About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.
Not really discussed much: the water mostly goes to food for cows and cars, not people
This isn’t a “prolonged drought;” this is normal. It’s the weirdly wet period a century or so ago that was the outlier!
The real problem here is that all the engineering and legal agreements governing who gets access to how much water was fundamentally built on a fantasy.
Not just fantasy. It was determined on gallons instead of some percentage of the water flowing. Nature doesn’t care about how many gallons humans want to divvy up.
Number of gallons of the water flowing during an unusually wet period, making the resulting number a fantasy relative to the amount of water normally available.
Its really not “normal”, global warming has caused huge shifts in how snowpack is put down, and how aquafers are (not) being recharged, as well as hotter temps driving a huge change in rainfall patterns, so that vegetation drinks a lot of the snowmelt that would normally make it into the river.
Global warming sure doesn’t help, but the Colorado basin was dry AF even before the industrial revolution. IIRC, the Anasazi got fucked over in a similar way.
There have been droughts before, but the Colorado Basin is not typically in drought conditions.
The current drought is the worse we have had in 1200 years, the last time we can find a worse drought we had to invent a whole new way to determine water levels so we could get data going back 1800 years.
There have been droughts before, but all the data we have says that the current period would be dry, but not critically so…except for global warming.
The account of alfalfa here on the western slope of Colorado is insane considering the decades long drought…
What is alfafa used for there? Animal feed?
Its basically a way to export water internationally, alfalfa takes a huge amount of water to grow, so grow it here where the water laws are basically whoever has money wins, and they ship it out.
Yes, unsure if it’s staying local though, if I’m remembering articles from a year ago right some of those farms are owned by Saudi Arabia and are shipping it out.
Animal feed but a lot of it is exported. It’s one of those crops that if it was only produced for internal use wouldn’t be so bad but a lot of it is exported while also being exported.
I thought the SC just settled that case? Kinda cool when NM opens up Elephant Butte and the river starts flowing again.
