The Colorado River is running low. The picture looks even worse underground.

washingtonpost.com

23 points

rblion

2 days ago


8 comments

gtani a day ago

This is a complex set of constraints, and people in Arizona, Nevada and Colorado etc have different perspectives on this. In my mind Lakes Powell/ Mead running low is somehow congruent to the /ZB Treasury futures contract (30 year) running lower, somehow there's a common economic invariant lurking in there.

The somewhat brighter bullet points: Northern California reservoirs are doing prety well, and the Bureau of Reclamatn can again kick the can by draining Flaming Gorge but i think this only works every few years:

https://graphs.water-data.com/flaminggorge/

https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/RescondMain

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weekly watch, showing, surprisingly, nontrivial drought in Florida but drought did visibly abate in Nebraska: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx

cute_boi 2 days ago

They should start to ban water usage to grow Alfalfa. It consumes so much water and is very inefficient.

  • amanaplanacanal 2 days ago

    That would likely constitute a taking under the fifth amendment, and they would have to pay the farmers a fair market value.

    But yes, they should probably do that.

  • iamthepieman 2 days ago

    The worst part is that a lot of the alfalfa and other feedstock crops are shipped out of the country.

Arnt 2 days ago

https://archive.is/dXr2K

Tldr: "the region lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003, roughly the same volume as the total capacity of Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoir — and that the decline accelerated rapidly over the past decade. These groundwater losses accounted for more than twice the amount taken out of reservoirs in the region during that time."