The goals below are all intended to support the ultimate goal of determining whether Demand Management is feasible from Colorado’s perspective…
— from the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s “Demand Management Feasibility Investigation Step II Work Plan”, published on November 18, 2020.
The Colorado River District emails out a short newsletter on a regular basis, with links to certain types of water-related news articles. This past Monday, the newsletter included the following links:
- Broad coalitions bring new hope for water funding
- Colorado River Basin winter forecast signals dry times ahead
- More must be done to protect Colorado River from drought
- Silverthorne’s new stormwater fee to appear on April water bills
- Amid drying conditions, Colorado River basin states kick off negotiations on future policies
These types of water-related articles typically focus mainly on two main ideas — first, that Colorado and the rest of the American Southwest is suffering from, and will continue to suffer from, worsening drought conditions; and second, that large amounts of money will come into play as the various states struggle to deal with the resulting water shortage.
The key words, for reporters and water industry employees who wrote about water issues in 2020, were “drought” and “funding”.
We’ve already discussed the belief, among many climate scientists who’ve studied historic and prehistoric water patterns in the American Southwest, that the current drought is, at this point in time, no worse than other “droughts” that have occurred in the past. The 21st century problem appears more serious, however, because we now have 40 million people (or more) dependent upon the water flowing through the Colorado River Basin.
There’s no archaeological evidence that the American Southwest had ever before accommodated 40 million people. At least, there’s none that I’ve come across.
And — if we want to be really honest about the situation — we wouldn’t have had this problem if the US government hadn’t invested billion of taxpayer dollars into dozens of dams throughout the Colorado River Basin, and thousands of miles of canals and pipelines, and thousands of miles of electrical power lines from dams that were constructed to produce hydroelectricity. Without federal money — if we want to be really honest about it — the cities of Phoenix and Albuquerque, as they are currently populated, would never have existed.
If the American Southwest had developed in a sustainable manner… maybe the towns would all have looked more like Pagosa Springs.
Meanwhile, the agricultural wonderlands of the Southwest, such as the Imperial Valley in California, have been massively profitable — so long as vast quantities of irrigation water could be delivered essentially free of charge, underwritten by federal and state water projects.
For example, each time I pour almond milk over my breakfast cereal, I’m enjoying an agricultural product — almonds — that has been heavily subsidized with free water.
In order to keep those almond trees growing in California, during “drought” conditions, it appears that I might be asked (or required) to help fund a new program in Colorado called “Demand Management”.
Last month, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published a somewhat vague but official-sounding 12-page summary of the state’s intentions, regarding the two parts of “Demand Management”. (You can download that statement here.) The first part of the plan involves a commitment by Colorado water experts to determine a method for paying farmers and ranchers in western Colorado to fallow their land — occasionally, or permanently — so that the water the farmers and ranchers would have used can flow down the Colorado River to Lake Powell. The second part of the scheme is obtaining promises from the federal Bureau of Reclamation that the “extra water” delivered into Lake Powell — up to 500,000 acre-feet of water — will remain permanently in the reservoir, until such time as Colorado decides to release it to meet the state’s “1922 Colorado River Compact” obligations.
As I understand American history, the US government has never been an organization that keeps its promises. But we can always hope.
But this whole idea seems more than slightly wacky, seen from my (uninformed?) perspective.
Let’s say, for example, that Colorado’s state government determined that the excessive operation of automobiles was harming the planet, and harming Colorado in particular. (We are pretty sure this is, in fact, the case.) So they hire a bunch of automobile experts to design a plan, whereby they will pay automobile owners a substantial sum of money if they are willing to ride the bus to work. (The people who own the most-polluting vehicles, such as pickup trucks and SUVs, would of course be receive a largest payments.)
Well, now, we have a couple of questions that pop right up… one being, where does the money (“the funding”) come from?
And secondly — is this really the best way to reduce the use of private vehicles?
And thirdly — what about the people who were already riding the bus to work?
These are questions similar to the ones that Colorado voters and taxpayers might want to be thinking about, regarding the state government’s “Demand Management” proposal, as we move into 2021 and beyond.
If we are going to pay people to stop using (and using up) so much water… that is, if we’re going to pay the agricultural industry, the floks who use 85% of the water diverted from the Colorado River… to leave water in the river… the folks who pay nothing for the use of that water in the first place, other than the cost of maintaining their ditches and pipelines…
…where will the money come from?
Who is going to measure the amount of water that these agricultural users did not use… and how, exactly, would you measure such a thing? (And how would you enforce the new rules?)
What about the people who were already conserving water?
Can we trust the federal government to abide by their promises? And can we trust California and Nevada and Arizona to stop draining Lake Mead and Lake Powell?
Interesting questions.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.