Stop building cities in the desert and stop taking Colorado River water for California.
From the Los Angeles Times via Yahoo News, December 16:
The Colorado River's largest reservoirs stand nearly three-quarters empty, and federal officials now say there is a real danger the reservoirs could drop so low that water would no longer flow past Hoover Dam in two years.
That dire scenario — which would cut off water supplies to California, Arizona and Mexico — has taken center stage at the annual Colorado River conference in Las Vegas this week, where officials from seven states, water agencies, tribes and the federal government are negotiating over how to decrease usage on a scale never seen before.
Outlining their latest projections for Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs, federal water managers said there is a risk Lake Mead could reach “dead pool” levels in 2025. If that were to happen, water would no longer flow downstream from Hoover Dam.
“We are in a crisis. Both lakes could be two years away from either dead pool or so close to dead pool that the flow out of those dams is going to be a horribly small number. And it just keeps getting worse,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
He said there is a real danger that if the coming year is extremely dry, “it might be too late to save the lakes.”
The Colorado River has long been severely overallocated, and its flows have shrunk dramatically during a 23-year megadrought supercharged by global warming.
Over the last six months, federal officials have pressed water managers in the seven states that rely on the river to come up with plans for major cutbacks. But negotiations have so far failed to produce an agreement, and the voluntary cuts states and water agencies have proposed remain far from the federal government’s goal of reducing water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet per year — a decrease of roughly 15% to 30%.
Faced with the prospect of federal authorities imposing mandatory, large-scale cutbacks, officials from states and water districts have been holding private, backroom talks in an effort to reach an agreement.
“We’re still talking among the states to try to figure something out,” Buschatzke said. “I think the scale is daunting.”
Buschatzke and other water managers say they fear the talks on voluntary cuts aren’t enough. Officials from Arizona, Nevada and other states have urged federal officials to take such steps as accounting for the evaporation losses from canals, as well as redefining what is considered a “beneficial use” of water — a change that could, possibly, open the pathway for large, federally mandated cuts.
The U.S. Department of the Interior and its Bureau of Reclamation have already begun a process of revising the existing rules for water shortages. They have also started reducing the amount of water they release from Glen Canyon Dam over the next five months, in hopes of boosting reservoir levels until the spring runoff arrives. And they have warned they may need to further cut the amount of water they release from the dam, which would shrink the flow downstream and accelerate the decline of Lake Mead....
....MUCH MORE
Previously, in no particular order:
A Short History Of Las Vegas And Water
I am one sick human being.UPDATED--"Las Vegas about to run out of water, go ‘out of business’"
My first thought on seeing "The Las Vegas Land and Water Company" was to inquire whether the company had any outstanding bonds with weird covenants and/or gold backing. I kid you not. Obsessive, Moi?
Clock is Ticking on Las Vegas' Water Supply and The Elvis Portfolio
"Water Crisis: Lake Mead, Largest US Reservoir, Faces Federal 'Water Emergency,' Forced Rationing"
February 2009
Las Vegas Running Out of Water Means Dimming Los Angeles Lights
The Las Vegas metro population is approximately two million.
Building cities in the desert is stupid.
The extent of the arid region is even larger than this map portrays (from DesertUSA):
Regarding the California Drought: "Don't even think about stealing Columbia River water, L.A."
Just so you know, I had that "quasi-mystical" "giver of life" balloon popped, at a very young age, By Isaac Asimov. "The Economics of the California Water Shortage"I don't know. Anything that normalizes the commodification of water, that, rather than exalting it as a giver of life (and one of the weirdest compounds in the universe) reduces it to just another thing to trade, brings us closer to the day when pure power politics forces the U.S. to drain the Great Lakes just to keep Phoenix and Las Vegas and Los Angeles going.
Or something....
—San Jose Mercury-News "California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say"
That little red blip at the far right side of the timeline is the current drought.
You could make a reasonable argument that for the last 150 years Californians have been living in a fool's paradise.
