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The Colorado River is shrinking
141–150 of 258 posts
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#142I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…
It's not that you aren't correct on some time frame, its more so that you have to live your life there for the entire duration that you aren't correct. So, whatever helps you sleep at night.
But I don't. I just plan to hold onto the property, if I buy another house.
As dev with a dual citizenship and ability to work anywhere in Europe, I have pretty high mobility and I can always move.
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#143Time for my usual post on water in the western United States.
We have know this for more than 140 years [0]. Since my previous post I can now also strongly recommend that everyone (yes, everyone) living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.
I fully expect the western water related engineering projects of the 20th century to fail in this century because you can't store what never falls from the sky, and you cannot refill a depleted aquifer. Powell presented us with the reality of the ecological and political situation, maybe some day we will finally get around to implementing the solution [3,4].
Edit: for a special treat RE the thread on water usage in Utah as see the discussion of page 84 (96) of [0] where Powell writes the following: "In general, there is a great wastage, due to badly constructed canals, from which the water either percolates away or breaks away from time to time; due, also, to too rapid flow, and also to an excessive use of the water, as there is a tendency among the farmers to irrigate too frequently and too copiously, errors corrected only by long experience." Apparently long experience is more than 140 years.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166
0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878
1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954
2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954
3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visio...
4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Water_Sheds_o...
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? Farming represents 3% of California's GDP, but 40% of the water. If California decided to simply sell that water to other states and then give the money to the farmers in exchange for not farming, the farmers would probably come out ahead. It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns.
> It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns. It might be easier to convince people to not grow lawns if we'd do away with some of the stupid laws and ordinances that require people to have "well groomed" lawns in places where such grass is an unnatural imported occurrence. Perhaps even offer some tax breaks or other incentives to "zeroscape" or landscape their yards using native plant…
I definitely support a statewide ban on requiring lawn watering. Luckily here in California, because of continuing drought, most cities have already made it legal to not water your lawn, and you can't require tenants to water a lawn.
I would definitely like to see it taken farther as you have suggested -- give tax breaks and subsidies for people xeriscaping or replacing lawns with synthetic turf.
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it? Farming represents 3% of California's GDP, but 40% of the water. If California decided to simply sell that water to other states and then give the money to the farmers in exchange for not farming, the farmers would probably come out ahead. It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns.
> It's also a lot easier to enforce than making sure people don't grow lawns. It might be easier to convince people to not grow lawns if we'd do away with some of the stupid laws and ordinances that require people to have "well groomed" lawns in places where such grass is an unnatural imported occurrence. Perhaps even offer some tax breaks or other incentives to "zeroscape" or landscape their yards using native plant…
In the last drought, California actually started fining agencies for over-using water. And our water provider established water allotments based upon our residence, and if we went over we would get fined.
And it definitely works. I knew a lot of people in HOAs that mandated residents eliminate a certain amount of lawn due to these fines.
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's silly, it's honestly why my wife and I keep deciding to keep our family here in Ontario despite the rest of my family being out west. We keep talking about moving to British Columbia for lifestyle and social reasons (skiing, family, scenery, politics etc.) but every time I go out west to visit family in Alberta & BC there's forest fires, talk of drought, shrinking glaciers (that supply all drinking…
I mean, there's a lot of techno-optimists on this forum diligently huffing the hopium that the eventual (perhaps even imminent) collapse of our current systems will surely be subverted by some great breakthrough. Of course they're going to downvote any view that purports that this is highly unlikely.
Personally, I been upvoting everyone who makes realistic and valid points, even if I don't like what they have to say, because especially in discussions about this particular topic, we need to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints and be willing to accept that not any one magical solution is gonna fix this.
The reality is that the whole "climate crisis" thing is gonna require humanity in general to gang up on the problem from all angles and each contribution will help the overall situation improve to some degree. The sum of all those contributions is the solution.
The longer we keep looking to corporations, politicians, and scientists to come up with a "magic bullet" for the problem, the worse it's gonna be for everyone and the less likely any amount of human efforts will be able to improve it again.
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#148I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…
I've idly thought about which areas are likely to come out ahead because of climate change. It's going to affect just about everything, but surely there will be at least a couple winners next to the pile of losers.
Obviously you can't predict too far out, but like you've said, the midwest seems likely to be a winner in the short-term. I've also seen a lot about the Russian permafrost melting, and I can't help but think they'll come out ahead as well. It makes me wonder if they've done that same mental math, because it would give them incentives that conflict with most of the rest of the world.
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#149Earlier 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?
Change to “another crop” is like a farmer telling a software company built on Java to switch to a C++ stack because it’s just another language. There is crop specific knowledge that makes it not just planting something else.
It’s also not just the knowledge and technology capital involved, like many startups here, it’s connection to markets that matter to produce income. Ag wise it’s not clear what other, lower water-usage crop one would switch to, or how our system would encourage, or require, or incentivize that change.
Re: The Colorado River is shrinking
#150I know this may be silly but one reason why I stay in the "Great lakes states" and own property here is because of global warming and my lack of hope that tech/governments/capitalism will solve it before we reach a point of no return during which we will experience massive property and life loss in the US. Only then significant change will occur IMO. There are places in the south now that need water to be delivered b…
Cheap fresh water will become the new oil. I wouldn't be surprised if the ridiculous idea of pumping Lake Michigan to NV/CA comes to fruition.
It won't happen due to the staggering energy requirements to lift water up and over the Rocky Mountains. For that level of energy expenditure, it would make more sense to desalinate water closer to those places.
What might make more sense is growing more warm climate fruits and vegetables in the Great Lakes with the abundant water supplies as the climate there gets warmer, and exporting those elsewhere.
This is already happening in portions of the southern UK which are now growing champagne grapes as the traditional locations in France are getting progressively drier.