After roaming the Southwest in June I found the ongoing water fiasco very perplexing.
The Feds just solemnly declared a “water shortage” in the Western U.S., which was a bit like stating the patently obvious, but from a regulatory and legal standpoint, it now allows the Water Keepers to start significantly cutting allocations to everybody. In Arizona, it will mean an 18% reduction, starting on January 1, and in Nevada it will be 7%. That’s a lot of water!
The farmers and ranchers are going to be the first ones to lose out. And the 25 million people in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico who get their drinking water from Lake Mead are in for a rude awakening when the flow is reduced to a trickle. Where will they all golf?
Science magazine recently described western North America and northern Mexico as on a “megadrought-like trajectory”. And all the scientific experts predict that climate change guarantees it will just get a lot worse for the foreseeable future.
The big lakes, like Lake Powell, Mead, Faming Gorge, Blue Mesa, and Navajo, are at their lowest levels since they were first being filled — only a third of capacity and dropping quickly. The cities in the desert, like Las Vegas and Phoenix, are going to have to start rationing drinking water.
And if all that isn’t bad enough, wildfires are out of control and no city or subdivision is safe.
The reckoning soon come.
And yet, up in Western Colorado and Eastern Utah, in farm communities like Loma and Vernal, they were blasting water over the fields with industrial pivot sprinklers like there was no tomorrow. On 100-degree, bright sunny days, they were bathing their crops nonstop, evaporation be damned. Near Hovenweep National Monument, some of the lush green alfalfa fields were literally flooded and water was running down the dirt roads. We saw this “use it or lose it” wanton water waste throughout the entire Upper Colorado Basin.
So, when I hear these dire reports from the Department of Interior, eminent scientists at prestigious universities, angry politicians in water-guzzling desert cities, chicken little environmentalists, and those desperate farmers and cattle barons, I really have to scratch my head at the disconnect between what is, and what really is. And to be honest, I can’t tell the difference anymore.