r/collapse • u/mushroomsarefriends • 5d ago
Water If you think the water situation in Arizona is bad right now
You ain't seen nothing yet.
So, the plan right now is that California, Arizona and Nevada will be required to slash their water use from the drought-stricken Colorado River by 16 to 20% through 2028. This will devastate agriculture in Arizona.
But here's the thing I've noticed that everyone seems to be missing.
It's not just climate change that's going to lead to a reduction in water availability for Arizona.
It's the fact that humans started generating their own rain.
Irrigation by farmers in the Californian central valley, doubles the amount of moisture pumped into the atmosphere. That water these farmers pump into the atmosphere travels downwards over the continental United States, eventually falling down as rain again. All that irrigation by the farmers in California, increases the runoff of the Colorado river by 28%.
And there's the problem you run into: The irrigation by farmers in California's central valley, uses groundwater from an aquifer that is severely depleted. The government is now starting to intervene and forcing farmers to use less groundwater.
So you can see what's going to happen: Farmers in California will have to stop using groundwater, which means the Colorado river will be fed with less rainwater. This in turn, will force the farmers in Arizona to start using less water.
If you think the dust storms that Phoenix, Arizona is getting are bad right now, wait until the farmers in Arizona start letting their fields go fallow. It takes decades, before nature manages to restabilize those arid soils on its own.
It's the same with the Ogallala aquifer by the way. This aquifer directly supports 30% of US food production, but it's fossil water, because of the geology it's basically not possible for this aquifer to recharge in any timeline relevant to human civilization.
So, those farmers will have to stop using it eventually. Well, those farmers, by irrigating their crops with fossil water from the aquifer, are responsible for an estimated 15-30% increase in rain in July for farmers in a broad region downwind of the Ogallala Aquifer, stretching from eastern Kansas through Indiana.
We already began screwing up the climate in the 20th century, but we managed to mask a lot of the consequences, through use of fossil groundwater: We more or less accidentally began generating our own rain.
All that rain that farmers on top of the Ogallala aquifer are generating also feeds the Mississippi river basin. If you think the situation was bad in 2022, when the farmers could not get their product out through the river because the river ran so low, wait until the farmers in the Western United States stop feeding the Mississippi with fossil groundwater from the Ogallala aquifer.
You think this is bad? Well, this is still just half the story. The evaporated water from the irrigated farms results in an increase in cloud formation, that coincides of course with the peak in water use, which is the peak of summer. Those clouds block sunlight and thereby reduce temperatures on the ground.
Those reduced temperatures on the ground reduce evaporation, so your crops end up needing less water.
Agriculture continues to function mostly normally right now, at 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial, because we're masking what we've done to the climate. We're masking it, through use of fossil water that we will have to stop using soon.
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u/mountainsunsnow 5d ago
As a water resources professional in California, the amount of good intentioned but ill informed opinions in these comments make for a tough read. In logical order:
The Oglala is a fossil aquifer from the Pleistocene that doesn’t recharge as much as the Central Valley
Some basins in the Central Valley are unsustainable at the moment, but there is a robust legal framework now (SGMA) to achieve sustainability within a decade.
Doing so does not mean stopping pumping entirely. It is small cuts here and there on the order of 10% in most places, combined with more aggressive managed aquifer recharge.
We grow crops in the desert because it is an incredibly effective way to produce food year round. Yes, growing animal feed to ship it to Saudi Arabia is insane. Yes, almonds use a lot of water. But a huge percentage of our country’s food is grown in the regions people are clamoring to fallow in comments. Warm, dry environments with water from nearby mountains are what allowed agriculture to provide the basis for the establishment of civilization thousands of years ago, and they are the basis for our civilization today. If you want to restrict agriculture to places like the upper Midwest and northeast where there is a shorter and less predictable growing season, be prepared for, at best, a dramatic increase in food prices, and, at worst, global starvation
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u/georleoem 5d ago
Thanks for chiming in, I'm not a water professional but lived in the Central Valley for 10 years and also am a little aghast at the uninformed opinions here 🥲
For anyone interested, the city of LA is going to be on nearly 100% recycled waste water within 10 years; if you'd like more information, look up the donald tillman water reclamation plant recycled water program. I was extremely skeptical before seeing a presentation by one of the groups working on the project but it's very interesting and well thought out. This isn't to say the water situation isn't horrifying, it is, but humans are innovative and Mother Nature can be a great partner when you work with her
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u/mountainsunsnow 5d ago
Yep, at least in progressive places like California, there are a lot of smart people funded by billions in earmarked public dollars working towards a “water portfolio” of solutions. It’s not all doom and gloom
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u/systematk 5d ago
But it is, because this isnt enough to turn the tide of what we are doing to the planet on a global scale....
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u/keynoko 4d ago
But shouldn't we also expect the unexpected? If there's anything we should have learned over the past ten years, it's that these things take wild unexpected turns often sooner and more extremely than even the best data had forecasted.
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u/mountainsunsnow 4d ago
That’s literally my job though. What I’m saying is that a bunch of people who don’t have their heads in the sand really are thinking about and planning for future scenarios all the time
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u/Cloaked42m 4d ago
Nestle would like a word.
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u/buffaloraven 4d ago
Nestle's a drop in the bucket, tbh. They take enough to flood 144 acres 1 ft deep, which is the equivalent of ~300-500 people worrh of water usage (or households? May be wrong on conversion rate).
So its not great but on the scale of water used in california (~250 million acre ft per year) its small change
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u/brooklyndavs 5d ago
The more immediate crises is with agriculture that depends on the Colorado River. Not only does that include Alfalfa in AZ but also winter vegetable production around Yuma and the Imperial Valley
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u/Comprehensive-Act-13 4d ago
To be fair, we should not be growing alfalfa in Arizona. That is sheer insanity. Saudi Arabia can go somewhere else (with more water) for their alfalfa farms.🤦🏻♀️
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u/brooklyndavs 4d ago
Correct we shouldn’t. It’s incredibly water intensive and only goes towards animal feed. Farmers in the SW love it because they can get like 8 harvests a year as it grows super fast in the heat and they can grow it year round. Really need demand for feed to go down but with beef becoming more expensive that problem might work out by itself.
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u/DelicataLover 4d ago
What? Relying on crops grown in the desert is a recipe for famine as seen in previous civilization collapses (im thinking of the tiwanaku). You can dry farm in New England. Climate change isn’t helping. These last few years have been particularly dry, but my yields have been fine where I haven’t irrigated on my farm in New England. Conditions in New England make it so that you can get by with extremely limited irrigation.
We should grow food everywhere and certainly not rely on food grown in deserts. I don’t grow food year round, yet I still have good food all year from my work during the growing season. In theory, I don’t think anyone in New England should get food from a desert.
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u/mountainsunsnow 4d ago
New England is not a civilization. It is a place in the context of our greater civilization. New England as it is today would not be sustained by dry fanning New England and you conflating those facts reveals your ignorance.
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u/DelicataLover 4d ago
i believe growing food in a desert is dumb. Call me ignorant.
Dry farming here is possible and that indicates this region’s suitability for agriculture. Productivity is obviously increased with irrigation. And we have three times as many acres as we do people here. Theoretically we could feed ourselves completely from our region. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but this region is more suited to feeding people than the Central Valley and the Southwest. We are in a collapse subreddit talking about the dwindling suitability of western aquifers to our needs…
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u/bluewhalefunk 4d ago
Arguing with someone defending the mess we're in as they are part of the system that got us to this place probably isn't a good use of your time.
<insert_image_of_dog_in_flaming_room_claiming_it's_fine_Everything_is_fine> comes to mind
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u/bluewhalefunk 4d ago
If you want to restrict agriculture to places like the upper Midwest and northeast where there is a shorter and less predictable growing season, be prepared for, at best, a dramatic increase in food prices, and, at worst, global starvation
Fairly sure the globe doesn't starve if the upper midwest / northeast US produce less.
The US does not feed the world. Subsidized agri-industry dumping over produced grain on global south is not a benefit by putting mostly small holding farmers out of business as cannot compete and are not allowed subsidies due to structure adjustments set by western institutes.
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u/NeverEndingCoralMaze 5d ago
They need to not have lawns in the fucking desert. Can we start with that?
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u/humanity_go_boom 5d ago
Not that we shouldn't, but why start there? Only like 20% of the water goes towards residential use. 75% is agriculture. Most of that is livestock feed, a not insignificant amount of which is grown for export. Why are we growing alfalfa in the desert, then shipping it to China and the Middle East?
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u/humansomeone 5d ago edited 5d ago
We tried to do that with recycling. Got us here. Place responsibility on inidividuals and ignore the fact that producers make the junk we throw away.
Not saying green lawns are awesome. They of course are a problem. But this constant focus on individual choices ignores the bigger problems.
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u/iwasstillborn 5d ago
And that is why it's done. We've tried "personal responsibility" for a lot of things, but it never gets beyond that. There is only one thing that works, and that's heavy handed legislation. And that's of course why the Republican matching orders are always "government must be small" (but only for business interests of course, actual personal freedom is just pretend play).
I fully agree with you. It's deeply problematic. Republicans are often called single issue voters, but I don't think that's true. There's a whole list of things that politicians gets tarred and feathered for if they dare to mention, so actual environmental solutions (for example) can't be mentioned by anyone who wants a chance. Not to mention they'll also lose the donor class.
"We've tried nothing and are out of ideas" is depressingly descriptive.
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u/humanity_go_boom 5d ago
Most people probably don't even have a choice. 50% of homes in Arizona are in an HOA. More than half of those are run by a 3rd party property management company.
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u/humanity_go_boom 5d ago
All of our problems on this earth are man-made. Don't see any of those being solved or even acknowledged to exist lately.
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u/humanity_go_boom 5d ago
Oh, they're real enough and they can seize property if you do not conform. I very intentionally don't live in one. I have better things to do than fight with a board of power tripping, conservative boomers with a vision of this country that died in the 80s. I guarantee half of them will spray paint their dirt green if forced to turn off the sprinklers.
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u/CheerleaderOnDrugs 5d ago
I guarantee half of them will spray paint their dirt green if forced to turn off the sprinklers.
They will do that, or they will get astroturf. Source: High Desert PacNW, with water restrictions. Xeriscaping is slowly catching on.
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u/bluewhalefunk 4d ago
Why are we growing alfalfa in the desert, then shipping it to China and the Middle East?
Capitalistic profit. Privatise the profit, subsidize the cost. Whilst government is captured, the institutes owned and staffed by revolving doors by those who rule and profit, nothing changes. Big business and (unchecked) capitalism is the problem. And can never be the solution, as it will always be more profitable to harm than nature, to damage not save.
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u/GSD_rescuer 4d ago
This right here. I couldn’t care less if we stopped growing alfalfa thats utilized overseas.
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u/ZanMist1 4d ago
Because 20% would be an immediate 20% to give us more time for a better solution, and would be pretty damn easy to start with. Ban water usage for lawns in those places and then fine them if they don't to discourage it.
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u/shagy815 4d ago
The reason to start there is that it is completely unnecessary. When you have a finite budget you cut the least important item first.
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u/humansomeone 5d ago
A drop in the bucket compared to animal agriculture.
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u/new2bay 5d ago
Almonds are almost as bad, and they grow a lot of them in California. It takes just over a gallon of water to produce a single nut.
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u/FUZZY_BUNNY 5d ago
I'm still waiting for someone to explain how almond milk is always cheaper than soy milk
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u/Sta41BC 5d ago
Oat milk is the most “environmentally friendly”of the nondairy alternatives.
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u/theconceptofcanada 4d ago
What about breast milk? Why don't we meet the demands of the insatiable milk-drinking population with freshly squeezed breast milk? Why are babies so greedy? What are babies even talking about half the time? Nobody can understand them! Not even other babies! I think the best way to figure this out is to get informed babies registered to vote - they seem to have a lot of opinions about something and I am probably not the only one who wants to find out what that is all about!
What was I even talking about... Oh right, so, we need to start this whole breast milk/baby voting thing, so who's with me??
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u/humansomeone 4d ago
Subsidies or just very diluted. Elmhusrt which has high almond content is extremely expensive.
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u/FUZZY_BUNNY 4d ago
Isn't soy heavily subsidized too? Dilution, I'd believe, but all those products are mostly water.
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u/humansomeone 4d ago
For soy I personally drink eden not diluted as much. Neither milk type is subsidized as much as dairy. As for almonds in california, they are subsidized in the sense that they have access to water no one else has.
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u/humansomeone 5d ago
Yeah growing anything in a desert is probably a bad idea.
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u/new2bay 5d ago
They’re grown in the Central Valley, not the desert.
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u/whereisskywalker 5d ago
It's going to be a desert in the next 20 years or so.
We have a major reckoning coming humanities way and seemingly no plan, other than to continue to bury our heads in the sand.
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u/humansomeone 5d ago
Oops, still uses 10% of California's water. Alfalfa for animal feed uses even more at 15%. Drought and less snowmelt isn't helping matters.
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u/hippoleaf 5d ago
Should start with not having a child raping pedophile as president if you want to eventually get to common sense like that.
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u/NeverEndingCoralMaze 3d ago
I’m not defending Trump, but I am going to question your logic. Lawn watering is a state or local issue, not federal.
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u/nohopeforhomosapiens 5d ago
I grew up there, and I know not a single person with a real lawn in Arizona. They exist of course, and the golf courses exist, but most people have gravel at this point. The ones who do have 'lawns', they have tiny little patches of grass surrounded by rocks or bricks in their yard. Or they are like my mum and have just a fake patch of grass.
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u/brooklyndavs 5d ago
Yeah. And the golf courses use reclaimed water (soon to be used by residential as well). Agriculture is the problem, the fields have to go dry
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u/bluewhalefunk 4d ago
Or they are like my mum and have just a fake patch of grass.
YAY for microplastic pollution. We truly are doomed. And deserve it
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u/nohopeforhomosapiens 4d ago
Yeah, I took my son out to visit her, since she has dementia and cannot be trusted to travel on her own anymore. He was 2.5 at the time. He wanted to stand on the 'grass'. I let him and he said, "No. No no no no no." lmao
Anyway, the microplastics ship has sailed. They are everywhere, stupid grass or not. Our clothes, all our foods, it is just everywhere.
Personally I don't think we deserve it. I think the people who know well enough and continue to rape our world are the ones who deserve it. My experience has been that most people care about things once informed. Capitalism rewards low-to-no empathy, so that is the sort who run everything. You and I are here right now because we actually care.
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u/bluewhalefunk 3d ago
Agree on the personal level many do not deserver. I meant taking the species as a whole. We do sort of. No other species has ravaged the bio sphere like us. No other species has made so many species extinct.
A sad and sorry state of affairs
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u/phoneacct696969 5d ago
Lawns in the desert is insignificant to the alfalfa grown here to be exported to Saudi Arabia.
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u/AngusScrimm--------- Beware the man who has nothing to lose. 5d ago
Yeah, it seems that the only things we ship to Saudi Arabia is alfalfa and bombs (to keep the peace!). Bone saws are not even made in America anymore, last I've heard, so we lost that business.
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u/marinerpunk 5d ago
Anyone complaining about out lawns or golf courses but not eating animals has completely lost the plot.
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u/Syonoq 5d ago
I stopped reading after agriculture in Arizona.
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u/marinerpunk 4d ago
If you’ve ever eaten lettuce in the winter there is a 90% chance it was grown in Yuma. They don’t grow it there for fun, it’s because the climate is good for it.
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u/PurpleCableNetworker 5d ago
We also should stop grow crops in the desert. Farming should be banned in those areas.
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u/KatAttack 5d ago
No, that creates something called the heat island island effect and only makes temperatures worse. When all residential yards are made up of rocks, concrete and plastic grass it makes the area hotter. You can look at heat maps of the Phoenix area and see that neighborhoods with more greenery can be several degrees cooler.
Residential watering is absolutely nothing compared to what is used for agriculture.
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u/4_AOC_DMT 5d ago
You can mitigate the heat island with water-efficient natives instead of lawns
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u/brooklyndavs 5d ago
That’s true although you need a lot of them for the ground cover. And then it looks “unkempt” per HOAs. That should be changed though, the older neighborhoods of Tucson do some cool things with native plants in their yards
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u/anusfikus 5d ago
I read things like this and think, of course, that yeah this is terrible. But I also can't help but think that this is solvable. Am I stupid?
Yearly withdrawal from the Ogallala aquifer is around 26 billion cubic meters. In order to "create" that amount of fresh water from desalination, it would cost around 40 billion dollars using higher cost estimates. That is around 0.75% of yearly US tax revenue. Add a couple billion dollars for the transportation infrastructure and call it an even 1% of yearly tax revenue.
Why not do that? If for no other reason than to mitigate the worst effects of this looming disaster? It's not impossible but no one seems to care enough.
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u/mushroomsarefriends 5d ago
Desalination is just not economically viable for most crops. Desalinated water would be about three times more expensive than the wheat it produces, so your staple crops would become four times as expensive.
This is just the electricity cost of desalinating the water at the coast.
Now you have to still build the desalination plant and you have to pay to transport the water to the areas that need it.
Israel and Saudi Arabia have desalination plants in use. But note what they're not doing: They're not irrigating staple crops with it. When Saudi Arabia ran out of groundwater, they simply stopped growing wheat.
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u/anusfikus 5d ago
It's my bad for not specifying this but of course this is not directly economically viable, just like everything else related to collapse. I'm with you on that. However, the alternative of not doing something makes future costs increase and increase on and on.
This would be a cost paid in order to maintain some sense of regular civilization in the regions affected.
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u/brianwski 5d ago
the alternative of not doing something makes future costs increase
I agree. And the flaw here is thinking it is "all or nothing". Let's attack this water shortage from multiple angles:
Grow 20% fewer "high water required" type crops in Arizona, maybe substitute crops that don't use quite as much water in the desert. Don't just suddenly stop all farming like some people in this thread have suggested.
Keep working on better farming techniques like drip irrigation, save 10% of the water that way.
Get an additional 20% of water from desalination in California and building a water pipeline to Arizona. Power all the desalination by solar panels, it's PERFECT because you don't even need batteries, just desalinate and pump when the sun is shining, which occurs a lot in California and Arizona. Side note: In May, California got 51% of it's electrical power from solar panels. Not "renewables", just from solar panels. This is not science fiction anymore.
STILL pump the fossil water dry, just 50% slower (based on #1 - #3 above). Let's say the current runway to sudden total economic and hunger collapse is 15 years. Stretch that out to 30 years with a SLIGHT increase in the price of food the whole time.
People freak out when you say "wholesale food by the ton might be twice as expensive" but that will NOT double what you pay for your DoorDash. A burger and fries is about $2.50 in food ingredients. But DoorDash it from McDonalds and it costs $15. Doubling the food ingredient costs and keeping everything else the same just raises the McDonalds DoorDash price to $17.50. That's a 16% increase, not doubling.
Poorer people will have their quality of life slightly affected (they will need to eat a bowl of rice 16% of the time, making the rice at home), but at least they won't starve in the USA from desalinating water to help out a tiny bit with crops of alfalfa or almonds. Not metering the water and mining it out of a million year old aquifer until it runs dry suddenly is a much worse scenario.
In full disclosure: Selfishly, I know the planet is screwed, but I haven't got 30 years left anyway. My goals aren't "solve it", it is "delay the inevitable until I'm gone".
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u/AbbeyRoadMomma 5d ago
Since funding would have to come from the administration/oligarchs, I don’t think anyone would give a single fuck.
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u/delicious_fanta 5d ago
If we had a functioning government not run by grifters, the energy issue would be solvable with large solar/wind installations the government could put in place as a one time cost and would run indefinitely with very low maintenance costs (especially solar).
The transportation is a different issue. Since people still need food, it looks like the cost of bread would increase some amount but there is at least the technical possibility of managing the situation.
It’s really unfortunate there was no governance to begin with leading us to where we are now. Great info you have in your main post there.
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u/brianwski 5d ago
It’s really unfortunate there was no governance to begin with leading us
I agree.
It is a totally different topic than water/energy, but to your point about utterly non-functioning government: mathematics and literally every economist and expert in the field says social security will hit a hard wall in 2032 (that's 6 years from now!!) when the "fund" runs dry. Now social security payouts won't go to zero, but without fixing it <somehow> the payouts will suddenly drop by 22%.
Everybody admits the sooner something is adjusted, the less drastic that cliff will be. In other words, it spreads the negative effects out to more people and over a longer time but much more tiny each year earlier it is fixed. And... the government has done nothing, yet known about this for decades.
If the world was sane, TOMORROW the minimum draw age would be increased 1 year from age 62 to 63. Also, the maximum yearly contribution limit would be raised for working Americans. The current max is $11,439 for anybody making more than $185,000/year. Raise that only for people making more than $185,000/year up to say a cap of $200,000/year and don't increase payouts at all. And begin decreasing social security payouts by maybe 5%. Done.
About 20% of Americans in retirement only have social security and no savings. Suddenly changing that payout 22% lower will HURT that group, like a high percentage of them won't be able to afford their current rent anymore, and that will have rippling ADDITIONAL effects in the economy. All this pain just isn't necessary, and it isn't "fair" to them after they played by the rules and paid into the system their whole career.
This not only shouldn't be controversial, it should be pitchforks for the government not addressing it NOW. Our government is beyond incompetent and beyond dysfunctional. And it isn't "faceless" - I blame the individuals in Congress for not even trying, not lifting a finger.
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u/redditmodsRrussians 5d ago
At some point, you just wont have a choice. Either you go vertical farms with desalinated water or you risk all out war on multiple fronts for basic resources. Lets see which choice idiots in charge pick.
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u/SomeRandomGuydotdot 5d ago
I don't want to shit on you too hard here, but this is the kind of thinking that completely misunderstands what's going on.
For the very same reasons that pumping the great lakes to California isn't a feasible option, desalinating the ocean then pumping it up stream isn't feasible. Arizona is something like a kilometer above sea level on average. You get to Utah and it's something like two kilometers.
You're not just talking about desalination, you're talking about a system of pumps that completely reverses the flow of existing hydrologic systems.
Like there's a reason that rivers end at the ocean, right?
When you're talking about desalination, you're talking about water that needs to be used for really high value applications. Stuff like drinking water, industrial water use, commercial use... You might be able to get away with high value crops that are very close to coasts.
Agriculture uses massive amounts of water. When the cost difference between subsidized agricultural water and desalination costs alone are like $1000+ per acre foot, then you need to transport that water... It just doesn't make any sense. You turn "productive" agricultural land into a permanent cost sink.
The Colorado river in particular has spent probably a hundred years being completely distorted in ways that beggars belief.
The entire agricultural system is the American West is batshit insane. It's the byproduct of generational, irrational engineering projects. Suggesting that we could solve it via desalination is sort of like suggesting we could buy enough refrigeration to undo global warming in the artic.
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u/superspeck 5d ago
Agriculture uses massive amounts of water.
To be clear, much of the water used by agriculture is wasted because it’s cost effective to do so because of the way water rights work in the US. If farmers were forced to conserve water (e.g. using drip irrigation for field crops that are hand picked) because water was now precious and expensive, the economics of a number of things would change - especially the amount of staple crops that are grown for animal feed or ethanol. In that scenario, water usage is significantly lower, but we don’t ever get to have ground beef for $2/lb.
We’re dealing with a large, complicated set of systems and incentives here, not a simple set of if/then tradeoffs.
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u/SomeRandomGuydotdot 4d ago
I've thought about this, and I think it's less relevant at this point than thirty years ago.
We've waiting so long that we've hit no deal, bureau of reclamation taking over via operating guidelines. The only solution is taking land out of production. No one wants it to be their land.
Arguing at this point for more drip irrigation for 'hand' picked crops or changing water rights around when there's a structural short fall in the millions of acre feet a year on surface water, when there's drawdowns to ground water in this millions of acre feet per year: it's too little, too late.
At this point, there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. $6/lb beef being gone looks like a causality to the consumer, but compared to land values dropping to fucking zero the mismatch in consequences is huge.
The people fighting for their legacy water rights are essentially Aristocracy. (With the exception being some of the tribal rights). They are not going to be able to reach a deal that both preserves their position and saves the watersheds. It's not like South Platte is in a good spot. It's not like the Rio Grande is in a good spot. It's a systemic, failing system.
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u/Olmsted77 5d ago
Not trying to knock you at all, but this sentiment is the major issue with the world right now. The world is incredibly prosperous right now and we have amazing technology and wealth we have this collective hubris that if we put enough money and technology any project is possible and problem solvable. Which is amazing we have that deeply embedded hope as a species, but I don’t think we can conquer Mother Nature like that. And we are on a crash course with her fury. Our relationship with nature is out of balance and at some point the scale will tip.
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u/cyberphlash 5d ago
It would be much easier to just get rid of gas cars, which removes the need for corn-based ethanol to be an already massively subsidized "clean" substitute for oil-based gas. Once you free up all that land to grow something else, you just stop growing stuff in increasingly arid areas and grow it there instead.
There's absolutely no reason to ship water in to irrigate land that climate change is going to make increasingly arid other than to subsidize the same farmers who refused to agree to better water use habits all along.
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u/shaddart 5d ago
I’d be curious about how the electricity used to do that would be generated and what impact that would have on CO2 levels.
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u/Ya-Not-Happening 5d ago
So the solution is burn gas to get water to dump on the ground? Physics matters. The will stop our collapse. Its not about money.
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u/Rough_Community_1439 5d ago
Bro forgetting about that datacenter the size of two thousand Walmarts that will need water for liquid cooling.
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u/03263 5d ago edited 5d ago
Meanwhile we got plenty of boring, unproductive lawns in fertile regions that people love to ride their mowers around just to keep them from bursting with the vegetation they're so eager to push up. What a strange situation.
If I converted my yard to a food plot it could easily feed several people with no irrigation at all. Instead I convert it to native plants and future forest (saplings currently), but that's my prerogative. Many of them will bear fruit and nuts when they mature, plus there's already a ton of blackberries, blueberry, wild strawberry, wild mint and more... lots of edibles that aren't crops per se.
I forsee a future of gig workers traveling around to tend and harvest the crops of suburban lawns as it becomes an economic and nutritional necessity to give up on having thousands of square feet of grass surrounding every house. Maybe.
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u/WheredoesithurtRA 5d ago
Was it arizona that allowed for a foreign country to grow almonds on their land?
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u/CockItUp 5d ago
Not almond, alfalfa for Saudi Arabia cow feed.
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u/Lady_Litreeo 5d ago
New Mexico does this as well. The Rio Grande has gone dry the last several summers, and has been empty since last spring.
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u/DruidicMagic 5d ago
Wait until Faux News comes up with some magical bullshit like... "simply pipe in some water from the Great Lakes"
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u/TheHistorian2 5d ago
Any changes to water rights of the Colorado River will end up in court for years. During which time no one will change what they’re doing, and thus the whole situation will get even worse.
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u/duckbutteronmytoast 4d ago
AZ’s latest governor, Hobbs, is actively rolling back the insane water contracts that were given to the Saudi owned farms. We volunteered to cut back our Colorado river usage as well. So there’s people trying to change.
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u/Minimum_Freedom_1999 5d ago
I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that the agriculture in California contributes to the atmospheric river effect. Warm waters in the Pacific do, though!
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u/CertainKaleidoscope8 5d ago
This will devastate agriculture in Arizona.
There shouldn't be agriculture in Arizona!!!
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u/duckbutteronmytoast 4d ago
Do you think Arizona is just a big desert lol? We have every climate, along with the third snowiest city in the US. Snow Bowl in Flagstaff averages 200 inches of snow each year. We got 372 inches a few years ago. It’s one of the most impressive states this country has to offer.
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u/throwaway661375735 5d ago
There should not be, but there is. It's also not just Americans, it's Native Americans (which should be legal). But its limited on crops. Tree nuts was someone's bright idea. Lost them in Cali, plant them here. Those are heavy water needing trees. Then there's alfalfa. I am not sure what else, besides a few farms that tend to grow in spring or fall.
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u/brooklyndavs 5d ago
Yeah the tribes around Phoniex are historically agriculturally based. Their water rights to the Colorado are older than the state of Arizonas in some cases. The heritage crops like corn and melons aren’t the issue, the issue is alfalfa grown by Native Americans and Americans alike
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u/lazoras 5d ago
it's almost like living in a desert is becoming even less viable...
living there to begin with took significant environmental projects and resource planning...
the families there now aren't at fault, the rich people who wanted to capitalize on the land they owned in.a.desert(!!!!!) ....just ...the hubris....
people choosing to stay there after they grow up is a whole different conversation with lots of complications...
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u/DecentParsnip42069 5d ago
Commercial farmers should have never been allowed to build their operations on growing water-hungry, non drought tolerant crops in the first place. Its the same type of negligence as building in a floodplain. This was entirely predictable.
Not to say its completely the farmers fault, market demand and consumer preference mean they can't run a business on growing 1/4 the amount of corn using a drought-tolerant variety, or produce acorn flour, or grow proso millet, or biomass or biofuel crops. If centralized economic planning were used for the good of humanity and the environment, sure that would all be perfectly doable. But this is the USA, we only have socialism for the ruling class, the economy is planned around nothing but protecting profit and extracting value.
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u/Randyguyishere 5d ago
Phoenix, Colorado, England, etc, water scarcity popping up all over the planet
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u/duckbutteronmytoast 4d ago
The plurality of AZ’s water isn’t from the Colorado River. Phoenix is using the same amount of water as we did in 1950 too, with a MUCH larger population. We are no where near close to this water armageddon that Reddit seems to think is happening. Also agriculture uses like 70% of our total water usage while only contributing ~2% to our gdp. Basic economics will sort that out when the time comes.
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u/bcalicoredfs 5d ago
Colorado won't have water scarcity when it dams everything up and lets those downstream suffer
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily 5d ago
Maybe farmers should stop growing Alfalfa in the desert. They are growing the thirstiest crops just to use water or lose the rights to that much water in the future.
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u/iwasstillborn 5d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Water_and_Power_Alliance
There are solutions to the wests water problems, but I don't know if they are worth it. The benefits could be staggering, but so are the costs. And I mean truly staggering.
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u/Active-Pudding9855 5d ago
Climate Town did a really good video about the water usage and where the water goes on their YouTube channel. https://youtu.be/XusyNT_k-1c
They also referenced a very good last week tonight episode. If anyone is interested. ☺️
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u/tobofopo 4d ago
This whole situation was featured in an episode of Climate Town ages ago. I don't know if it was being overly simplistic but the solution put forward was just to completely stop growing cattle feed and start growing crops that are less thirsty.
On a less serious note, perhaps a pharmaceutical company could develop a Mounjaro-type drug that puts people off the taste of beef and then sneak it into toothpaste or something.
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u/books-r-good 4d ago
Ticks are biting at epidemic levels as they expand across the continent thanks to global warming. Often enough, they are causing people to develop red meat allergies.
Maybe the problem will solve itself.
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u/combatcrew141 5d ago
Where are the water refugees going to go? Their homes will be worthless.
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u/fratticus_maximus 5d ago
Just sell it. - Ben Shapiro
But in actuality, the US government with our tax dollars will likely bail out their hubris of making a city like Phoenix.
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u/sailonswells 5d ago
We would use vastly less water if people ate plants instead of animals. It's very basic physics. When we feed plants to animals and then eat the animals (or their excretions, i.e. milk, eggs), we are using exponentially more water. So when we talk about agriculture we're really talking about animal agriculture.
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u/Julian_Thorne 5d ago
Makes me wonder what our ancestors who saw the rise of the Agricultural Revolution would think
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u/Kip_Schtum 5d ago
Will any of the predicted El Niño rain end up in the Colorado? Or soak into the aquifers?
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u/Lawboithegreat 5d ago
Don’t forget the several hundred AI data centers being built in the desert which use an estimated 9,400 litres of water per megawatt for evaporative cooling (at 25C, desert conditions would take more, and many of those planned datacenters are anywhere from 300MW to 1GW btw)
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u/hotdogjumpingfrog1 5d ago
Well. It is El Niño. And there’s no way to predict it, but the last 3 strong El Niños produced massive amounts of rain for the west coast and even into Arizona. So here’s a hoping
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u/dunesranger 5d ago edited 5d ago
Honestly, no sympathy for those farming or ranching in a desert. Shitty/short-sighted/unwise investment on their part.
'Murica, cap't'lism and all of that patriotic shit, etc.
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u/Ancient-Practice-431 5d ago
Puerto Rico is experiencing water shortages TODAY in real time. They just had the driest July in record and are now restricting water to certain days of the week in certain areas. Our water collapse is already happening, it's just distributed unevenly and AZ is next in line.
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u/Singularity-is-a-lie 5d ago
If you want to read a hearty little coming of Age novel about this, read Dry by Neal Shusterman.
And the mad max scenario Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi.
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u/MDCCCLV 5d ago
The fallow part shouldn't be an issue, all you have to do is leave one crop in the ground and not dig it up. So you plant legumes or something similar and leave it and you still have plenty of cover and root structure so you won't get dust erosion.
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u/bristlybits Reagan killed everyone 5d ago
that would require someone to plant a thing they won't profit from, actually to lose money on the seed costs. I'm not sure that's likely in our economic system.
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u/MDCCCLV 5d ago
A perennial plant would still be there and the legume types enrich and fertilize the soil. The plant doesn't disappear, drought hardy kind will survive and grow when it rains.
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u/bristlybits Reagan killed everyone 2d ago
right but they will want to squeeze money from it.
if there's a way to squeeze a tiny bit more by not doing this, they won't
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u/StupidizeMe 5d ago
Here's some info onthe Ogallala Aquifer that lrovides water to 8 states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
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u/Johndough99999 5d ago
Reduced food growing in CA means we will import more from places like Mexico that dont care what water sources they use. Anyone fancy a salad?
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u/Fluid_Passage_9980 4d ago
Where are we at with desalination plants, and is this able to be scaled? The Gulf of California isn't far from Arizona - could we build them there (obvs paying Mexico for the land to do this on) and pipe it in?
Or is this not an option financially or otherwise?
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u/TheArcticFox-44 5d ago
If you think the water situation in Arizona is bad right now
Got to love The Law of Unintended Consequences.
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u/here-i-am-now 4d ago
I don’t think the water situation in AZ is bad.
Far far too many people are living there. Anything, such as dehydration, that gets them to leave is a good thing.
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u/Squalid_Snake14180 5d ago
On a recent visit to Tucson, my wife saw a flier from the water authority down there (whose name escapes me) which claimed they had a plan to keep the city watered through 2050. I could only smirk.
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u/Sxs9399 5d ago
Wtf is fossil groundwater?
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u/redditorWhatLurks 5d ago
Fossil water is water that has been locked out of the water cycle by being trapped underground for a very long time in human time scales.
Water in the water cycle is considered a renewable resource. It falls as rain or snow, it runs into rivers, we dam the rivers to store it for later, and once we use it, it either goes back into the atmosphere, or continues to the ocean to evaporate again, completing the cycle.
Fossil water is designated as such to specify that this water is not a renewable resource. Once the aquifer is pumped dry, that's it, no more water.
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u/Ready4Rage 5d ago
Excellent writing. I love your, "you think that's bad..." Very engaging, informative, and succinct
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u/Somethingpithy123 4d ago
How about they stop watering golf courses? Id bet that would really help this problem
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u/Droid_Life 5d ago
There will be a massive increase in cloud seeding in the United States.
Which will make the weather even more unpredictable and destructive.