For those insisting cheap and plentiful water is a right, but hate the idea of a desalination plant in Orange County saying we don’t need it, a lesson in economics. What happens to the price of a resource as it becomes scarce while demand remains high?
Southern California is highly dependent on the Colorado River for water — for human consumption and agriculture. This week, the Federal Government warned of the first ever water usage cuts for the Colorado due to a shortage of water that 40 million people in the West depend upon. So we’re looking not only at a state cutback on water use but a federal one as well.
From the NPR piece:
Water levels at the largest reservoir on the Colorado River — Lake Mead — have fallen to record lows. Along its perimeter, a white “bathtub ring” of minerals outlines where the high water line once stood, underscoring the acute water challenges for a region facing a growing population and a drought that is being worsened by hotter, drier weather brought on by climate change.
States, cities, farmers and others have diversified their water sources over the years, helping soften the blow of the upcoming cuts. But federal officials said Monday’s declaration makes clear that conditions have intensified faster than scientists predicted in 2019, when some states in the Colorado River basin agreed to give up shares of water to maintain levels at Lake Mead.
Water stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell is divvied up through legal agreements among the seven Colorado River basin states, the federal government, Mexico and others. The agreements determine how much water each gets, when cuts are triggered and the order in which the parties have to sacrifice some of their supply.
Under a 2019 drought contingency plan, Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico agreed to give up shares of their water to maintain water levels at Lake Mead. The voluntary measures weren’t enough to prevent the shortage declaration.
Lake Mead supplies water to millions of people in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
Cuts for 2022 are triggered when predicted water levels fall below a certain threshold — 1,075 feet above sea level, or 40% capacity. Hydrologists predict that by January, the reservoir will drop to 1,066 feet.
Further rounds of cuts are triggered when projected levels sink to 1,050, 1,045 and 1,025 feet..
Eventually, some city and industrial water users could be affected.
Lake Powell’s levels also are falling, threatening the roughly 5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity generated each year at the Glen Canyon Dam.
Will conservation, pipelines that capture run off to the ocean, and new water storage save the day? Nope. CalMatters reports in spite of a 2014 groundwater law, wells in the central part of the state are drying up.
From that story, this:
During the height of the state’s last drought, thousands of Californians in the Central Valley ran out of water as their wells went dry. So much water was pumped from underground, mostly by growers, that the earth collapsed, sinking up to two feet per year in parts of the San Joaquin Valley.
Alarmed, the California Legislature in 2014 enacted a package of new laws that aimed to stop the over-pumping.
But seven years later, little has changed for Californians relying on drinking water wells: Depletion of their groundwater continues. Pumping is largely unrestricted, and there are few, if any, protections in place.
Now, after two dry years, reports of dry wells are worsening and spreading in many new areas, leaving more families like O’Brien’s with no drinking water. Despite the law, about 2,700 wells across the state are projected to go dry this year, and if the drought continues, 1,000 more next year.
Called the Sustainable Management Groundwater Act or SGMA, the laws gave local groundwater agencies in critically overdrafted basins 26 years — until 2040 — to achieve sustainability and stop impacts of overdraft from worsening.
Those managing less-depleted water supplies, like the ones underlying Glenn County, have until 2042.
But, somewhat predictably, this drought arrived much sooner than the laws’ safeguards: As a result, echoes of the last drought are now sputtering from people’s faucets and knocking through their empty pipes.
“It feels like we’re in a very similar place to where we were in the last drought,” said Darcy Bostic, who analyzed groundwater sustainability plans at the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. “Everyone talks about how it’s different, and how it will take time, but people are still going to lose access to drinking water. And we don’t really have a new plan for addressing that.”
Don’t like Poseidon? They right the licensing rights to HB. Find another company to buy the licensing rights from them and build a plant then, but economics says the cost of doing so will get passed on to the customers.
Our fresh water situation isn’t getting better anytime soon.