Contra High Country News, yes, banning alfalfa IS the answer

Specifically, contra High Country News' Jonathan Thompson and specifically, banning alfalfa from being irrigated off the Colorado River and tributaries.

Two years ago, HCN's editor at large Thompson claimed, straight up: 

So, banning alfalfa is not the answer.

And, I fired back at him.

Last year, a year later, the NYT of all people weighed in with a story on the Colorado's woes, that noted that livestock feed off all types uses a bit over half of total Colorado River basin usage.

And now, the LA Times, with more regional skin in the game than New York has, drops the hammer even harder. Alfalfa and other hay by itself — no corn, no milo, no other feedstocks — uses one-third the total water usage in the Colorado River basin.

And, more specific to the HCN plaint by Johnny Peace, who was looking at the San Juan River drainage in southwest Colorado? This:

In the upper basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — cattle-feed crops consumed 90% of all water used by irrigated agriculture on average.

Nails it.

Sadly, some of the researchers, like Brian Richter, while they get the math right:

“We need to get very serious about shifting to a different mixture of crops, and we need to reduce the overall footprint, the acreage of land, that is being used for farmland,” Richter said.

Miss the political science. This:

Richter said that as a scientist, he is reluctant to tell people what to eat, and thinks everyone should “act on their conscience.”

Is just wrong. The personally:

“Personally, once I started this research, I gave up beef consumption altogether,” Richter said.

Is nice. (I'm at near-zero on beef, and only modest-moderate amounts of pork.)

But, the other part? Wrong.

We use scientific information all the time to tell people not to do stuff. We use it, in another issue related to climate change, for private insurers to jack rates as hurricane and wildfire dangers increase.

Richter does get this right:

As the region’s water managers continue negotiating long-term approaches for reducing water use, Richter said it will be vital to create a fund with federal and state support to help farmers change crops or retire some cropland.

In other words, putting alfalfa on a glide path to extinction in the Colorado River drainage.

But, we should only do that in combo with other things, like the SEC requiring the ag sector overall to account for carbon emissions.

AND, in terms of the matter at hand? Contra that neoliberal nutter John Fleck, IMO, the new, post-2026 Colorado River Compact needs to get rid of the "Upper Basin" / "Lower Basin" division. Fleck, like Thompson, is also an alfalfa lover, per that second link.

To put it another way? Thompson needs to read Lyle Lewis' "Racing to Extinction." Amazon reviews here.

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And, it's on the other side of the Rockies, on the High Plains, but, Thompson, there's a replacement that's gaining popularity. Grow millet.

Colorado River sound and fury, symbolizing nothing, in Las Vegas

Plenty of talk from state-level and lower-level water folks 10 days ago, from all seven member states of the Colorado River Compact, in Las Vegas, but no action.

Upper Basin states still want Lower Basin states to take more of a water haircut. Lower Basin states, like wingnut Aridzona, continue flooding land for alfalfa — for Chinese and Arab owned dairying, among other things, but Aridzona by god will give Xi Jinping himself a fucking hug rather than cut one acre-foot of water, especially if the Californicators in California stand to benefit.

And BuRec? Plenty of hand-wringing:

“I can feel the anxiety and the uncertainty in this room and in the basin,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.

But not much else.

This Pro Publica piece makes that clear. That starts with Touton, though "feeling the pain," refusing to comment further about it.

Will she actually do anything by Jan. 31? Or will it be another head fake, like last summer?

She won't do anything because, per her Wiki, she's a political hack. (Congresscritter staffer for years, starting with Harry Reid. Nuff ced.)

And, per the first link, she shot herself in the foot with last summer's head fake:

Some state officials here blame the Biden administration. When it became clear this summer that the federal government wasn’t ready to impose unilateral cuts, the urgency for a deal evaporated, they said.

So, in Vegas, nobody's showing their hole card.

And, much of the low-hanging fruit's already been harvested. As a reader told High Country News editor Jonathan Thompson on his Substack:

Finally, it is true that we in Las Vegas were able to reduce water use while almost doubling our population over 20 years. However, this involved a one-time rebuilding of the entire valley’s wash system to capture and recycle all the water we used to let runoff. Now that it is done, we can’t repeat this feat for the next population increase. It is easy to cut back the first time (when starting with a wasteful system), but is progressively harder as system develops more efficiency 

Sascha Horowitz Las Vegas, Nevada

Very true.

That said, as I've noted before, Thompson himself is as much problem as solution.

Finally, as the Post story notes, there WILL BE a potential "nature bats last" fix for the Lower Basin.

In recent years, the worry of "dead pool" has been more at Lake Powell. Well, if it hits dead pool, and in an unmanaged way, hoe long before Mead hits dead pool?

And, all of this shows how laughable New Mexico neolib environmental journalist John Fleck is.

#ClimateChange and tree health — a vicious circle

Turns out that trees that fight the effects of drought rather than going with the flow may come out ahead in the immediacy but struggle in the next few years after that.

The effect is most noticeable in already arid climates. We're looking at you, Colorado Plateau and Desert Southwest:

Scientific models of the global carbon cycle –  which are important for projecting climate change – don't account for this slow-down in growth. "The models assume there is no lag, so as soon as climate is better, so is growth," says Nate McDowell, who researches the physiology of tree death at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. That means that models may overestimate the ability of ecosystems to store carbon – and underestimate the severity of future climate change. 

If droughts do become more frequent and severe, (forest ecologist Bill Andregg) says, as climate models predict, "this suggests that more forests are going to spend more and more of their time recovering, and become less good at taking up carbon."Anderegg estimates that in Southwestern forests, the lag could amount to a 3 percent reduction in their carbon storage over a century. That may not sound like much, but when it comes to squirreling away the emissions we stubbornly keep spewing, we need all the help we can get. 

 And, of course, we know that the Southwest is headed for a period of long-term drought, as well as global warming. Given that aspens "fight" drought a lot, by opening their stoma, and that they're less resistant to the effects of doing this than are juniper, 40 years from now, a lot of Rocky Mountain hillsides are doing to be aspen-denuded.

And, otherwise, Andregg is right. It's working at the margins, but 3 percent is 3 percent.

Tea Party schadenfreude, dried out and warmed up

Arizona is of course a hotbed of illegal (and general) immigrant stereotyping, along with being near the top in birtherism, and home to one of our biggest political hypocrites, John McCain. Well Schmuck Talk Express and others better find a way to get one-third more water to their area. Ditto for Orange County denialists, as California is already the most "overdrawn" state by absolute water numbers as well as percentages.

The thumbnail is here.

All the details on how climate change will affect the Southwest are here (PDF).

Nothing short of cutting ag use by nearly 50 percent AND hiking prices by that much to push non-ag conservation will really help.

Going by value, the ag answer is simple - eliminate hay growing, at least the irrigated variety. Change rice to winter wheat followed by rapid-grow summer corn. Cut back on beans, which do OK as a dryland crop anyway.

The bottom-line question about water is not whether adaptation is difficult or expensive, compared to doing nothing. Rather, it should be compared to buying several trillion dollars worth of water over the next century; adaptation is a bargain that the region cannot afford to ignore. The implication for climate policy is similar: although doing something about greenhouse gas emissions is expensive, doing nothing would cost even more. Among the benefits of global emission reduction is a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars in the future cost of water, or the avoidance of water scarcity, in the five states of the Southwest.

Part of my solution?

Let's not try to "repair" Nevada's casino-based economy. If Federal job training includes moving people out of that state, with the nation's highest per-capita residential use, do it!

Second, find a way to undercut economic development corporations that don't adequately price water as part of their recruiting pitch.

That said, the authors wrote their study while ignoring the Colorado River Compact, and admit they did that as a simplifying measure. In reality, the "project" is even more difficult than they paint.

'New normal' on Colorado Plateau starts having results

As most environmentalists know, the "drought" in the Colorado River watershed is really closer to the basin's long-term normal. Now, the lack of water in the overappropriated, overdammed river is starting to have fallout.

Boulder City, Nev.,and other smaller communities south of Vegas are finding hydropower from Hoover Dam is harder to come by. At the same time, they're finding that their current supplemental supplier is too expensive.

Of course, the real story is the explosive growth of Boulder City, Laughlin and other cities that are in the middle of a freaking desert! The city's use of dam power has dropped from 80 percent to 50 percent in the last 15 years.

And so, you white folks retirees slumming at small-town casino cities are getting hoist by your own capitalist petard.

Once again, I quote Ed Abbey: "The desert always wins."

Retire in Mississippi, where there's water, and hit one of the oceanfront floating casinos if you have to. (And, get more schadenfreude from more Class 4-5 hurricanes, maybe.)