A drying Rio Grande won't fix itself

Author photo, 2019: The Rio Grande on the border at Boquillas in Big Bend National Park, near the area of Mexico reported in the story below.

The Observer reports from south of the border on the drying up of Mexico's Conchas River. It's a good story; the river is Mexico's main contributor to the Rio Grande and is the heart of a 1944 treaty. Related to that, local Chihuahua unrest against Mexico's federal government started in 2020. But now, the drought is so bad that many area farmers are beyond protest. And, as the story notes, many of them have gone to El Norte.

Trying to fix border water allocations, primarily here but also in the Southwest on the Colorado, is going to get ever more problematic.

Per the above? 

Strangeabbott likes to thing he's part of the federal government when Washington makes a decision under international law over which he has no power, but that he doesn't like. The sensical amendment to the 1944 US-Mexico water treaty that governs the Rio Grande is the latest. Let's add in, which the Trib doesn't, that then-Mexican President Lopez Obrador, beyond the drought hitting both sides of the river, had cited Strange's floating border barriers as part of why water was being held up. Big John Cornyn and Havana Ted Cruz, per the story, also didn't talk about that.

And, as I noted not quite a year ago, to which the Observer refers, part of this is Texas' fault. Tributaries on the north side of the Rio Grande, and the reservoirs they fill on the lower stretches of the river, are running lower and lower on water.

Per what happened on the Guadalupe last weekend, this too is part of climate change and neither tots and pears nor pouts and posturings will change that. 

Finally? Since the dying Rio Grande starts its death further west than Texas, even, the news that the Southwest's drought will likely continue for the rest of the century means things will only get worse.