Lake Powell and Lake Mead
The megadrought currently choking the western United States is the worst drought in the region in more than 1,000 years. It’s having an enormous impact across many states and on several major reservoirs including Lake Mead, a water source for millions of people in the West.
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This week, local officials in Southern California started restricting water use, including watering of lawns to once or twice a week, for about six million residents. It’s also having a major impact on Lake Mead, which is a major source of water for agriculture and for millions of people in the American West.
Ok hang on – why not just ban watering lawns entirely? Lawns make no difference to anyone apart from a stunted kind of aesthetics. Lawns can come back. Lawns don’t feed anyone. Lawns don’t matter. When it’s a choice between crops and lawns why in hell are lawns getting any water at all?
The megadrought is connected intimately with climate change, of course. And our story is part of our ongoing coverage of the Tipping Point.
The Colorado River Basin, a lifeline of the American Southwest, is shrinking. And, with it, the country’s two largest reservoirs are going dry. Just 30 miles east of Las Vegas sits Lake Mead on the border of Arizona and Nevada. It’s the largest manmade reservoir in North America.
It’s not good when a country’s two largest reservoirs go dry.
Lake Mead gets water from Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the country. Its water supply is around a fourth of what it used to be.
States in the Southwest have started limiting some of their use of the Colorado River Basin. And, last month, federal officials took unprecedented action to temporarily keep enough water in Lake Powell, one of the country’s largest reservoirs, to continue, generating hydropower for a million homes.
Is the situation going to improve?
No.
Telling people not to water lawns seems like a good solution to a lot of people, but it doesn’t do much good. Agriculture uses about 80% of all the water used by humans in the area. Finding ways to grow crops with less water is a much better solution. We really don’t even need to do that; the Israelis did it for us, decades ago.
Or perhaps not grow crops that require a lot of water in a desert.
It’s the principle of the thing!
@iknklast
I was astonished to learn that cotton is the number one crop in Arizona, because it is incredibly thirsty. The history of water in Arizona is laden with battles between farmers and natives, with some dams built specifically to block water from native reservations.
As far as lawns in Phoenix go, many people have sand and rock instead of grass and don’t need to have them watered (except for the wealthy, who consider it a status symbol). Runoff ditches along Central Avenue over flow during the dryest months due to watering.
One of the problems that I have with the claim that going vegan would solve climate change is the amount of water that would need to be recovered from somewhere in order to make up the volume of food that would have to be grown to replace meat. Livestock are able to graze on succulents for some of their water source, almonds aren’t able to. Univariate solutions to the climate crisis are not available, after all.
You mean we can’t solve it just by recycling? Well, color me shocked!
Yeah, I hear a lot of these – “all we have to do is…” followed by recycling, plant trees, electric cars, become vegetarian (which wouldn’t require more water. The amount of water to grow a single cow is enormous; the amount of vegetation to grow a single cow is more than would be required for a human).
Agriculture is the heart of the problem, lawns are more visually wasteful, but not that relevant in the broad scheme. Water policy in the American West is absurd, and the placement of agricultural water rights at the top of the stack order is a huge part of that. It is absolutely insane to grow almonds in California.
The US is slowly going to see the Southwest endure what happened to Northwest Mexico over the past 80 years. The Colorado used to have a lush river delta. It is a little brown trickle by the time it hits the Pacific these days.
How long before somebody proposes doing something Direly Stupid to the Great Lakes.
As a Canadian, I do not relish living next door to an increasingly thirsty United States of America.
Was in Vegas airport yesterday (incidentally turns out I got COVID from my step-brother while I was out of town, so that’s been fun)… I look around, it’s 98 fucking degrees, but I saw the golf courses… Why does this place exist?
People have already proposed doing Direly Stupid things to the Great Lakes; so far it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Not to mention water fountains and water parks.
I work for a hydropower company in the south-eastern part of Norway (by far the most densely populated part, which is not saying much, since the whole country only has about as many people as larger Berlin). Under the old normal, roughly during the second half of May (due to snowmelt in the mountains), reservoirs would rise rapidly (far above the “highest regulated water level”), water flow could increase more than five-fold, and for a few weeks everyone had more water than they could possibly use. This pattern was considered so reliable that hydropower companies would lower their reservoirs towards the “lowest regulated water level” during the winter season (when the demand for power was high and prices were good), knowing that they would be filled back up in May. This didn’t just make sense from a purely economic point of view: Even back then there was a real danger of flooding populated areas if snowmelt coincided with heavy rain. You definitely don’t want all that water to go straight into the rivers at the same time with no buffer, and filling up a lake is a great buffer!
But that was the old normal, and in recent years the trusted “spring flood” has often “fizzled out” with only a moderate surplus of water for a short time. Still, this year is the first time it has been completely absent due to record low levels of snow in the mountains. And as a result, at a time of the year when hydropower companies have always been eager to “empty” their reservoirs to free up space for all that melt water, we have been forced to save water, driving up prices for the end consumers to economy-breaking levels*. And at a time when reservoirs have always been full, we’re now entering the (usually) “dry” summer season with most of our reservoirs closer to empty. Most of the people I speak to still talk of it as a freak anomaly and make references to “when it gets back to normal” etc. And, to be fair, 2020 was an unusually wet year, pushing prices to a record low. But that’s exactly the point: We have left the old normal behind, and “how it’s always been” in the past is increasingly becoming a useless indicator of what to expect in the future. The one thing we can say for sure is that it won’t be good.
*Of course we are accused both of emptying the reservoirs for short term gain with no consideration for the environment and of holding back water to drive the prices even higher. You can’t win.
Mike @3 It’s estimated that it takes over 20 gallons of water to produce 1 ounce of almonds. Almonds are not the best example of efficient water use and almond production is frequently used when arguing against plant based diets. Oats for example use 6 times less water, and are considered a staple food while almonds are not. It’s a bigger problem in California due to the limited water resources available for growing them, as an estimated 8% of total ag water use there is for almonds. The biggest use of water (in California and elsewhere) comes from the production of animals and their excretions by a huge margin vis a vis plant farming for human consumption (minus the animals of course), for the simple reason that the majority of plant farming goes to feeding these animals, not to mention the direct use of water by these animals. Plant farming for human consumption would, if a majority of people gradually switched to plant based, use much less land and water resources overall. No one advocating for a vegan diet could seriously promote almonds as an alternative to meat production. As iknklst noted @4, by comparison, with almonds being one of the worst examples of plant water use, it is also estimated that it requires north of 120 gallons of water to produce 1 ounce of beef. I think it’s an interesting subject, and it’s easily researched. A plant based diet is not a cure all, as there are other environmental problems alongside animal farming that also need to be addressed, and getting people to give up exploiting and eating animals isn’t easy. On a personal choice level though, as far as making a positive impact on the environment goes, it is probably the easiest and most effective thing a person can do on a daily basis.
Don’t get me wrong though, a lot of vegans give the movement a bad name with fetishization and militancy, and it puts people off, which is counterproductive. II’m sure there are a lot of folks out there who can’t imagine a world without barbequed ribs, so if the general population ever converts to plant based, at this rate it will take generations.
But that is actually what I do see in a number of vegan cookbooks. A lot of vegans are less concerned with water use than with killing animals, and a lot of them are unaware of the other implications of plant based diets that need to be dealt with (but the dealing with them would probably be substantially less difficult than with animals). I don’t know how many times I, a botanist, have cringed when a vegan tells me they “don’t eat living things”. Really?
Tell me about it! They’re true believers, and must spread the gospel, and will harangue even people who are vegan but not completely enough. I saw that happen to a writer I followed who went vegan because of heart issues but would occasionally add something like butter. He was harangued unmercifully for not being ‘perfect’.
ikn, absolutely. There is no such thing as being 100% vegan, although from a dietary standpoint alone, if we don’t count the animals harmed as a result of the plants we produce for human consumption, you can get pretty close. I can sympathize with the writer you speak of, as I have also been criticized and ridiculed for my diet. Most of this from meat eaters who come up with everything from that it’s “unhealthy” to “unmanly” to eat this way. Absurd. But yes, more so now, vegans themselves become pretty judgemental about dietary vegans (like me) who aren’t ‘veganing’ properly, according to some unattainable standard. Since discovering that this worked successfully for me 20 years ago, by experimentation mostly, and not from a fad diet book or advocacy material, I learned more about the different benefits beyond personal health later as a result, and that those benefits aren’t inconsequential. Also, I think a good case can be made for different vegetarian diets that are still very healthy overall, that include things like butter, so I would still consider that a net positive. Beyond that, yeah, it resembles religion, and people who know me know that I’m firmly against religion. :)