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The Colorado River is shrinking

sciencemag.org

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Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#131

Post by lostapathy »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #103
anonAndOn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US exports massive amounts of water in the form of hay and alfalfa.[0] This practice may not survive once the reservoirs completely dry out. [0] https://alfalfa.ucdavis.edu/+symposium/proceedings/2019/Arti...

Chinese and other overseas investors own those US desert farms. They were attracted here by the massively generous water rights they get automagically. ref: https://grist.org/agriculture/u-s-southwest-already-parched-...

While the US is unlikely to mess with the private property rights, export restrictions are easy to change.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#132

Post by thehappypm »

CrazyStat wrote: post #124
01100011 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we desalinate water when there is water already desalinated by nature available for us? Like I mentioned earlier, I'm not against desalination, it just seems crazy to leverage it to supply all of our water shortfall. Wouldn't a network of canals and pipelines allow the country to be more secure and handle disasters more effectively?

You would still need a network of canals and pipelines, because places like Colorado and Utah facing imminent water shortages aren't close to the ocean. Desalinating plus pumping water up to those places would be insanely expensive though. It's not economically feasible for the primary uses of fresh water (farming).

Maybe places like Colorado and Utah just aren't meant for water-intensive farming. Why should the ecological sins of the past just be grandfathered in?

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#133

Post by blooalien »

Niglodonicus wrote: post #98
briga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeaaaaaah, if cities could stop doing that endless unsustainable sprawl thing that would be great

Yeaaaaah, if our whole society could stop doing that endless unsustainable growth thing that would be great.

The whole "unsustainable" part is what gets me. Why is "growth" so important that we must do it to a point where it becomes unsustainable and risks literally all life everywhere on Earth becoming extinct (or at least knocked back to pre-stone age levels)?

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#134

Post by thehappypm »

01100011 wrote: post #43

The choice is pretty clear to me. We need a national water grid. Desalinization is great and a piece of the puzzle, but we need a way to distribute water across the country. It could also be leveraged as an energy storage device if we continue to add more reservoirs at various elevations. It's not going to be cheap or easy, but we'd be stupid not to start on it now. The climate changes, and we need to plan for it. Pl…

Water pipelines are also a national security issue. Imagine an enemy being able to ruin our agricultural sector with a few bombs.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#135

Post by lostapathy »

dylan604 wrote: post #99
dv_dt wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your perspective and mine yes, but politically one needs a policy that also addresses all the people already involved making their living from that activity. This is a micro sized problem of the larger scale fractal problem of climate crisis and industrial shifts needed to address it.

What is the number of people directly involved in production of alfalfa in the desert that would no longer have work if the alfalfa production in the desert stopped. Do these jobs absolutely 100% depend on alfalfa, or would they "pivot" to other crops? Is the "farming" sector in Utah that artificial that there is no other crop?

Also consider the markets that depend on the alfalfa that you'd disrupt.

I'm not arguing it's not worth disrupting, but it's not a simple problem.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#136

Post by thehappypm »

t0mbstone wrote: post #109
simiones wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's ignore the simple solution - stop consuming so much water - and jump to a high-tech, unknown impact, expensive, complex, expensive solution. What could go wrong?

Stopping water consumption is an inadequate solution to our three biggest water supply problems: 1. Desalination 2. Purification 3. Distribution There would be no shortage of fresh water on earth if we simply put resources into solving these three problems.

There is no shortage of fresh water in the US. The water is simply not near where the farms are because we're unbelievably irresponsible with where we do farming.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#137

Post by thehappypm »

01100011 wrote: post #65
selectodude wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The Great Lakes are not leaving the Great Lakes area. Ever.

What does this even mean? What does a national water grid have to do with the Great Lakes? Is there some sort of regional paranoia that the rest of the country is coming for "your water"? If you look at a map you'll notice that there is quite a lot of water available beyond the great lakes. Is there a reason freshwater can't be pulled from the mouths of great rivers like the St. Lawrence, the Columbia, and the Missis…

It would be extremely energy intensive to push water from sea level to upland farms, basically you'd be running hydro plants in reverse.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#138

Post by blooalien »

dogman144 wrote: post #49

Does anyone have educated views on desalinization tech? That seems to be the few ways out of this that's totally within our control. I imagine we'll rob Peter to pay Paul with it via extincting a bunch fish we didn't mean to in desal turbines or something unexpected like that, but that aside..

I've read about some pretty interesting recent developments in desalination and other water "cleaning" technologies lately, but they're all still "in the lab" as it were. Nothing of the newest and most amazing stuff I've read about has yet progressed to the point of being in any widespread use.

As another reply mentions, existing technologies that are in use tend to be quite expensive (in terms of cost and power/resource usage required to get the job done on any sort of large scale).

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#139

Post by xyzzy21 »

ngngngng wrote: post #10

Approximately 27% of the water used in Utah comes from the Colorado River and 60% of Utahans benefit from the river. 82% of Utah water goes to farmers. Significant amounts of that water usage is to grow Cotton and Alfalfa. Two water intensive crops that are largely exported out of the country. In my opinion we have absolutely no business growing these crops in a desert, especially just to ship them out of the country…

California is still worse. NO ALMONDS. They are water pigs and if you eat almonds you are aiding and abetting environmental damage at a grotesque scale.

Re: The Colorado River is shrinking

#140

Post by ansible »

nostromo wrote: post #129
JohnWhigham wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting all the modern amenities of life while living in the desert is just pure arrogance. I seriously don't know why governments subsidize it.

People absolutely should live in the desert. It's better than what we usually do: destroy natural bio-diverse habitats along rivers and coasts and replace them with housing and strip malls.

I live in an area of the country that has some of the very best environment in the entire world for growing crops. Length of seasons, rainfall, topsoil depth and quality, etc. The very best in the world, no hyperbole.

And yet, due to this land being near a major metroplex, we are busy paving it over with roads and buildings. Mostly what is grown now is Kentucky bluegrass, which doesn't do so great here (or anywhere besides Kentucky?) and so needs frequent applications of pesticides and water to stay green.

Market forces, I know. But from a larger perspective, how does this situation make the slightest bit of sense?

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