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Severe drought and mandatory water cuts are pitting communities against each other in Arizona:
As the climate crisis intensifies, battle lines are beginning to form over water. In Arizona -- amid a decades-long megadrought -- some communities are facing the very real possibility of losing access to the precious water that remains.
Outside the city limits of Scottsdale, where the asphalt ends and the dirt road begins, is the Rio Verde Foothills community. Hundreds of homes here get water trucked in from Scottsdale, but those deliveries will end on January 1, 2023.
That's because last summer, for the first time ever, drought conditions forced the federal government to declare a tier 1 water shortage in the Colorado River, reducing how much Arizona can use.
[...] "We are what I call the 'sacrificial lamb' for the bigger areas," Irwin told CNN. "In my opinion, look somewhere else -- we need to be able to sustain ourselves."
The scarcity of water in the state is pitting small towns against fast-growing metropolitan communities.
[...] Arizona's population growth and extreme drought have increased demand for water in limited supply. Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow with the Kyl Center for Water Policy in Arizona, says water scarcity in the state has resulted in the "haves" and the "have nots," and likened the coming water battles to the days of the Wild West. "Once you have your water rights, you defend it," Ferris said. "That's the way it works."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 01 2022, @08:34AM (1 child)
Conveniently, the Economist just published an article on desalination [economist.com]. Although there is not really anything new in it.
The Economist article prices desalination at $2100 per acre-foot, which works out to less than a penny per gallon. This is not free, but it's a fraction of the retail price of water for urban consumption. In terms of price, we could, in principle, have everyone drink desalinated water and save all the river water for farming, and not really notice it.
But desalination isn't just expensive, it consumes a lot of energy. When everything runs on fusion or solar power, that won't matter, but right now it does. Conservation is still better than desalination. But desalination is better than draining aquifers.
Environmentalists, of course, object to taking salt out of the ocean, then dumping the exact same salt back into the ocean. It's contaminated, after all. Not with any chemical or toxin, but with the cursed bad juju of having contributed to civilization and quality of life, instead of the self-flagellation we should all be doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03 2022, @02:25AM
So what? You're supposed to built a small nuke right next door. Instead of making excuses, let's just build the damn things. Voluntary conservation is fine, rationing is totally bogus, like telling the poor to eat bugs so the rich can enjoy their steaks
And urban consumption isn't even close to what big agriculture consumes, the farmers need desalination more than anybody