[HN Gopher] Soon, life for 40M people who depend on the Colorado...
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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?
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(page generated 2022-07-22 23:01 UTC)