The engineers who built the dams that created Lake Mead and Lake Powell never fathomed those reservoirs would ever be nearly empty. Step 2: Build Distributed Green & Grey Infrastructure, Not More Big Dams Regardless of their novelty, climate adjustments to annual deliveries could bring the water management of the Colorado River into the 21st century and spread out the shared pain in a much more sensible way.
If we wanted to get really fancy about it, we could scale each year's proactive cut to a 5-10 year running average of previous annual water deliveries to Lake Powell. In this way proactive disaster readiness measures lead to cuts in supply that are more at scale with water needs of users in the system. These payments (or “use reductions”) could be distributed in proportion to rights. What is the alternative to reactionary disaster management? I think that the “shared pain” of a single year 2-4 MAF reduction issued as proportional cuts to all users right at the buzzer could be avoided if issued proactively as annual advance payments. We have two enormous lakes that have been draining slowly for 10 years, both are now nearly empty, and the Tier 1 water shortage was only declared and implemented (as cuts to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico) in January of 2022. If we set the priority issue aside for a minute, and take a look at the lakes, and the way the current law of the river responds to drought there is room for improvement. Morgan Snyder of the Walton Family Foundation once told me of the Colorado: “We have to find a way to share the pain.” The Biden plan avoids reductions based on seniority, which would cause disproportionate pain to junior water rights users and force a conversation reprising the Marc Reisner book “Cadillac Desert” about water for cities versus water for farms.īut then we need to move quickly from the artificial equity of the Biden plan to an allocation scheme that is truly climate-smart.
I’m of the mind that the equal distribution scenario proposed by the Biden administration is a good place to start.
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