Southwest Water Wars

...in which Saudi Arabia also plays its own little role.

As shitty as it is, I’m kinda curious what will actually happen if the worst case scenario drops on the Colorado River and all the farmers and ridiculous AC-guzzling mega-suburbs that feed off its water out in the arid lands of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona.

For years everyone involved in the business has known that the Colorado River does not supply nearly enough water to feed all the insane over-development that’s been taking place out there. Reservoirs have mostly been able to cushion that lack of supply. But every year the levels of water being held back by these massive dams has been falling and falling. There hasn’t been enough rain. Now they’re at a critical level. If things continue to get worse, the taps might start to close.

Here’s the Denver Post from a few days ago:

Running out of time and options to save water along the drying Colorado River, federal officials said they’re considering whether to release less water from the country’s two largest reservoirs downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada.

Without enough snow this winter, the water level at Lake Powell — the country’s second-largest reservoir — will drop below a critical level by next November, according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Below that point, the Glen Canyon Dam will no longer be able to generate electricity and experts worry whether conditions will worsen to the point that the structure will no longer be able to send water downstream at all.

Conditions on the Colorado River are worsening quicker than expected. The seven states in the river basin made little progress saving water over the summer and Colorado is heading into its third La Niña winter in a row, likely indicating below-average snowpack. A worst-case scenario, once considered only as a hypothetical, now presents a very real threat.

“It’s going to be ugly,” Mark Squillace, a water law professor at the University of Colorado, said. “The bottom line is there just isn’t going to be enough water available.”

Nothing like that has happened to the limits-denying culture that has sprung up out there in the Southwest, one of the driest and most inhospitable areas in the world. So how will people react when they finally realize there are actually constraints to growth — and that you can’t built out endless suburbs and do industrial-level ag as if the desert doesn’t exist and as if there’s a bottomless supply of water?

Something like 40 million people depend on Colorado River. But most of the water doesn’t go to people directly, it goes to big ag: Around 80 percent of the river is used for farming and cattle ranching, and growing crops like hay and alfalfa as cow feed. So a giant powerful industry depends on that water and they’re not gonna give it up without a fight. Remember the Bundy family and their standoff against the federal government? Well they’re ranchers from Nevada — right along the Colorado.

So if water starts get cut off at big scale, what happens? Plunging real estate values? Anger at the federal government? Rancher-backed violent militia activity? A big exodus of people saying goodbye to their McMansions, loading up their RVs, and heading up to Canada, jet-skis and ski boats in tow? All this could happen…I guess. But who am I kidding. Unless the water simply stops flowing entirely, I doubt anything fundamental will change. What they’ll probably do is just pump more groundwater while they swap out what should have been coming from the drained and dead Colorado River with yet another technological fix: desalinated water from Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of California. I’ve seen plans for this kind of desal kicking around for years — and apparently there are more recent developments, too. So…after destroying major river ecosystem they’ll just move on to helping destroy what’s left of marine life. No limits to growth! The west’s glorious suburb civilization will do everything it takes to live to see another day, even as everything else dies.

—Yasha

PS: The funniest bit about this region is that Saudi Arabia has recently been buying up land that enjoys basically unlimited access to Colorado River to grow and export hay and alfalfa as feed to Saudi dairy cows — even as the whole region dries up. The Saudis are smart. They don’t want to use their own precious water supplies to grow the stuff locally over there, so they’re taking full legal advantage of America’s libertarian water rights system to grow it here and then send it to their cows on the other side of the world. Basically, they’re exporting water by proxy. And they aren’t doing anything special, really. A lot of crops that use Colorado River water get exported. The Saudis simply wanted to cut out the middle man and have a direct tap. It’s the markets, man. They’re telling people to do this so who are we to say anything?

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