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

23 points by rblion 1 month ago | 8 comments
  • cute_boi 1 month ago
    They should start to ban water usage to grow Alfalfa. It consumes so much water and is very inefficient.
    • amanaplanacanal 1 month 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 1 month ago
        The worst part is that a lot of the alfalfa and other feedstock crops are shipped out of the country.
      • gtani 1 month 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

        ______________________________

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

        • davidklemke 1 month ago
          Climate Town did a great video breaking down where a lot of this ends up, worth the watch if you want some more detailed background on the agreements in place that are leading to this happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c
          • Arnt 1 month 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."

            • niobe 1 month ago
              paywalled