assuming when they say tribes they mean the reservations).

Perhaps that's not how it works in the US? Or are they saying agriculture by the native tribes, and therefore that is considered different from non-tribe agriculture?

bombcar7• 3 years ago

The native tribes predate the states and have their own treaties which often outrank the state ones (because the natives are their own nations that negotiate with the Feds).

They may use or resell their water.

syngrog66• 3 years ago

We should stop wasting water in general. The biggest easy win in the US now looks to me like ending our obsession with green lawns. Switch to xeriscaping and re-wilding in general.

In this same spirit, I happen to be building a sci-fi post-apocalyptic "comedy" adventure game [SB: see below] whose goal is to educate as much as it is to entertain. We take as a premise that humanity fails to take the kinds of big bold urgent action needed to prevent the worst of climate change's dystopic upheavals from happening. Water becomes much harder to come by, for billions. (Imagine like in the film Mad Max Fury Road.) Even while other areas go underwater or experience more frequent or more extreme monsoons or flooding.

Therefore everyone becomes massively more careful about water. More respectful.

Because they must.

----

[SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz

Breakthrough deal to prevent Colorado River from drying up

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