(Image from Wikipedia)
It may be hard to see thousand-year trends in a daily newspaper, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.
The WSJ is reporting on the US Bureau of Reclamation cutting back the use of the water from the Colorado River. That’s part of the two trends. The first is too many people (overpopulation) and too much heat (climate change).
The Colorado River starts near Denver, where it picks up its name before slices off the corner off Utah and snaking through the Grand Canyon, separating Arizona from Nevada and California before it dumps into Mexico’s Gulf of California. Except there hasn’t been any dumping for many years now. The US states have damned the river and siphoned off so much of the river water for irrigation and consumption that none of it is left to flow into Mexico.
The US West has been baked with heat waves. This year, we got some rain but a lot of the water evaporated in the heat. Lake Mead, created by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, is at the lowest level since the dam was built.
With every state helping itself of Colorado River water, the federal government had to step in. And so, we have been put on rations. Though not all of us, though. California, on the edge of the massive Colorado River basin but its biggest user, is left out of the Bureau of Reclamation’s recent limits.
If you’re thinking “So what? I can flush my toilet less and get bottled water,” think of doing that in the dark. If water levels go much lower in Lake Mead or Lake Powell, the hydroelectric power generation stops completely. There go the Western power grids.
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