Global Warming Shreds Colorado River Compact As Glen Canyon Dam Nears End Of Hydropower Generation, Possible Deadpool

[hatrack]

EDIT

Western water law is based on the prior appropriation doctrine, which gives the first entity to make “beneficial use” of water the right to keep on using that amount, even if that means that upstream “junior” users’ spigots will get shut off. By the early 1900s, a rapidly growing California was enthusiastically diverting the Colorado River, with huge irrigation districts gobbling up the senior water rights. Less-populous Colorado, Wyoming and Utah were forced to watch in increasing dismay as downstream users gained control over larger and larger shares of “their” river. To appease these headwaters states — and to garner their support for huge dams and other water projects on the lower river — the seven Colorado River Basin states hammered out the Colorado River Compact of 1922. It divided the states into an Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico) and a Lower Basin (Arizona, California and Nevada), with the dividing line at Lees Ferry, Arizona. It aimed to share the river’s water equally between them, giving each basin the exclusive use of 7.5 million acre-feet (MAF) of water per year.

The compact was far from perfect, but the concept of dividing the water equally generally held up, even if the reality didn’t always follow suit: The Upper Basin states have always used far less than their allotted amount (around 4 MAF), while the Lower Basin for years has consumed far more than its share (as much as 11 million MAF). That wasn’t a problem as long as the river had enough water to go around. But for the last 26 years, it hasn’t. Since around the turn of the century, warming temperatures and abnormally dry years have severely diminished the headwaters states’ snowpack, thereby shrinking the river. The annual “natural flow” at Lees Ferry, or the estimated amount of water the river would hold without any upstream diversions or human consumption, has been about 12 MAF on average since 2000, dropping below 6 MAF in 2002, or just over half of what the Lower Basin alone consumed at the time.

EDIT

Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell were supposed to make things easier by acting as an Upper Basin savings account that could be drawn from during dry years. But withdrawals have greatly exceeded deposits more often than not in recent decades, leaving Lake Powell at about one-third of its full storage capacity and bringing its surface level critically close to hitting minimum power pool, the point at which water can no longer be released through the hydroelectric turbines. When this happens — possibly as early as this fall, according to current federal forecasts — the dam will stop generating hydropower for Southwestern utilities. It will also force all releases to go through the outlets lower in the dam, which were not engineered for such sustained use. This would compromise the outlets and possibly the dam itself, and Bureau of Reclamation engineers have strongly warned against it, meaning that minimum power pool becomes the de facto deadpool.

If current climate trends continue, the only way to avoid reaching minimum power pool — aside from re-engineering the dam on a very short timeframe — is either to substantially increase flows into Lake Powell by curtailing Upper Basin water use and draining upstream reservoirs, or else significantly reduce releases from Glen Canyon Dam, forcing the Lower Basin — and the river through the Grand Canyon and its endangered native fish — to take major cuts.

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Exposed sand is seen on a northern side of a depleted Lake Powell in 2022, when historically low water levels led to closures of many popular recreational areas.

https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-colorado-river-rift-abides/

[NNadir]

1. A good and interesting succinct article. Thanks.

[Bluestocking]

2. It sounds like Colorado Wyoming an Utah

should be okay but the other States are in trouble.

[jfz9580m]

3. K&R

If we don’t use the water, it will just flow downstream to California — where it would presumably be used to water golf courses, fill LA’s swimming pools and serve other nefarious West Coast purposes.

Swimming pools are kinda obscene. California is the only US state I visited that I disliked, with apologies to CaliforniaPeggy .

I used to wonder why folks worried so about Colorado’s water running downstream to California, as if letting it go were some sort of sin. I can understand not wanting to lose the water that originates in your state, but to prefer wasting it or locking it up in reservoirs to sharing it didn’t seem right. After all, every drop that Colorado sends to California and Arizona is another drop that stays in the river for that much longer, benefiting fish and the other critters and boaters that rely on its waters.

This is an indirect response. But it is all very well to be all magnanimous about someone else’s resources when you just don’t stop going on increasing population and junk industry growth and expecting people who live within their limits and keep doing their best to pick up after you. Less populous places do get shafted by this endless worthless growth mentality. Outdated and out of touch to keep denying population explosion and how broken immigration to the US is with, California being one of the worst places that generates these nuisances. I tolerate a lot, but I am also pretty fed up of people’s endless greed and disingenuous bullshit.

One of the greediest places I ever went to..California. Even academia and medicine there stink of corporate influence and to this day between sleazy communists locally and the least creepy tech, one is forced to try to work out the least loathesome path. But it is straining my temper.

I liked the red and midwestern states I visited. I am well to the left, but not in shallow ways and the Californian Ideology is bullshit in progressive garb. And it is a strain on every decent human being who tries to do their best.

I was pleased to see this on Christopher Ketcham’s substack. Substack is sleazy and manipulated a lot of money out of me tight fists thanks to my grief after losing my mom on top of years of hell after a shitty job in Ca.
But this piece is bang on and good journalists like Chris or Yasha Levine only find work on places like that in this corrupt msm environment:

https://ketcham99.substack.com/p/population-toxification-part-i-6d0

I have tried to do what I can. But I can no longer support the millions of goddamn sleazy narcissists still cracking the whip.

At some point I will follow through on criminal liability all around over cute shit. But in the meantime entrapment of the corrupt, self serving, self absorbed narcissists I have met for 14.5 years is the only path.

[hunter]

4. Most of this water is used for agriculture.

About 20% of the water goes to cities. Only a tiny fraction of that water is used to fill swimming pools and irrigate golf courses.

If you live in the U.S.A. the salad greens you buy in the winter were probably grown using Colorado River water.

Supermarket produce sections and restaurant menus across the nation would be bleak in the winter without this water -- cabbages, turnips, and potatoes. No salads, just soup. Some expensive hot-house and imported produce.

Eventually U.S. cities in the Southwest are going to switch to other, more expensive, water sources. They'll recycle more sewage and desalinate more water. Lower elevation cities won't run out of water, but the price of it will increase.

It's the farmers and consumers of fresh vegetables who will experience the worst of this.

[jfz9580m]

5. Thanks hunter

That puts it in perspective.