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Raising cattle and growing water intensive crops in the desert is foolish.
Much of those grasses are also exported to feed animals in the Middle East and Asia.
Did not know this. Learned something new today and it is early.
Developers don’t care what happens in 20 years. They buy a piece of land, build houses on it, sell them, and walk away counting the money. Hell, there’s concern about future groundwater supplies here in southeastern Pennsylvania because of development.
“but they remain disparate and self-interested parties hoping they can miraculously agree on a way to manage the river without truly changing their ways.”
You could change “River” to “Covid-19” and this sentence would still make sense. There’s this hope, in both cases, that things will go back to normal. There is no back to normal and we’ll have to adapt. I think eventually the usual suspects — the GOP — will accept that the climate is changing and will support actions to mitigate it, but I greatly fear that they will want to dream up engineering solutions, that will likely do more harm than good, such that we can continue with our profligacy unabated. The iceberg towing (ludicrous on a number of levels) and giant desalination plants (where will the huge amounts of energy come from; what do we do with the left over salts and brine waste water?), along with crackpot schemes like injecting SO2 into the atmosphere are examples. Sacrifices like changing our eating habits and life styles are unavoidable, but we all know who will fight this to the very last.
They’ve denied it was changing but now it’s undeniable. So they’ve gone to plan B, which is that it’s not anthropogenic but natural. After all 15,000 years ago Canada was covered in a continent wide glacier.
“It’s natural so nothing can be done about it.”
In the 1990s I went to conferences in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Tucsan. Even then there were “water shortages” in the news, and I found it absolutely incredible [especially in Pasadena] to observe gulf courses with acres of grass in the middle of the desert being prodigiously watered with sprinkler systems. Nothing like going out for a round after a nice spring rain.
How much of the “agriculture” uses drip irrigation?
Conservatives don’t believe in conserving.
I had a pretty nice career as a chemist, and was able to work with my IRAs. I learned about investing. It always strikes me that Republicans are always on about the importance of business and investing, etc. But having read your post reminds me of what I have actually observed about Republicans is that they never seem to follow the first real rule I learned: Hope Is Not A Plan.
130,000 gallons of water per day per average golf course.
And that doesn’t even include the 20 ft. high decorative fountains around the club house. (See Las Vegas extravaganzas)
A few weeks ago I mentioned the term “Manhattan Project” to make a metaphor for what needs to be done (even though the assembler of the initial Manhattan Project was the Government).
But I meant a combination of the Private Sector, Government and The Academic Establishment working under overarching guidance so as to somewhat tame the Greedy.
It may not be this, but it better accomplish something alluded to above.
Welcome to Texas.
They still grow cotton around Phoenix, couldn’t believe it when I saw that years ago. High use of water.
I have a friend that recently moved to Tucson from the PNW. He was telling me how cheap the water is there.
Raise the price of water and cut out the nonsense of growing alfalfa to feed cattle. This might have all been fine 40 years ago. Things have dramatically changed but no one wants to recognize it, it all keeps getting pushed till later.
I spent summer in Phoenix with a high school friend at her parents house in the 70’s. I’d never been to the desert before.
I was recently back in touch with this friend after 40 years and told her one of the most shocking things about Phoenix that I remembered was the water truck coming, maybe once every couple weeks and turning on the water to flood the back yard to keep the grass green.
The myth persists that technology can always outrun nature, that the American West holds endless possibility.
A smartphone represent generations of science, engineering and innovation.
But if you can’t recharge it, it becomes a paper weight.
8% of all the water in California, that means every drop that falls from the sky anywhere in the state, plus the water from the Colorado River, is exported to Asia in the form of alfalfa at a loss. The value of the crop is so low that it costs more to deliver the subsidized water to the growers than the crop is worth.
This happens because of “water rights” written into law 130 years ago. According to the law the alfalfa farmers own the water rights. They are also perpetually enraged that they are not getting more water.
We’ve got tens of millions of people who would gladly work in endeavors to deal with our environmental ills.
Our problem is that we have not figured out a way to overcome the opposition, which is the Republican Party.
Why?
Because helping to save the Planet would help the Democrats.
Foreign cattle to boot. Sorry, it never struck me that we sent grass feed overseas. That would be pretty much corporate large scale growers? Which brings the economic benefit down to a limited number of people?
Surface water is not the only problem in CA and the southwest. Southern Arizona and Southern Nevada might become unlivable.
Water tables declining all over the West.