Three Drop Thursday: Lurching towards the cliff edge
Friends of Confluence West -
In this week’s Three Drop Thursday:
Sticking points (still)
Meanwhile in the CRB - saber-rattling
Fleck brings it home with the ‘F’ bomb
We’re again looking at the Colorado River Basin. If you don’t know much about/don’t care about this Basin – you should. Look at the Rio Grande Basin, the Nile (thanks Ethiopia), the Mekong (thanks China), and the Danube – all river basins on the brink of ecological collapse (Which equals, along with other things, not much water for people or growing crops.)
We have the science, institutions, governance structures, and laws, and we currently have a decent amount of federal funds compared to many other countries. Given these assets, couldn’t we manage our Basin sustainably?
Can the Colorado River Basin leadership show others that win-win negotiations work? Otherwise, the American West and northern Mexico are headed for a hard fall.
The annual hoopla Colorado River Basin leaders conference wraps up tomorrow. Alex Hager, in his pre-conference piece Colorado River states hold an uncomfortable reunion in Las Vegas, compares this conference to a gathering of fractious, cranky kids. With no parent in the room.
Moving over to a cheerier note (tis’ the season), we would greatly appreciate your tax-deductible contribution! Check out what we’re up to.
In case you missed our last Three Drops, “Bingo Cards and Conundrums,” you can read about other fascinating to totally frustrating issues in the West.
For the West,
Kimery
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Sticking points (still!)
Allen Best’s recent excellent piece, “Colorado River Compact curtailment,” provides insights into the Upper Basin’s ongoing finger-pointing at the Lower Basin: “It’s all your problem!”
As many CRB mavens have pointed out, the Upper Basin’s position is a negotiating stance. Still, the question remains – what happens when all hell breaks loose (i.e., another maga-drought), and the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico) is caught flat-footed without a curtailment plan?
We’d probably have a few months’ notice of a mega-drought – one that could easily last for a decade or decades.
As the senior staff with The Nature Conservancy and lead for the CRB, Taylor Hawes points out: “The first rule you learn in working with water is that users want certainty. We do planning in every aspect of our lives, and planning is typically considered smart. It need not be scary. We have all learned to plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
The West Slope, the Front Range municipalities, and a lot of Colorado ag have junior rights. (Quick Quiz: What CRB entity is senior, with the single largest allocation?)
Meanwhile, in the Lower Basin … saber-rattling
Last month, Arizona and California shot a ‘water bottle’ across the Basin. Shannon Mullane’s insightful piece in the Colorado Sun, “Arizona, California push study of century-old policy that’d force cuts on the upper Colorado River states,” presents a fascinating new facet to the Basin negotiations.
These two Lower Basin states point out that, under the rules of the 1922 Colorado River, the Upper Basin states could be forced via a “compact call” to cut about twice as much water compared to the basin-wide cutbacks proposed by California, Arizona, and Nevada last March.
These Lower Basin states want Reclamation to include in the current Draft EIS study an analysis of the impacts of a compact call.
This century-old legal concept raises the prospect of forced water cuts in the Upper Basin states if inter-basin water-sharing obligations aren’t met. The details of how a compact call would work are unclear — it has never been enforced since it was first introduced in the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
For a mailed fist wrapped in political language, JB Hamby (the lead negotiator for California) points out that the risk of a compact call is far from hypothetical and has long been the elephant in the room. (Climate change, anyone?)
Fleck brings it home with the “F” bomb
In a recent Inkstain post, John Fleck nicely sums up the current CRB evolving muddled disarray:
“I’ve been holed up for the last six weeks in a third-floor garret (metaphor alert) doing the final revisions on the book, which is a full brain activity.
“I haven’t been paying much attention to the world around me, and I came down to the corner bodega (metaphor) to get some bread and cheese and ask the newsboy what’s been happening. He pointed me to Tony Davis’s story from the Tucson Star last week.*
“What the actual fuck, y’all? Is this the best you can do?
“The network is failing. Yeah, I’m talking to you. You are failing us. There are 40 million of us, and we have to figure out how to share this river.
"I am so profoundly disappointed in Colorado River Basin leadership right now.
“Will I lose blog readership if I say “fuck” again?”
“F” bombs work for me.
(take ‘em to a bar …)
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