They should start to ban water usage to grow Alfalfa. It consumes so much water and is very inefficient.
amanaplanacanal · 3d ago
That would likely constitute a taking under the fifth amendment, and they would have to pay the farmers a fair market value.
But yes, they should probably do that.
iamthepieman · 3d ago
The worst part is that a lot of the alfalfa and other feedstock crops are shipped out of the country.
gtani · 3d ago
This is a complex set of constraints, and people in Arizona, Nevada and Colorado etc have different perspectives on this. In my mind Lakes Powell/ Mead running low is somehow congruent to the /ZB Treasury futures contract (30 year) running lower, somehow there's a common economic invariant lurking in there.
The somewhat brighter bullet points: Northern California reservoirs are doing prety well, and the Bureau of Reclamatn can again kick the can by draining Flaming Gorge but i think this only works every few years:
Climate Town did a great video breaking down where a lot of this ends up, worth the watch if you want some more detailed background on the agreements in place that are leading to this happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XusyNT_k-1c
Tldr: "the region lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003, roughly the same volume as the total capacity of Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoir — and that the decline accelerated rapidly over the past decade. These groundwater losses accounted for more than twice the amount taken out of reservoirs in the region during that time."
But yes, they should probably do that.
The somewhat brighter bullet points: Northern California reservoirs are doing prety well, and the Bureau of Reclamatn can again kick the can by draining Flaming Gorge but i think this only works every few years:
https://graphs.water-data.com/flaminggorge/
https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/RescondMain
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weekly watch, showing, surprisingly, nontrivial drought in Florida but drought did visibly abate in Nebraska: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx
Tldr: "the region lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003, roughly the same volume as the total capacity of Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoir — and that the decline accelerated rapidly over the past decade. These groundwater losses accounted for more than twice the amount taken out of reservoirs in the region during that time."