I have previously recommended the books Salt Dreams and Water for a thirsty land for anyone interested in water issues.
I will add that there is decades old research on how to plant trees in the desert in their own local catchment to help them survive on rainwater and Earthships are a known technology for living lightly on the land. My recollection is you can adequately supply an earth ship with water for as little as 10 inches of local rainfall annually.
More reading suggestions from Jeff Fleck's article "If you read two books about the West’s water problems, one of them probably shouldn’t be Cadillac Desert."
It's a little unclear to me how realistic the scenario painted there is, for the simple reason that the main problem with water in the US southwest is commercial agriculture, which uses 75% or more of all the water in these areas. This is the result of ideas promulgated in the first 3-4 decades of the 20th century (the Bureau of Reclamation) which touted the idea of a garden paradise, based largely on the unusually wet couple of decades that had just happened.
If you eliminated commercial agriculture in the US southwest (let's conveniently pretend that this doesn't cover the Central Valley of CA), there's plenty of water for everything else, even in the middle of the worst drought in 1200 years.
The book doesn't appear to deal with this very well. Still, great story and very imaginative.
[ EDIT: one idea I did really like in the book was the part about the federal government allowing states to ban inter-state migration, so that the "Zoners" (people from AZ) could not move, and would effectively become refugees within their own state and nation ]
Not sure making residential decisions based on SF novels is a wise idea. Arizona has been one of the fastest growing states for many years now. So has nevada and utah. If the population and economic activity is there, the water will find its way there one way or another.
SF novels can be a way to explore the possible outcomes of decisions, technological changes, environmental change and more. "The Water Knife" is a well-informed book that covers a lot of ground. There are plenty of non-fiction books that cover the same on-the-ground truth, but don't bother to speculate on how things might evolve from here.
To your point, the book specifically floats a "vision" of a new kind of housing development in Las Vegas and Phoenix that the book calls "arcologies" but you might think of them as high-end earthships for the ultra-wealthy. They use very little outside water, endlessly internally recycling almost every drop of moisture within them. Accessible only to the ultra rich. I personally find this a much more believable idea and much less sci-fi than the notion that Nevada, Arizona etc. will receive water via a multi-thousand mile long, multi-thousand foot elevation spanning pipeline.
I think you may be underestimating the challenge of bringing water to the US southwest. Also, as I've mentioned several times in this thread, without commercial agriculture, there essentially would be no water issues here. When 77% of your water is being used to irrigate crops, most of which are exported from your region ... you've got a different kind of problem.
I've read it too. Regarding the Arcology things in the desert, and the unlikely water pipelines, I thought it to be more likely(economically) that the ultra rich would go for seasteading instead.
When you go to turn on the tap and nothing comes out, the next thing that happens is that economic activity grinds to a halt, much as it does when the power supply goes down. Who wants to visit Nevada if there's no water in your hotel to take a shower, just drinking water only?
Now, maybe if the snowpack is gone and the rivers are dry someone could set up a gigantic solar desalination plant on the California coast and start producing water to be piped to Nevada and Arizona... which would need more gigantic solar plants to produce the electricity to power the pumps. Someone will have to pay for that, and the costs will be pretty high. Probably higher than the revenue from the tourism or agriculture in the region. What happens then? People leave the region.
Visiting Arizona made me never want to move to Arizona or Nee Mexico. The minute I got there a kind of depression set in. Just the color of the place. After awhile I realized it was because so little was growing, even compared to say somewhere like Wyoming.
> "Amen. Dutton describes a process of westernization of the perceptions that has had to happen before the West is beautiful to us. You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."
Probably you also should make plans not to live in California - this state is also experiencing quite severe droughts year after year - probably will be same fate as Arizona in maybe couple decades?
I'm not in the business to know feasibility...but I've lived all over. Out west, depending on area, it seems there's -too- much sun and everyone has solar panels. Back east(and potentially PNW, but I've never lived there) it rains so much people tire of it.
Is there no way states can like...organize a trade? Clean power for clean water? Or is piping that much water around not realistic? I know it's a naive take, just felt weird seeing and living on both sides.
The agriculture shouldn't be there in the first place. This would just reinforce bad public policy. The places with an abundance of water also have a lot of underutilized land.
> In 2019, there were a total of 838 commercial greenhouse vegetable operations with 17.6 million square metres of production area which produced nearly 664,450 metric tons of vegetables.
By contrast, just California alone produced 173500 metric tonnes of just bell peppers. California alone produced almost 1000000 metric tonnes of sugarbeets.
So while there's no doubt that agricultural production, even in winter, even in the great white north, is viable, the scale doesn't really come close to what is happening in the US southwest.
> By contrast, just California alone produced 173500 metric tonnes of just bell peppers. California alone produced almost 1000000 metric tonnes of sugarbeets.
California exports a lot of stuff. Canada may simply be trying to feed itself, so the 'extra' volume may not be considered a major consideration.
> […] the scale doesn't really come close to what is happening in the US southwest.
I did not mean to suggest that the CA/southwest agriculture setup is sustainable (though it might be if it made some notable changes). I just meant that we likely can't replace what is grown there by growing things in more northerly latitudes, even if there is more water there. Maybe we shouldn't replace it, that's certainly up for debate. But we almost certainly cannot do a 1:1 switch, Great Lakes, greenhouses or otherwise.
So you pass a law that says no farming in NM? That doesn't fix the rest of the water access policy once the water keeps dwindling. States will keep arguing among themselves and the federal government won't get involved until after a few years of FEMA handouts. Policy isn't going to be able to fix this because people won't want to sacrifice. Even if people in AZ and NM welcome regulation, the other states that aren't hurt as bad won't be willing to compromise any of their water or farming rights. Unless there is a quid pro quo, people in southwestern states are just fucked.
I live in NM, and while I may be in a minority here for now, I'd happily support a bill that at the very least banned agriculture that used flood irrigation in NM. A bill that outright banned commercial agriculture might be too much, but I wouldn't rule it out of order if the current drought were to last for say, another 50 years.
Yeah not sure about the north, where you live IIRC, but I was shocked at the sheer amount of pecan trees in the southern half of the state. They flood them so much mosquitoes are bad the whole summer!
Just make the price of water match the cost of it, and flood irrigation no longer becomes cost effective. Of course wrangling that through the entrenched interests is another story.
Water flows horizontally through aquifers, so water from your well isn't really "yours". California is starting to mandate meters on wells in some counties (as they should).
I am not 100% sure about the law in CA, but here in NM all the meters could do is check that you do not exceed the water rights associated with the property. Every piece of land has some amount of water rights (possibly zero), and you cannot be prevented from obtaining that much water from the land via wells. In most of the US west, the water you pull from groundwater reserves very much is yours as long as you do not exceed your alloted water rights.
None of which helps with establishing the actual cost of the water.
Granted, the situation with the CA and AZ irrigation projects is somewhat different, since the water arrives on your land thanks to a massive federal government project. In this case, while it might not be accurate, determining and defining some sort of price is feasible.
I was referring to physics, not laws. The water allotments you describe are clearly unsustainable, unless they vary from year to year based on the local aquifer (if so, it's similar to what the CA meters check).
I know the compacts with other states have trigger points that invalidate them during shortages. I wonder if the NM allotments work that way too. (If not, and they're fixed for all time, then NM is probably headed to a situation where there simply isn't any water.)
The well water in CA mostly arrives due to snow pack melting and sinking into the aquifer.
There are state projects to allow faster spring melts (thanks, climate change!) to reach the aquifer. They basically slow the flood water and cut ruts that let it drain into the aquifer instead of the ocean.
Your "massive federal project" is probably referring to the California aquaducts and reservoirs, which are a separate water delivery network.
Water rights in NM are not based on aquifer conditions, they are absolute inalienable rights associated with a piece of land. Yeah, I know, it's absolutely freakin' insane. Of course, nothing about the water rights actually says that you're going to get that much water.
The interstate compacts for the Colorado and Rio Grande (also the Pecos) don't have anything directly to do with intra-state water rights. Obviously they are connected in some implicit way because it's all the same water. But this is why in general you can't fulfill water rights by pumping from rivers directly (its not impossible to do legally, just hard). Every drop of rain or snow that falls on NM is effectively pre-alloted (and the federal government already controls a large chunk of it).
AFAIU, it's only the water delivered via aquaducts that can really be said to have a controllable cost. I know that CA generally prefers that farmers use that water and not pull from the acquifer, but my impression has been that they can't prevent farmers from using wells if they stay within the water rights associated with the land.
AFAIU, this only impacts the San Juan (and likely the Chama diversion). But yeah, wow (also wow for an incredibly poorly written bit of journalism about a very important topic).
The concept here, which is clearly and correctly communicated by the article, is simple.
New Mexico believes that it has the final say on its water. New Mexico believes that every drop of water that falls in New Mexico is under New Mexico's final control.
For 50 years, New Mexico has been "negotiating" with the Native Americans in their land, by running their own courts and deciding in their own favor, over and over again.
This is blatantly illegal. The entities they are dealing with are soveirgn nations - entirely distinct countries - and we have been very, very clear with the states that they do not have dominion. If you're American, just think about all those casino fights. Every single one, lost. All of them.
Why?
Because *the states are not the owners of that land.* Those are other countries, and they get to set their own rules.
The problem is that New Mexico has been robbing the Native Americans of their water for almost a century, and has become entirely dependant on water that does not belong to them.
Over the last fifteen years, the Navajo have been saying "this is going too far, we don't have electricity or sewage or schools, you can't keep taking our resources for free." So New Mexico offered them about five cents on the dollar for their water, which amounted to about $1.3 billion.
Then New Mexico took three times as much water as they purchased, and reneged on half the money.
The Navajo finally said "enough" and took them to court, because New Mexico in 2019 took so much water that Navajo people started dying of thirst.
New Mexico runs sprinklers on lawns in the open air, while taking away so much water from the Native Americans that they're dying.
Every one of those beautiful trees in the near forest city of Santa Fe is built on the corpses of Navajo who died of thirst.
The Navajo won.
The State Engineer's Office immediately paniced, because more than 70% of New Mexico's water is stolen from the other countries that New Mexico thought it owned. They will all win too, if they try.
The State Engineer's Office went to the court of appeals and said "please let us continue to steal the Native Americans' water, we know they're dying and we know they're another country and we're just a state, but the trees in our city parks are thirsty."
For once, the US courts did the right thing. They said "no, and you're not allowed to raise it further."
It's the whole state. The reason this is important is that every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
If they all take the route that the Navajo did, then Santa Fe no longer has a water supply at all.
This article, that you said was incredibly poorly written, got all of these topics correct.
I'm sorry you felt the need to insult the writer. It also makes me feel pretty bad for having brought it up, because I thought this would be worth your time.
In the balance, it seems like you didn't learn what the real situation is.
> Because the states are not the owners of that land. Those are other countries, and they get to set their own rules.
I expect it is more complicated than that, and less adversarial. The states really could make life more unpleasant for the reservations if they wanted, and the feds couldn't necessarily keep that from happening. It's in everyone's best interest to play along.
I was speaking in general. But yes, I think that it may be contentious occasionally, but mostly the states and the reservations try to cooperate. If push comes to shove, the states will end up winning, and the tribes know it. The situation they have now is as good as it's going to get, and it could only get worse if they fight viciously over every jurisdictional question.
First of all, the state of NM does not lay claim to all the water that falls here. Large parts of the state are federally owned, and other large parts are tribe owned. As a result, the state only has claim to about 45% of the water that falls from the sky or flows across the land, the rest is already allocated.
The article in the ABQ Journal does not, in fact, state any of the things you've mentioned above. I appreciate that you cited the article, I just think it was poorly written.
What the article describes is this: a Court of Appeals judge said that because Congress was involved in the settlement between (at least) the Navajo and the state of NM, Congress is now in charge of water in NM and not the state (at least, this is one reasonable interpretation of the opinion). The SE Office appealed this on the basis that it contradicts decades of clear precedent. NMSC declined to hear the appeal, which potentially leaves the door to someone (potentially one of the tribes) forcing administrative action that forces Congress into active oversight of water allocation etc.
I said it was poorly written because it lacks sufficient context, uses short out-of-context quotes from the court's opinion, and because it completely fails to explain the relationship between the SE Office/State, the tribes and the US Congress. The article does not describe the settlement reached with the Navajo, for example, it does not describe the general situation with water in the state, it does not describe the context of the settlement.
In addition, I do not believe it is the true to say:
> The entities they are dealing with are soveirgn nations - entirely distinct countries
While the US (and to some extent, the Spanish) did grant significant sovereignty to (some of the) the nations already here during European colonization, the sovereignty of the tribes today is far more complex than is indicated by calling them "entirely distinct countries". Any serious challenge to the authority of the federal government would be harshly dealt with (challenges to state government, not so much). The Navajo and the Hopi utilized the federal government in their attempts to resolve their own disputes over land and access. While I believe that the tribes deserve more autonomy, more power and definitely more water, the actual legal situation is far more complex than the one that exists, for example, between the USA and Mexico or the USA and Canada.
> every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
I think (but am not certain) that you're describing inflows to the area of the state. This does not describe the Pecos River, nor the rainfall nor the snow.
In general, I think you might be imagining that I'm not aware of or sympathetic to the tribes' arguments in this matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. I entirely agree with the terms of the settlement, and think it should likely go further.
> the state of NM does not lay claim to all the water that falls here ... and other large parts are tribe owned.
Yes. And when you finish reading the article you keep criticizing, you may learn that these are what the Navajo just successfully sued back from the state, after the state tried to lay claim to them.
.
> I said it was poorly written because
I already told you once that you made me feel bad by trying to say this.
I'm not interested. Thanks.
.
> > In addition, I do not believe it is the true to say:
> The entities they are dealing with are soveirgn nations - entirely distinct countries
That's nice. It is, though.
.
> > every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
> I think (but am not certain) that you're describing inflows to the area of the state.
No, I meant the words I said
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> I think you might be imagining that I'm not aware of ... the tribes' arguments in this matter.
The things you are saying are directly contradictory to a correct understanding of the matter, so I don't believe "imagining" is actually the right word here. I think it's "discovering."
.
> I entirely agree with the terms of the settlement
Sir, the settlement is what was overturned. The thing that we're discussing is a judgment, not a settlement.
This is like someone suing someone for breach of contract, and in attempting to support them, saying "I agree with the contract."
If you support the settlement, that's saying New Mexico is right, and the water should continue to be taken.
It's very difficult to take legal discussions seriously with someone when they misuse basic concepts.
We seem to be reading different lawsuits. Here's the ABQ Journal again in 2018, describing an earlier phase of the legal process that was (almost certainly) settled in 2021:
> State government recently got a big legal victory when the New Mexico Court of Appeals upheld a landmark water rights settlement with the Navajo Nation.
[ ... ] Although the “result” of the April appeals court decision authored by Judge Pro Tem Bruce Black was correctly in favor of settlement, Black’s opinion held incorrectly that water in the San Juan River through New Mexico “is ultimately subject” to federal government control and “denies the State’s jurisdiction over its own waters,” says the petition filed Friday at the high court.
From the 2021 article that you cited:
> The New Mexico Supreme Court recently decided to let stand a Court of Appeals decision that the Engineer’s Office says would rob the state of its ability to regulate water rights in New Mexico.
Here's you, just now:
> Sir, the settlement is what was overturned. The thing that we're discussing is a judgment, not a settlement.
I do not see to square the reporting in the ABQ Journal with your claim that the settlement was overturned.
Do you have some links to the suit you're saying was brought by the Navajo Nation? I have been unable to find anything about such a suit. The only one I can see is the suit against the federal government regarding access to water from the Colorado
> It’s the second recent court victory for Navajo Nation water rights. Last month, all challenges were dropped from a settlement over the tribe’s access to the San Juan River.
which, like the ABQ Journal pieces, suggests that the settlement was upheld, and the challenges to the settlement were denied.
Separately, if you literally meant this:
> every single source of water to New Mexico flows through the land of either The Nuntzi, the Navajo, the Goshutes, the Shoshone, the Shivwits, or the Koosharem.
then I'd appreciate gaining an understanding of which of the tribal nations you've named, or any that you haven't named, lay claim to the source or basin of the Pecos. In my research on this, I couldn't see any sign of those tribes holding claims on that land. The same question would apply to the other rivers that flow out of the Sangre de Cristo. If any native people had a claim to that, I would expect it to be some/all of the Puebloans.
Even with it spelled out in your own quote, you can't admit the mistake
This is not good faith and I have no interest in arguing with your most recent use of a search engine
If you had no web browser you wouldn't be able to write a word about this
You haven't read the articles about the lawsuit, much less the lawsuit itself
No understanding is coming for you, because you'll just argue with it then ask for more until someone gives up, so that you can feel like you were right all along
The quotation literally verbatim agrees with what I said about your error, word for word, and you're still pushing
I asked you for a single reference to the lawsuit you're referring to. It seems that's too much for you.
My quote from the ABQ Journal said "upheld a landmark water rights settlement with the Navajo Nation". You said "Sir, the settlement is what was overturned". Then you avoid explaining this by claiming bad faith.
Having now read a good chunk of your comment history on HN, I think it's time to bow out of any attempt to discuss this with you. A persistent failure to provide citations, frequent bad-faith style of discussion, hand-waving assertion-from-self-invented authority seem common.
That said, if there actually is a lawuit by the Navajo Nation that overturns the settlement reached with NM, I would actually like to know more about it.
This is another example of what I mean by complex sovereignty, from the SFNM today:
> Last month, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed 10-year intergovernmental agreements with the leaders of two pueblos — Picuris and Pojoaque — but other tribes are still not allowed by the federal government to grow marijuana.
What you may not know is that none of those tribes honor that requirement, much like California for 30 years.
There's no "complex soverignity" here. US marijuana law entrenches a great many casually illegal things because nobody's powerful enough to fix them through the DEA budget.
Highlights include that marijuana is on the schedule 1 list under two different names, and extacy 3; that marijuana is also on the schedule 2 list, despite that nothing is permitted to be on multiple schedules ever; and that the entire prohibition was never legal in the first place, as it's just Nixon's extension of the illegal tax stamp scheme.
You'll have a very hard time convincing anyone with even a passing familiarity with the law that American marijuana laws are a good example of a system working as expected.
Also, since you seem to be holding yourself up as a knowledgeable expert, the state level requirement was stricken in 2020, and a pact with the tribes was signed a month and a half ago
Not only is your example incorrect; it's also not true anymore
If this were China...we could build a transnational canal network and federated power grid -- in 10 years. Unfortunately our (every?) democracy, moves too slow for that. So given the pace of large scale projects I'd say in 50 years ... maybe.
China has been doing what the grandparent suggests for 20 years now, building networks to transfer water from the south to the north, and even at full-tilt with cheap access to labor and the political will to displace (so far) hundreds of thousands of people, it's not nearly enough to solve their looming water crisis.
Regions like Arizona are just inimical to large-scale human habitation and agriculture. The good news is that Arizona is projected to get more humid thanks to climate change. The bad news is that Arizona isn't projected to get any less hot, so look forward to an increasing frequency of wet bulb events in the future.
Arizona averages what, 4000 feet above sea level? It'd be an absurd waste of energy to pump sufficient fresh water there from anywhere, but especially the east coast.
I think those parts have winters. The parts in the sunbelt are more like 1500 ft or less. Or 2500 ft for Tucson. I wound up looking it up, so here you go: https://en-us.topographic-map.com/maps/ea/Arizona/
It's way easier to move electric. There's a decent chance desalination on the west coast would be cheaper than building pipelines and canals to move water 1500 miles. Moving water from the Pacific Northwest would be easier, but that would be an Alaska Pipeline-level endeavor (likely more since you'll want more water than oil) for something that's worth cents per gallon, not dollars.
Analysts say that the costs of the $25 billion groundwater extraction system are 10% those of desalination.
It is the largest underground network of pipes (2820km / 1750 miles) and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere. The late Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi described it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".
Of course this is from the 1980s in a completely different part of the planet with totally different circumstances and not directly comparable. But makes one wonder as to the veracity of your statement. Sadly, it is entirely plausible present day US can't perform mega projects as well as a crazed Libyan dictator from half a century ago.
We already do this sort of thing in effect with the great aquifers of the US midwest. The result has been the almost unimaginable depletion of the aquifers. You can't pull water out of an aquifer faster than it refills, at least not for very long. They can act as a "water bank" for a limited time, but if you're actually using more water per unit of land area than falls as rain or flows through, the "limited time" part is of critical importance.
It's fair to wonder, and it's an interesting project. I think the main difference is Libya is very flat compared to the US, so a lot of the construction is easier. The main caveat to their approach is that "the aquifer could be depleted of water in as soon as 60 to 100 years."
I happened upon a list of water sources for Los Angeles a couple of years ago that listed the energy requirement for each source. It ranged from minimal to maybe half the amount required to desalinate water. That points to you being right that desalinization is cheaper than trying to tap new sources of fresh water.
Piping water that distance isn’t particularly difficult, but the easier solution is to pump water from the east coast into a tributary of the Mississippi and then move Mississippi water further west. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/517843657152394153/
There isn't surplus water in the Mississippi or its tributaries. This is an illusion caused by seeing the river and not understanding the way it works and the ecosystems around it.
Piping water long distances isn't particularly hard, true. But ... piping water uphill consumes extraordinary amounts of energy. Where I live in NM (between 6000 and 7000'), it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that we'd ever see water pumped from within a few hundred feet of sea level up here.
Thus “pump water from the east coast into a tributary of the Mississippi”
The way these kind of projects work is to divert water at the border between multiple catchment basins. You might need to pump water up a minimal distance or even simply cut a channel at one end which lets you extract the same amount of water without negativity impacting anyones water rights.
As to pumping water up, users downstream of the Mississippi don’t care where their water comes from as long as they can get it. Thus you can now move water upstream on the western edge of the Mississippi to Nevada because that’s been offset but adding water to the eastern edge of the Mississippi catchment basin.
Of course the more water you want to move to Nevada the more complicated this gets. Also, it would be much more convenient to start from the Great Lakes than the east coast but the basic principle works.
I can't pretend to know enough about this to really comment on such a scheme. However, I do read https://www.inkstain.com/jfleck and view him as an authority on southwestern water. He appears to me to be very skeptical that long distance pipelines make sense and/or are possible given the requirements at each end.
> The way these kind of projects work is to divert water at the border between multiple catchment basins.
Interestingly Colorado river water is diverted to the east side of the continental divide this way, e.g. for Denver water supply (and others). Which ultimately deprives Los Angeles, which is also diverting water from the Colorado river in much the same way. Actually to be fair it’s ultimately depriving the Mexicans of a Colorado river....
Arizona has 360 sunny days. Arizona isn't the real problem, because they sell a ton of water and power to california, and that has already been cut back due to severe drought. Farming may not be viable in California, if the rockies don't build up snow pack anymore. All CA will be is droughts and severe floods because the snow just melts immediately. Its second largest city is the largest city in th eworld running off of ground water and some smaller towns have a few hundred years in the aquifers.
Arizona just happens to be upstream from California. That doesn't imply Phoenix or Scottsdale are sustainable.
Scottsdale's population is 268,000, and they use 63.2 million gallons per day. That's 235 gallons per day per person.
Californians average 85 gallons per day. Arizonans average about 100 gallons.
Anyway, the snowpack is increasingly a thing of the past, and so is the Colorado river. I'm guessing Phoenix and or Scottsdale will be mostly abandoned in the next few decades. California cities can at least desalinate.
I tried looking up Los Angeles total water usage. Saw a historic table that had number around 500,000 to 600,000 acre feet per year. Fairly steady since 1970.
That's about 180 billion gallons a year. Divide by days per year and LA's population you get 123 gallons a day. But that includes industrial.
Either way guesstimating the cost of desalinization, I think it'd be about $170/per person a year. Call it $500/year per household. Water bill $40/month. Steep but not impossible.
I live in Oregon and AFAIK the idea of shipping (diverting?) water from the Columbia to California has been a recurring theme that is, so to speak, "dead in the water" before the ink dries on the planning documents. (Yeah I know, paperless, etc., but the really big plans seem to never escape printouts.)
FWIW in Portland water isn't at all a cheap resource which speaks to the costs of even fairly local transport and delivery. (Portland's water source is ~60 miles east at Mt. Hood.) To me it suggests attempting to share water with very distant areas would be an extremely expensive/complex engineering feat that would dwarf construction of the new Panama canal. Even a project of such scale is by comparison merely a backyard ditch.
Folks in Rome figured it out thousands of years ago. Still works, last I checked. Los Angeles and San Diego both get water from the Colorado River, hundreds of miles away.
but aquaducts flow downhill, and folks are discussing sending water to Arizona and New Mexico, both at much higher elevation than where the water being discussed originates
It is possible to move water to a higher elevation by means of a pump. The water can then flow down hill.
This is the same technology that is used to raise groundwater to the surface, and to distribute water from many reservoirs. It is in economic use today.
The aqueduct I mentioned, that which brings water from the Colorado river to Southern California, uses several pumps to raise the elevation of theaqueduct along its course.
Pumping water horizontally for long distances: doable, if there is actually water somewhere. Pumping water vertically to the 5-7k ft elevations of a lot of the southwest, not so much.
Washington has one of the cleanest electrical grids in the states, about 90% comes from renewables. 66% of their energy generation is from hydro. No need to import sunshine, well at least for energy purposes.
Also, the PNW is one of the driest parts of the country for many months of the year. They rely on enough snowpack melting slowly enough and not being reabsorbed by the ground in order to keep rivers flowing. Snowpack is on a downward trend, and drier warmer ground absorbs more of what does flow before it reaches rivers.
Agriculture consumes something like 3 of every 4 units of water in Arizona. But 'consumers of desert lettuce are on a short leash' doesn't make quite as good of a headline.
"Irrigated agriculture is the largest user of water in Arizona, consuming about 74 percent of the available water supply. In the past, this percentage was as high as 90 percent;" [0]
Exactly. When it comes to water, Colorado comes first. Colorado gets all the water it needs and wants. If there is anything left over, then lower areas can have some of the water. If not, they don't get any.
True in some senses. But the Colorado River Compact was finalized in 1946.
US water law in the west is also based on private water rights, a "first in time, first in right" approach that is completely different from the east (say, east of the 100th meridian). Out here, governments have no authority to dictate patterns of water usage across a watershed (for example) in times when such regulation might be to the benefit of everyone. If I have 3 acre feet of water rights, then if I can actually get 3 acre feet out of my well(s), I get to use it regardless of the general water situation.
These laws discarded (in NM at least) much older water management practices imported by the Spanish who had learned them from the Moors. These allowed for a "majordomo" who would regulate water usage on a community-wide basis, depending on the availability, need and community benefit. The US almost completely overthrew these systems after taking control here.
I hope not. This is a bargaining position. Some points:
1. Colorado was, is, and remains in the future committed to the Union.
2. Colorado has no access to the sea but most downstream neighbors do, to which Colorado needs access. Worst case, these downstream partners can use desalination to obtain drinking water. War is always a choice for them. Colorado has no such choice.
3. Colorado is reasonable. We still need these United States to be at least somewhat self sufficient in food production. All I am asking is Colorado doesn't suffer alone while downstream neighbors waste water.
4. As a matter of principle, the water belongs to Colorado. Downstream partners must recognize this. Alternatively, they must realize we have a right to audit their water use.
All of this is my personal (uneducated, unqualified) opinion and does not reflect the will of the people of Colorado. Please correct me if you think I am wrong.
Arizona is already a place that is uninhabitable to humans for 4 months of the year without a cooling chain (air conditioned house to air conditioned car to air conditioned work).
Basic survival there already requires artificial means; adding water to the requirements list only makes sense.
Arizona, like NM, is a state of some substantial climate range.
Yes, Phoenix in summer is close to uninhabitable without cooling, even with adobe/stone construction and properly designed ventilation. But head north to Flagstaff and the story is entirely different. Well designed structures are entirely comfortable there even in the middle of summer. On the other hand, it is also cold enough to require significant heating during winter.
Absolutely they did. They also didn't wear clothes, or have shelters with walls. So if we went back to that, we could definitely stretch out a few more decades of habitability.
It's also fair to say that the temps, even as few as 500 years ago, were much different than they are now.
Even a 10 foot high sea level rise preserves most of the residential areas of every single major metro on the west coast. My guess is the GP is unfamiliar with them and is just saying weird random shit for some reason.
