{"id":10607,"date":"2023-05-05T13:31:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-05T13:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=10607"},"modified":"2023-05-05T13:31:41","modified_gmt":"2023-05-05T13:31:41","slug":"you-yes-you-are-going-to-pay-for-the-century-old-mistake-thats-draining-the-colorado-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=10607","title":{"rendered":"You \u2014 yes, you \u2014 are going to pay for the century-old mistake that\u2019s draining the Colorado River"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“More than 100 years ago, the US government encouraged Americans to populate rural areas like this, build infrastructure, and farm more land, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. That\u2019s when engineers started building canals to take water from the Colorado River. At the time, the US policy was \u201cto try to get every acre of land under the plow,\u201d Porter said.
These canals turned the desert into a produce powerhouse. When farmlandin Iowa or Nebraska is frozen and blanketed in a thick layer of snow, it\u2019s 70 degrees and sunny in the Imperial Valley and Yuma. As soon as there was enough water in the mix, the conditions were ideal for growing crops year-round.
oday, the Imperial Valley, Coachella Valley, and Yuma together use close to 4 million acre-feet of water per year. That\u2019s an enormous amount, equal to roughly a third of the entire flow of the river. (An acre-foot fills one acre of land with one foot of water and is roughly what two average houses use each year.)”  
…
“In determining the share each basin would get, water officials ignored inconvenient science<\/a> and massively overestimated the river\u2019s average flow. Western water users each got a piece of the river, but \u2014 together with water later allocated to Mexico through a treaty \u2014 those pieces turned out to be more than what it can offer in a typical year. (The 1922 decision also failed to spell out<\/a> what shares would be given to the 30 or so tribal nations in the basin.)”  
…
“water officials didn\u2019t factor in the possibility of a changing climate. Decades of recent warming have been drying out the West, causing less water to flow into the river.”
…
“Conserving waterobviously sounds like a great idea. The problem is that farmers in these regions are already highly efficient. Water-saving technologies are also pricey, and farmers I spoke to are concerned that any future payments won\u2019t be enough to cover them.”  
…
“I\u2019ve spent the last few weeks searching for a good solution to the crisis, an end to this story. No source I found could offer one. Any effort to restore the river will mean some people (or animals) get less water, barring several more winters like this one. And there\u2019s no way around that, no secret technology to grow food without water. \u201cIt\u2019s just such a complicated, ugly problem,\u201d Schwabe said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an unsatisfying conclusion.Then again, maybe that\u2019s what climate change creates: ugly problems where everybody loses. The best thing we can do, perhaps, is to sober up to this reality \u2014 that climate change will reshape economies and human lives \u2014 and use that knowledge to prepare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists have known for decades that the Colorado River is over-allocated and that warming is drying out the basin. Yet water regulators have failed to act in a meaningful way to rebuild Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Schwabe said. They should have started overhauling the Law of the River years ago, he said, instead of always being in \u201ccrisis mode.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe longer you wait to act, the more drastic your action has to be,\u201d Schwabe said. \u201cIf we had started making these cutbacks in the \u201980s and \u201990s, in incremental steps, we probably wouldn\u2019t be talking about this today. The situation is dire because we failed to act previously.\u201d”
https:\/\/www.vox.com\/the-highlight\/23648116\/colorado-river-lake-mead-agriculture-leafy-greens<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“More than 100 years ago, the US government encouraged Americans to populate rural areas like this, build infrastructure, and farm more land, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. That\u2019s when engineers started building canals to take water from the Colorado River. At the time, the US policy was \u201cto try to get every acre of land under the plow,\u201d Porter said.<\/p>\n

These canals turned the desert into a produce powerhouse. When farmland in Iowa or Nebraska is frozen and blanketed in a thick layer of snow, it\u2019s 70 degrees and sunny in the Imperial Valley and Yuma. As soon as there was enough water in the mix, the conditions were ideal for growing crops year-round.<\/p>\n

oday, the Imperial Valley, Coachella Valley, and Yuma together use close to 4 million acre-feet of water per year. That\u2019s an enormous amount, equal to roughly a third of the entire flow of the river. (An acre-foot fills one acre of land with one foot of water and is roughly what two average houses use each year.)” <\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“In determining the share each basin would get, water officials ignored inconvenient science and massively overestimated the river\u2019s average flow. Western water users each got a piece of the river, but \u2014 together with water later allocated to Mexico through a treaty \u2014 those pieces turned out to be more than what it can offer in a typical year. (The 1922 decision also failed to spell out what shares would be given to the 30 or so tribal nations in the basin.)” <\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“water officials didn\u2019t factor in the possibility of a changing climate. Decades of recent warming have been drying out the West, causing less water to flow into the river.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“Conserving water obviously sounds like a great idea. The problem is that farmers in these regions are already highly efficient. Water-saving technologies are also pricey, and farmers I spoke to are concerned that any future payments won\u2019t be enough to cover them.” <\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“I\u2019ve spent the last few weeks searching for a good solution to the crisis, an end to this story. No source I found could offer one. Any effort to restore the river will mean some people (or animals) get less water, barring several more winters like this one. And there\u2019s no way around that, no secret technology to grow food without water. \u201cIt\u2019s just such a complicated, ugly problem,\u201d Schwabe said.
\nIt\u2019s an unsatisfying conclusion. Then again, maybe that\u2019s what climate change creates: ugly problems where everybody loses. The best thing we can do, perhaps, is to sober up to this reality \u2014 that climate change will reshape economies and human lives \u2014 and use that knowledge to prepare.<\/p>\n

Scientists have known for decades that the Colorado River is over-allocated and that warming is drying out the basin. Yet water regulators have failed to act in a meaningful way to rebuild Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Schwabe said. They should have started overhauling the Law of the River years ago, he said, instead of always being in \u201ccrisis mode.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe longer you wait to act, the more drastic your action has to be,\u201d Schwabe said. \u201cIf we had started making these cutbacks in the \u201980s and \u201990s, in incremental steps, we probably wouldn\u2019t be talking about this today. The situation is dire because we failed to act previously.\u201d”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1586,1157,1156],"class_list":["post-10607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-colorado","tag-river","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10608,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10607\/revisions\/10608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}