MegaDrought Threatens HydroPower in US West

[W2DR 1,860]

The memories of my youth in California.....fishing on Lake Mead, camping beside the Truckee River, water skiing on Lake Comanche, spending long weekends on the slopes at Alpine Meadows, picking Poppies in the foothills, watching the Monarch butterflies in  Pacific Grove, walking through the giant Redwoods in Sequoia National Forest, and so many others. Many are gone now. Some never to return. It makes me sad to think about what my grandson will miss.

[birdguy 3,943]

10 hours ago, dave2013 said:

The fact is that if there weren't tens of millions of people living in the Southwest, those water levels, albeit very low, wouldn't be as much of a concern.

It would still be a problem Dave.  California and Arizona are major agricultural resources.  The Southwest produces more than half of the nation's high value specialty crops.  California has over twice the agricultural receipts of any other state with almost 50 million a year.

The United States cannot use all of the Colorado River water.  Some must be saved for Mexico.

The Colorado River is not the only concern.  The drought also affects the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada range on which the central valley agriculture depends.  And the lack of snowfall in the San Gabriels around Los Angeles affects the California citrus crop too. 

Even cutting the populations of Southern California and Arizona in half wouldn't solve the problem.

Desalinization is fine for drinking water, but what about agricultural water?  The wells in Arizona are drying up.  Drought also causes the water tables to drop.  I recently read where a landowner n Mesa Arizona gave up trying to drill a well after spending almost 50 thousand dollars drilling 90 feet and not even finding moist sand.

Here in New Mexico farmers along the Rio Grande have been told to conserve and use as little irrigation water as possible because of reduced flows and the amount of water that has to be saved to deliver to Texas.

It's more than just a people problem.

Noel

[birdguy 3,943]

6 hours ago, W2DR said:

picking Poppies in the foothills

Shame on you Doug!  The California Golden Poppy is protected and it's illegal to pick them...even back when I was boy tramping the areas you just mentioned in the late 40s.

Noel

[martin-w 3,239]

50 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Shame on you Doug!  The California Golden Poppy is protected and it's illegal to pick them...even back when I was boy tramping the areas you just mentioned in the late 40s.

Noel

 

😵 How many cat points do you want me to delete Noel? You chose.

[dave2013 1,130]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

California and Arizona are major agricultural resources.

Ahh, but you bring up another question: should those areas be major agricultural resources in the first place?  If there ain't enough water to support all that agriculture, then it probably shouldn't have been as heavily developed in the first place.

California experienced a miracle years ago when they built those reservoirs in the mountains and aqueducts to bring all that water down to Los Angeles and the San Joaquin valley.  As usual, the people squandered that precious resource with excessive agricultural development and population increase.  Look at all the almond farms out there that use huge amounts of water.  Maybe they shouldn't be growing as many. 

We have enough arable land in the USA without having to farm deserts.

New Mexico is a bit of an exception as there is a lot of water underground.  Plus, New Mexico's population isn't nearly as large, although that is starting to change.  Albuquerque is growing too much and they're taking water out of the Rio Grande which should not be allowed.  Anyway, when I lived in New Mexico there was a company that was trying to get access to the many billions of gallons of water in the San Agustin aquifer.  They wanted to drill hundreds of wells and ship the water off to Arizona and California.  No way should this be allowed to happen.

Like I keep saying, too many people and too few resources.

Dave

[birdguy 3,943]

Let him go this time Martin.  It happened a long time ago.  And I don't guess he'll picking many more California Golden Poppies from Florida.

Noel

[dave2013 1,130]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Drought also causes the water tables to drop

One more thing.  Much of the Western USA is an arid place.  Period.

We can talk about "droughts" all day long, but a drought out west is very different from a drought in the east.  That part of the country has never gotten a lot of rain.

I see you got an upvote from someone who is desperately trying to link this issue to something he fervently believes in.  Sorry, not this time.

Dave

Edited July 25, 2022 by dave2013

[dmwalker 607]

12 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

We have enough arable land in the USA without having to farm deserts.

Asking as an outsider, where is there arable land in the USA which is not being farmed and why is it not being farmed?

[birdguy 3,943]

Well, Dave, foresight is a wonderful thing if you can be sure of what's going to happen.  But when these areas like the Salinas Valley artichoke fields and the Inland Empire citrus orchard and the Imperial Valley alfalfa fields and the farmlands of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys were first tilled and planted water was abundant.  Who could forecast 20 year droughts?  They had no prior knowledge.

Would they have built Hoover and Glen Canyon dams if they knew at the time they would become useless in less than 100 years?  Maybe the water will come back someday and the cycle will repeat itself.  Humans are very short sighted when it comes to forecasting disasters.

Noel

[birdguy 3,943]

3 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

Asking as an outsider, where is there arable land in the USA which is not being farmed and why is it not being farmed?

Much of it has been turned into urban developments.

As an example, the arable land north of Denver were sugar beet farms.  It was a major crop.  But developers offered big bucks to the farmers to sell the land for expand Denver's suburbs.  The farmers took the money to live the good life and now you have what were small communities like Westminster, Thorton and Brighton expanded into small cities.

I believe they still grow sugar beets north of Denver, but not as many as they used too.

But you raise a good question Dugald.  Where else can you get two or three crops a year?  California's gross income from agriculture is more than twice that of any other state.

Noel

[dave2013 1,130]

26 minutes ago, dmwalker said:

Asking as an outsider, where is there arable land in the USA which is not being farmed and why is it not being farmed?

We produce far more grain than we consume, so we could stop farming so much arid/desert land and just focus on our existing farmland.

There's another land resource that a lot of Americans take for granted: our big lawns.  There are millions of houses with 1/2+ acre lots which are only used to grow pretty grass, and waste a lot of water for that grass.  If we had to, we could start panting gardens and have a bounty of agricultural produce.

Dave

[dmwalker 607]

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has estimated that 30-50% of food produced worldwide is wasted, either because of imperfections or expired best-before dates. 

They stated that “The potential to provide 60-100% more food by simply eliminating losses, while simultaneously freeing up land, energy and water resources for other uses, is an opportunity that should not be ignored.”

[W2DR 1,860]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Shame on you Doug!  The California Golden Poppy is protected and it's illegal to pick them...even back when I was boy tramping the areas you just mentioned in the late 40s.

Noel

That's just the beginning of my transgressions. Also, I often drive over the speed limit and have been known to jaywalk.....Doug 

[dave2013 1,130]

2 hours ago, birdguy said:

Well, Dave, foresight is a wonderful thing if you can be sure of what's going to happen

But it's not just the drought that's caused the problem.  There was plenty of water in the rivers out there 80 years ago because there were a lot less people.  The Hoover Dam was built in the Dust Bowl period when a lot of the country was already dealing with drought conditions, but I guess there was enough water there to justify building the dam.

Those areas got developed *because* of the huge population migration into those areas.  Those dams were built to supply power to all those people moving out there.  The power from Hoover dam doesn't get transmitted all the way back east.

In a related topic I already posted some figures on population growth in California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico.  They're pretty staggering.  Everyone wants to live in a mild climate with low humidity, but there simply isn't enough water and food in those areas to support such a huge population.  Add in a cyclical drought and the problem becomes more evident.

The folks out west are going to have to deal with this through conservation and developing new sources of energy and water.  I hope they don't steal resources from other parts of the country.

Dave

[birdguy 3,943]

So, Dave, how do you prevent people from moving where they want go?  How do you tell people, "No, you can't move to California because they are going to run out of water in 50 years?  Move to North Dakota instead.  They probably won't run out of water before California does."

Are you now proposing that we select people in California to move out because of a water shortage?  How many people do you think California can sustain at the present time?

Woulda, coulda, shoulda is easy to second guess and write paragraphs and paragraphs about in hindsight.

Instead of writing paragraphs and paragraphs about what should have been done in the past why not start thinking of solutions for the people who are already there?

Noel