[HN Gopher] Soon, life for 40M people who depend on the Colorado... ___________________________________________________________________ Soon, life for 40M people who depend on the Colorado River will change Author : orionion Score : 36 points Date : 2022-07-22 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.denverpost.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.denverpost.com) | orionion wrote: | "We thought we could engineer nature... huge mistake," the | general manager of the Colorado River District says | Aarostotle wrote: | What a pessimistic view from the person managing the River | District. | | How many people would the river basin have supported without | damming and irrigation? Far fewer than 40M. In other words, the | engineers clearly engineered nature and made it much more | hospitable to human life in the arid West. | | Sounds like they might have overshot and can't meet tomorrow's | demand, but even so, the status quo is certainly far superior | to an un-engineered Colorado River Basin. | voz_ wrote: | > but even so, the status quo is certainly far superior to an | un-engineered Colorado River Basin. | | Making an uninhabitable area, habitable, at the cost of a | total destruction of natural resources does not seem like its | "far superior". | Aarostotle wrote: | That depends on your standard of value. | | Do you justify things in terms of human life? Conversely, | is your standard that nature should be left untouched? | | As for me, I would say that flooding the valleys that are | now Lake Mead and Lake Powell, enabling tens of millions of | people to live, is worth far more than whichever critters | and plants were displaced. | | Besides, the issue here is not "total destruction" it is | over-allocation. We have not destroyed the Colorado River. | Rather, it seems like we just have too much demand for its | supply. Did I misread that? | icegreentea2 wrote: | I would love to know the quote's original context. | | I think that the manager was speaking specifically about the | Central Arizona Project, in the context that the negative | impact of the project was already predicted. | hinkley wrote: | But we can engineer nature. Beavers did it for tens of | thousands of years before we showed up. | | There are groups experimenting with reestablishing beavers on | tributaries of the Columbia river, with positive results. We | really need to be doing these on the upper reaches of the | Colorado. | stirbot wrote: | you can build the largest reservoir in the world, but if | water consumption and evaporation exceed precipitation in the | watershed you're on borrowed time. | orionion wrote: | How much water does generating electric power waste? Or does | the system suck everything dry? | Denvercoder9 wrote: | Power generation doesn't generally waste water, it just | extracts the potential energy from discharges that would've | happened anyway. | majormajor wrote: | Seems like the problem is more "we thought we could do some | stuff and then stop" while meanwhile adding a ton of population | AND fucking with the atmosphere. | | We're gonna have to do a lot more engineering of SOME sort | soon. | jacquesm wrote: | That's interesting. Here in NL that is also pretty much the | attitude, and it so far seems to be working out reasonably well | except that we get the occasional surprise. The latest large | infrastructure project ("ruimte voor de rivier") is an | unqualified success and has seen many other countries following | the example. | | I think one big difference is that it all happens on a much | smaller scale in a much more densely populated country. What | happens 'upstream' outside of the borders of NL could well have | massive effect. | Denvercoder9 wrote: | I wouldn't really consider "Ruimte voor de rivier" to be | engineering nature in the way that's discussed in the | article. Most of the projects were about removing human-made | constraints on the rivers and giving it more land to flow | freely. | jacquesm wrote: | That's literally what it means. "Space for the river". In | the past NL tried to contain the rivers in smaller basins | so there would be more land to build on, but this backfires | when there is a lot of water at once (such as two years | ago). It's engineering nature but this time in favor of | nature, rather than in favor of the humans occupying the | borders next to the rivers, which falls under | 'watermanagement', which includes controlling the flow and | the level of water throughout the country. | Denvercoder9 wrote: | Ah yeah, you're right, I do agree; I misread which | comment your original comment was a reply too. | WkndTriathlete wrote: | Well, to be perfectly honest, well-engineered projects manage | rivers in the US as well - e.g. the system of locks and dams | all along the Mississippi courtesy of the US Army Corps of | Engineers. | | The two big problems with the management of the Colorado | River water are big disincentives not to lose legal water | rights, resulting in farmers growing water-hungry crops in | the desert just to preserve those rights; and water | allocations that were larger than even optimistic Colorado | River flow rates during a very wet season in the 1930s. In | order to preserve the river basin and reservoirs, both of | those issues have to be addressed, concurrently, and there | are a lot of stakeholders that are going to be very angry | about whatever solution is proposed to them (or imposed on | them very soon, out of necessity, to keep the lights on.) | jacquesm wrote: | Well, they might want to have their cake and eat it and | find themselves without cake at all. That's mostly a matter | of time at this point and irrigation for crops is secondary | to drinking water. | GauntletWizard wrote: | If by "Smaller Scale" you mean "17% of total land area"... | jacquesm wrote: | No, I mean that NL is simply much smaller than the US. | [deleted] | rustybelt wrote: | I've watched a number of friends, family, and acquaintances move | out to Colorado over the past decade. Several of them even | proclaimed that our home region, the upper midwest, was dying on | their way out. I really try to avoid indulging in schadenfreude, | but it's tough sometimes. | goo wrote: | Colorado's where the river's headwaters are: this is probably | an even bigger deal for those in Utah, Arizona, Las Vegas, and | Southeastern California. | cmurf wrote: | That is somewhat true, but also in Colorado there's a | plethora of westslope vs front range issues. | xyzwave wrote: | Don't forget Mexico who's allocated 1.5 million acre-feet per | year (59 cubic metres per second) by the Colorado River | Compact [1]. | | Which I believe was drafted during the wettest decade in the | Southwest's history. | | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact | hinkley wrote: | So Colorado, Utah and Wyoming - the states with the upper | tributaries - were drawing water out at a much lower rate than | they were entitled to by treaty, until about 2000, at which point | the wheels started to come off. | czbond wrote: | I read it as the opposite: "lower basin"... CA, NV, AZ | MarcScott wrote: | John Oliver did a nice piece on this recently. Best clip I could | find - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YykXkG2Mjz8 | gardenfelder wrote: | https://archive.ph/1LLnC | czbond wrote: | Thank you - I had to use | | cache:<url> in Chrome to read it, and wish I had seen your link | first. | qaz_plm wrote: | TIL! Always did a search and use the cached option from the | SERP. Thank you! | oxfeed65261 wrote: | You can simply type "https://archive.ph/" followed by a URL, | like https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/21/colorado-river- | drought..., and archives of the page will be shown: | | https://archive.ph/https://www.denverpost.com/2022/07/21/col. | .. | | I have https://archive.ph/ as autotext on my mobile device | for convenience. | slotrans wrote: | Relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water- | you-d... | czbond wrote: | Interesting, thanks for sharing. | djenendik wrote: | Low confidence and presumably indistinguishable from noise. | czbond wrote: | I am thinking of placing a water re-use system (where essentially | I can filter my own use water, to reduce use by ~75%) and | convince my gardening wife to xeriscape. | | Question for more broad group: Will politicians end up moving | agriculture development elsewhere to preserve the water? Will | they build a de-salination pipeline from the rising ocean to the | river? Strategist with opinions? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-22 23:01 UTC)