Water Wars
By 
I may be a westerner from west of the Cascades–the endlessly rainy corner of the region–but all of my family on both sides were from eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, and Idaho, so I always knew the dry side. Then I did my PhD at the University of New Mexico, which really teaches you about the importance of water. The Rio Grande ain’t exactly the Columbia. Now, I always tell my environmental history undergraduates that if they ever want to have work for a lifetime, go to law school in the West and specialize in water law.
Everyone has claims to water and none of the claims ever have anything to do with the actual available amount of water. Some of that is that the late 19th century, when these first laws were being created, was an especially wet time in the Southwest. But people thought it was normal because they didn’t know any better. The first quarter of the 21st century however is now an official megadrought, the worst in hundreds of years. But hey, at least Phoenix has a lot of golf courses, the Bellagio fountains rock on in Vegas, and farmers in southern New Mexico grow cotton and pecan and hay for dairy cows, none of which can only be grown there. It’s a shitshow.
There’s a good piece at the Prospect on the water wars of the West:
The 174-year-old feud over a stream has set the stage for a seven-state impasse over water allocations from the Colorado River Basin. The river system spans parts of seven states and northwest Mexico, running from the headwaters of the Colorado and Green Rivers in Colorado and Wyoming, respectively, through the Southwest into the Gulf of California. The states mete out water for about 40 million people through a mind-bending web of compacts, regulations, treaties, and other legal arrangements that dictate the basin’s flows for drinking, irrigation, hydropower, and recreation.
The problem is that there is not enough water in the Colorado to serve all extant users—and the amount of runoff is shrinking fast thanks to climate change. Who will have to cut back? A 2007 interim agreement between the states and 30 Native American tribes laid out new strategies to deal with accelerating periods of drought and the knock-on effects of reduced water flows. That agreement, along with a separate pact with Mexico, all expire later this year.
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Climate change has torched the antique logic of Western water rights. Even at the time, 16.4 million was far too optimistic, and the year 2000 ushered in a severe and ongoing drought, the worst in 1,200 years. The river owes its existence to melting snow, so this past winter’s record-setting lack of snowfall was catastrophic—particularly given that both Lakes Mead and Powell were already low, at about 33 percent and 23 percent full, respectively. The spring’s higher-than-average temperatures led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to warn that the West can expect worse. If runoff is low enough, the levels on Lake Powell could sink below the power intakes on Glen Canyon Dam as early as this summer.
Anne Castle, a former commissioner and chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission, says there’s a gap of about four million acre-feet between what the river supplies and what humans demand. She is a senior fellow at the University of Colorado Law School’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. “Because the effect of global warming is decreasing the amount of runoff in the entire Colorado River Basin, we just have less water to work with than we have had before, and that we’ve become accustomed to using,” she says.
The 2026 deadline seemed a long way off in 2007. The Bureau of Reclamation had been prodding the states to come up with a plan before the agency imposes one on them. But that hasn’t worked either.
The Upper Basin states argue that they use less water overall. (California is indeed the largest consumer, though Colorado is in second place.) Wyoming has come up with a voluntary pilot program that encourages landowners to use less water. Utah has a similar volunteer plan and pays farmers $390 per acre-foot to hold off on planting and irrigating new crops. These states have long resisted mandatory cuts, pointing out that Lower Basin states like Arizona continue to build water stressors like housing developments and data centers.
As I said, go get that water law degree.