In The American Southwest, The Water Crisis Threatens Existential Harm To Millions
Seven US states rely on the water in the Colorado River. Those seven states are divided into upper basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — and lower basin states — Arizona, Nevada, and California. In 1922, the American southwest was little more than an arid area with few cities. Nevada was a dusty backwater town with a population of just over 2,000. Los Angeles had a population of about half a million. Phoenix was home to about 30,000.
Today, there are 1.7 million people living in Phoenix with another 4 million in surrounding communities. Los Angeles is home to 4 million with another 8 million souls scattered throughout the surrounding area. And Las Vegas? It has grown to 700,000 people with another 2 million nearby. All of that growth in population has been made possible by one thing — access to fresh water, much of it from the Colorado River.
What is the significance of 1922? That is the year the upper basin states and the lower basin states entered into a legal agreement that awarded 7.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River to each group — a total of 15 million acre-feet. That was far more than either needed at the time and the prospect that there would ever not be enough water in the river to meet the allotted quota was never considered. Today, the Colorado supplies only about 12 million acre-feet to all seven states. An acre-foot, in case you are unfamiliar with the term, is the amount of water needed to cover a football field to a depth of one foot. It is equal to 326,000 gallons or 1.2 million liters.
The abundance of water meant there was enough to make the deserts bloom. Farmers used it to water their crops and because it was so cheap, they elected to grow things like hay, alfalfa, and lettuce — all of which need copious amounts of water to grow. Lettuce, in case you didn’t know, is about 95 percent water.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. The one thing no one thought would happen, happened. They expected the amount of water in the Colorado to remain constant, but it has not. Today, there is not enough to meet the needs of all the people, farms, and industries in the Southwest. That is not new news. For more than a decade, representatives of the seven states have been seeking a way to deal with the diminished water supply but have failed to reach an agreement.
For its part, the federal government has wheedled, cajoled, blustered, and threatened the states to come to an agreement or face a resolution imposed by the government that would please no one. Nothing worked. The talks continued but led to no forward progress. And so, last week, the government said it will mandate a new allocation scheme that will take effect in October, which is when the current agreement expires. The feds don’t have any actual authority over the river but they do control the dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which have a direct effect on how much water flows below those dams.
A 40 Percent Reduction
According to The Guardian, the new 10 year blueprint could reduce the amount of water allocated to California, Arizona, and Nevada by up to 3 million acre-feet per year — a 40 percent reduction. The lower basin states would see their allocation cut by 1.25 million acre-feet in 2027 and 2028, with the possibility of larger cuts, depending on conditions. The plan is meant to give the states time to come to a final resolution on their own, once they find out what happens when their access to river water is dramatically reduced.
“This just kicks the can down the road,” Noah Garrison, a water researcher at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said when the outline of the plan first became public in July. He and others are concerned the federal plan limits the ability of the states the to move forward and locks them into endless negotiations instead. “There is a potential for extremely serious consequences if we don’t address this,” Garrison said. “We’re putting the water supply for 40 million people at risk.”
More than 3 million acre-feet of cuts are needed to bring the Colorado River basin back into balance – about a quarter of its annual average flow. Even that amount may not be enough in years that are especially dry. “In order to best protect the system, there needs to be pretty significant shortages,” said Dr John Berggren, regional policy manager at Western Resource Advocates. “We’re going to have to do more.”
The Central Arizona Project
One of the oddities of the area is the Central Arizona Project, a 366 mile long canal that runs southeast from Lake Havasu to below Tucson. It was created in 1968 to address water scarcity in the state. Until 1968, most of Arizona relied on ground water from aquifers beneath the state but those resources were being rapidly depleted.
It is fair to say that without the CAP, Phoenix as we know it today would not exist. If you are flying into Sky Harbor, the airport that serves Phoenix and its environs, at 35,000 feet you will see bedroom communities below that extend as far as the eye can see. None of them would be there but for the life-giving water from the Colorado River that flows to Phoenix through that canal.
In the worst case scenario in which the water in Colorado River continues to decline in volume, the CAP could be shut down entirely, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine. “They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” Brenda Burman, the CAP general manager, told the New York Times. “It’s not possible to picture it.” Without the CAP, people in Arizona would be forced to rely on aquifers that are already depleted.
But in order to get the legislation creating the CAP through Congress, Arizona made a Faustian bargain with the state of California — if push came to shove, California would have first claim on the water from the Colorado. Now the wolf is at the door and Arizona is about to reap the bitter harvest.
In Phoenix, which gets about 40 percent of its water from the canal, mayor Kate Gallego said the federal government should kick in more for multi-billion dollar purification plants that will turn wastewater into drinking water. “Given the magnitudes of these cuts, we would like them to step up in a really big and meaningful way,” she said. Gallego compared such funding with aid that helps coastal states rebuild after hurricanes, calling it a just a different type of disaster. Of course, the current administration has seen fit to effectively dismantle FEMA, which makes the mayor’s plan seem a bit too hopeful.
The fight among various interest groups makes getting an agreement more challenging. Tribal communities have a higher priority in the distribution scheme for the water supplied by the CAP, which awakens ancient animosity between Indigenous people and the newcomers who have flocked to the desert. The tribes suspect their treaty rights will be overridden once again, based on historical precedent.
The Cost Of Water
One of the factors not being discussed is that agricultural and industrial users are charged far less for the water they get from the CAP than residential users. This results from local and state authorities wanting to bring commerce to their areas to provide jobs and create a tax base. But if those priorities lead to overuse of the water available, there may be no water for anyone at any price.
Regular readers, who are all above average, know instinctively that the primary cause of these water woes is climate change. There is less snow in the Rockies than normal and what snow does fall melts more quickly because of higher ambient temperatures. But governments just keep marching forward as if nothing was happening, egged on by special interest groups funded by fossil fuel companies.
It is perfectly obvious we are headed for a climate cliff, but no one is willing or able to take evasive action for fear of being voted out of office by people who have no inkling of what is happening around them and only want things to go back to the way they used to be.
If civilization fails — which it very well might — it will be because people choose to ignore the advice of scientists, just as the Catholic Church refused to recognize the new knowledge about how the world worked as discovered by Galileo Galilei. The arrogance of ignorance is rampant upon the land and may very well be the factor that pushes humanity over the edge and into the abyss below. The light of reason is going out all around the world. One wonders if it will ever reappear.
