The future of the Colorado River stares the Southwest in the face

The recent winter storm helped somewhat, but the Colorado Plateau and Western Slope are dry enough this year that, per High Country News, the Upper Colorado River Basin (Upper, not Lower) is having to implement a drought contingency plan.

The biggie is that this is part of a larger ticking time bomb.

The Colorado River Compact, which overallocated the river, and which, due to the formulation of the U.S. Senate and other things, wrongly divided the seven U.S. states into Upper and Lower basins, expires in five years.

HCN's Nick Bowlin says it will be renegotiated in "patchwork" fashion over that time. But, will it? Rather, might we not have attempted renegotations that fail?

He notes that, per that Upper basin contingency plan, BuRec has said that Lake Powell could hit a trigger point in 2022 similar to the one that Mead hit in 2019.

It's no wonder that, per another link in the story, hedge fund types and other vulture capitalists salivate over privatized Colorado River water. Some have even been, often surreptitiously, buying up water rights where they can. That said, the Times notes that these vultures have allies, starting with Colorado's former chief water allocation official, James Eklund. A real neoliberal attorney grifter, he also worked as private council to then Gov.-John Hickenlooper, known here as Chicken Licker and worse. After leaving his state job in 2017, Eklund, per this piece, first went to work for white-shoe Squire Patton Boggs before forming his own law firm.

That Times story moves forward by reminding us of the Owens River and Chinatown. Prescient indeed. It then moves to Aussie water markets, which some in the US would like to emulate. Critics note the end result is financiers cheering for more drought.

The problem is further exacerbated in New Mexico by transfers (not large, but still) from the Colorado to the Rio Grande, which is currently even more stressed out.

Even if a new deal can be successfully negotiated, problems loom. Some of them are discussed by an excellent book.

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West by James Lawrence Powell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just how dry can the Colorado River system get?

I've often thought of the tragedy of Marc Reisner dying fairly young. I have no doubt he would have written a third edition of Cadillac Desert, had he lived long enough to have the hard science on global warming issues that we're getting today.

Well, short of that, we have James Powell, no relative of John Wesley Powell, writing "Dead Pool," a worthy successor to both that and Donald Worster's "Rivers of Empire."

That said, Powell goes beyond those two books in some ways.

First, he not only has the global warming science that Reisner didn't, he works with this issue more than Worster.

He also addresses development issues and water-grubbing in the modern West a bit more directly than they did. And, he addresses the future of what a "dead pool" on either Lake Powell or Lake Mead will mean for city water, irrigation water, and hydropower in the Southwest.

While Powell doesn't tell Las Vegas or Phoenix they should prepare for Armageddon, he pretty much details that's what's facing Phoenix ... an increasingly polluted smog, with Colorado River run-off chemicals in addition to hydrocarbons, nighttime temperatures sometimes staying in triple digits, and no more cheap electricity.

Someone like Ed Abbey, or an Ed Abbey fan, would love this book.

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