SETH W. JAMES

Colorado River Crisis: Agreement Reached

June 7, 2023

By Seth W. James

On May 22, 2023, Arizona, Nevada, and California reached an agreement with the Interior Department to voluntarily reduce the amount of water that they take from the Colorado River.  The agreement comes after years of drought and refusal to cut water usage, even as the river continued to dwindle.  As the New York Times reports, “The agreement, announced Monday, calls for the federal government to pay about $1.2 billion to irrigation districts, cities and Native American tribes in the three states if they temporarily use less water.”  The ominous word in the Times’ reporting is, temporarily.  The reduction amounts to 2.3 million acre-feet of water, initially, to come from the largest users; an additional 700,000 acre-feet in reductions, however, needs to be identified by the states or the Interior Department has threatened to simply withhold the water, a move that would certainly end up in the courts.

The agreement may preserve water levels in Lakes Mead and Powel, in the short-term, avoiding a dead-pool situation, which would prevent the two reservoirs from generating power for millions of people and delivering water for drinking, irrigation, and industrial uses: what the agreement does not do, however, is address the underlying causes of the drought or the unavoidable need for more cuts as climate change worsens.  Today’s drought will look like a deluge, tomorrow.  The current deal only extends until 2026, which may be convenient for politicians, as it is after the next Presidential election, but it only puts off the technological and social development needed to permanently deal with the realities of climate change.

While I am pleased that some action was taken to preserve the two reservoirs, the victory is pyrrhic, a delaying tactic in a struggle that will brook no delay.  The money provided to those financially impacted by the water-usage reduction may protect their businesses, but it does not solve the problem: if that money—and, realistically, a lot more of it—had been devoted to desalinization development, water-usage reduction technology, and relocation of agriculture, then 2026 would not loom on the horizon, a battle to be refought.  At the end of the day, without a permanent solution, without action to end climate change, the disaster thought to have been avoided today will nevertheless fall tomorrow.