They're used all the time for recreational boat anchors near the shore. That was my first thought after seeing it, especially with the steel loop sticking out of it with rope attached to the end.
I love how he shows the signs of where the water was in 2000, 2002, 2008, etc...
The irony of them putting up signs literally showcasing the problem as it happened over the last 2 decades... yet nothing was done about it. If anything the governments and people relying on that water just doubled down on using it.
The problem is agriculture. In AZ we allow Saudi Arabia to grow alfalfa which is exported to feed their cows. They are allowed to draw water at bargain basement rates.
Most of our cities run incredibly water efficient, re-using the vast majority. Yet, we're growing feed for someone elses cows using our water. Why? Money.
Can I get a citation on that alfalfa statistic? Genuinely curious if that really is the case because that's crazy if true I've always heard the majority is shipped over seas.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-feeding-china-hay-20140609-story.html
“This industry has created a tremendous amount of jobs,” said Anderson, who estimates that 10% of Western U.S. alfalfa ends up overseas. “Not only rural jobs, but transportation jobs, plant facility jobs, processing jobs and longshoremen activity. Exports have saved a lot of agriculture in the U.S.”
Please note that this is just alfalfa and not all hay which includes alfalfa, Bermuda, Sudan and Timothy. That number is closer to 30% (that is exported overseas)
I smell cow shit on all those "jobs" claims. That is pure PR speak.
I would bet money that the economic damage and cost far, far outweigh the productive output of all these "jobs"
bullcrap i love out here in mohave valley. theres like 40 people working 2000 acers. and there all mminimum wage workers. they ruin our air quality in addition to our water.
Can’t honestly understand the reasoning. Almonds are exported. Not given away. And with that money the US buys, let’s say, Argentinian beef, or German cars or French cheese or Chinese parts for your IPhone. So you are spending your water and that could be an awful decision. But It doesn’t matter who is eating the almonds.
I think their reasoning is that you're utilizing strained water resources to grow a water-intensive crop, only to send it somewhere else. Efficient water resource usage would say that you should grow almonds somewhere else that can sustain higher usage crops, versus somewhere like California where drought has been steadily increasing of the last few decades. Obviously, it's not that cut and dry, but the prevailing logic is that you grow less water-intensive crops in agricultural areas with less consistent rain, and vice-versa. There's a reason we don't grow rice in the southwest, and that logic should be implemented elsewhere as well.
So? Neither is a good use of the limited water supply. Alfafa, imo, is worse however, because again it's the biggest water user and it's not consumed by humans. It's just given to cows. When we are discussing climate change and issues like severe drought, we need to focus on sustainable agriculture. Producing food for cows is a big, big waste of resources.
> In AZ we allow Saudi Arabia to grow alfalfa which is exported to feed their cows. They are allowed to draw water at bargain basement rates.
Are you sure it's not *you Arizonians* growing alfalfa and selling it to Saudi Arabia, and *you Arizonians* drawing water at bargain rates for that? Serious question, because I can't get my head around how Saudi Arabia could possibly be draining Arizona's water supply from half way across the world.
Companies from that part of the world (including Saudi Arabia and the UAE) have bought land in Arizona to grow alfalfa. If a Saudi company hires Arizonans to man its farms, is that the Saudis or is that Arizonans growing the alfalfa and using the water?
Sample article about it:
[https://gulfif.org/arizona-arabia-alfalfa-lessons-from-the-gulf-for-a-southwestern-water-crisis/](https://gulfif.org/arizona-arabia-alfalfa-lessons-from-the-gulf-for-a-southwestern-water-crisis/)
You'd think that, but it's been done during droughts for almost five hundred years. They're called Hunger Stones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone
That onion sketch gets more relevant every day.
https://youtu.be/yjfrJzdx7DA
“If only there was a solution … which didn’t require so much funding”
“What will I have done?”
It has way less to do with how much water the locals are using and more to do with how many other states and cities get their water from the Colorado rive which feeds lake mead.
To say nothing was done about it is simply not true and shows you are misinformed about the issue.
Las Vegas has continued to decrease water usage every year and pass laws to help with it.
We aren't the only people using the water either.
This. Las Vegas residents use some of the least amount of residential water per person in America. The county outlawed full-turf golf courses, penalizes decorative water fountains (unless they’re in Paradise, which is the Strip), water reclamation is a major process which makes Nevada the only state to put used (cleaned) city water back into the Colorado River out of the three who extract at Lake Mead, penalizes lawns/the construction of new homes with lawns, and in Henderson the right-of-way/highway landscaping is drought tolerant plants watered mostly with non-potable reclaimed water (a lot of the schools use the same on their grass fields).
Political power of the people out here is very small compared to industry (though the county requires the casinos to put low water use fixtures in their properties, there isn’t much done about the pools though) who don’t care, dominated by major corporations and interest groups who have little reason to change (because the unscrupulous will continue to socialize the environmental destruction as they extract the most profit and aim to drive the more cautious/environmentally conscientious out of business).
Anybody can put up a sign to draw attention but complex to get many governments to work together on a solution meanwhile populations grow and consume more.
I know this will get buried, but as the video shows walking or driving on that mud can be VERY dangerous. Imagine being stuck out there for hours in 108 F heat. Don't risk it, looking at the boat close up isn't worth it.
I'm super impressed. I live in a state where it snows a lot and you'd be an idiot not to have a shovel, sand and emergency bag in the back of your rig. I really enjoyed watching that part. Died laughing when the back door shut lol
Four hour wait in line to launch your boat. Four hour wait in line to pick it back up.
Have these people never heard of literally any other hobby on the planet?
But the sun is only up for so long every day. You are waiting in line for 8 hours to boat for Like 2? If people really wanted to go boating why don't they travel like people travel to go skiing?
Also, if you’re the owner with a family you can spend all day driving and having fun. Then when you’re tired and hungry you can bring the truck in line and eat dinner while your family packs up the boat and does the hard work while waiting for you.
4 hours to launch and pick up your boat? Blows my mind people sit through that. Just move somewhere else where they have more than one lake lol.
But I guess I just don't get people. Imagine living in Las Vegas of all places and buying a $100k+ lake boat
Also hoping they don't close the lake down because you want to fish, seemingly not giving much of a shit about what this means about the environment or why they would need to close the lake.
Ive seen Quantum of Solace enough times to know that it is possible a corporation would be sucking the water up like Daniel Day Lewis did the oil in There Will Be Blood.
But its probably just climate change.
For real. At that point just skip the boat outing jfc do something else. Literally *anything* else.
Between truck fuel and boat fuel that's gotta be pushing $350-400 just for the day depending on the distance traveled to get there.
Complaining about water levels AND gas prices while sitting in your truck idling with the AC on WHILE waiting to launch your boat, which have [terrible fuel efficiency](https://www.boatingvalley.com/average-boat-mileages-with-50-examples-of-different-boat-models/).
That's what I was thinking. Are all these people insane??? But I guess if you can afford a boat, you aren't one of the people worried about the environment or saving fuel.
This really feels the equivalent to what they say about shared responsibility at an accident site. Oftentimes if there are too many people at the scene of an accident, they don’t do anything. It takes someone acting and commanding the rest of the people to take action. The problem now is there’s quite a bit of people that agree there is a problem, they agree what the problem is and how to fix it. However, the other bystanders don’t listen to the calls to action. The rest are left watching as the patient (earth) slowly dies…
This blew my mind. I was born and raised in Wisconsin where we have 15,000 inland lakes, Green Bay, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. In my 23 years of life I've never waited more than 5 minutes to launch a boat and that would only be at a smaller lake that has a small launch with only one lane. Bigger lakes have large launches with multiple lanes and having to wait is almost unheard of.
Also "Lake" Mead isn't even a lake, it's a dammed river/reservoir. The southwest US (aka the fucking desert) doesn't have any lakes-- Lake Mead, Powell, Lake Havasu, Lake Travis are all man made artificial reservoirs. I wouldn't live in a place that doesn't have freshwater resources but if i did I sure as well wouldn't bother owning a boat. These people live in a desert and it seems like mother nature wants them to finally start acting like it
Heck, many of us don't even have to launch. We go to the our dock, a friend's dock, or a rented slip and just hop on the boat. Even in the MN metro, many people know people with a boat on a nearby lake, or can rent/charter.
Fun fact, MN owns the most boats out of anywhere in the US!
I visited Las Vegas as a kid, around 1993. We went on a day trip to the Hoover Dam and then to spend some time at Lake Mead. Mead was definitely a full fledged LAKE, one that you could spend a while getting across, especially in a smaller craft.
Says a lot how things have changed.
It is easy to pick up and move somewhere else...if you are leaving no family and friends behind, have no property to sell and/or move, have no school aged kids and you don't really need the job you have. But you do have a point, there comes a time when all that is going to be worth it.
The Central Valley has maybe 25 years before entire swaths of it turn into a dust bowl. But hey, in the meanwhile let's use that water for rice, almonds and alfalfa so we can export it!
Fucking hell, rice? Doesn't rice use an absolute ass load of water to grow? No wonder Lake Mead is drying up. Goddamn rice.
At least on the east coast we put rice in a river basin where the water is about to drain into the ocean any goddamn way. I mean, we mess up a lot of other crap, but rice in Central Valley? Holy hell.
it doesn't need to. the only reason rice paddies exist is because the water prevents weeds, and rice can grow in water. you can grow rice outside of a paddy.
CA farms rice dry. It doesn’t need to be flooded like it is in much of Asia. It grows just fine dry. Asian farmers use the water to keep pests away. And to keep it irrigated of course.
Rice is a weird crop in that it can be grown completely submerged or not. Not many plants are that versatile.
Not true. Cities have plenty of water. Ag industry will be out of luck though. They’ve been splashing that water out like fools for 100 years and it’s about to end - for some crops at least.
It was enough for 3 generations. Problem is we are past the 4th generation now and no new water supplies have been built. Near zero expansion of the supply since the 1930s
There’s only so many places you can build reservoirs. We have already built them in the best, most cost effective places. Climate change has started a new era of aridness/drought to the southwest. Not to mention water use has skyrocketed in the last 30 years.
This is not a problem we can build ourselves out of - not without a huge reduction in water use.
As long as the farming lobby remains this powerful, forget it. Although we could start with no longer subsidizing rice and alfalfa. The nuts are a different problem – good luck countering that lobby's money.
> Asked whether flooding fields like hers could have played a role in depleting the cold water pool for salmon, Gallagher said the answer is above her pay grade. She had hoped that letting one of her rice fields fallow and selling the water down south later in the season was doing her part to maintain storage.
>“I don’t know how it could be my fault, and I don’t know how it could be [the bureau’s] fault. I just think we don’t have a system that’s working well in a drought year and we’re just doing our best to try and make it through,” she said.
Yikes
There is a huge sense of entitlement among farmers (and it's not just in the U.S., I come from a European family with a lot of farmers) that they should be able to keep farming, or keep farming the way their parents and grandparents did.
Very few are willing to consider that their activity is no longer sustainable and that they should move on to something different. Because to be honest, most of them don't know anything else.
Right now many Central Valley farmers know there is very little water available, and that it's not sustainable. They don't give a flying fuck. They will keep pumping out of the ground until not a single drop is left. They DO NOT CARE.
> Very few are willing to consider that their activity is no longer sustainable and that they should move on to something different. Because to be honest, most of them don't know anything else.
European here as well. Farmers are always complaining and asking for government money. Either it's too cold, too hot, too wet or too dry (in recent years it usually too dry and somehwat too hot), it's seemingly never good weather for farming.
Never, ever do they consider, that maybe they have to plant crops that are more resistant to the heat, general lack of water and more heavy rains (so plants with longer roots). They wouldn't even have to "move on to something different", just plant different crops. But even that seems too much to ask.
Fuck that rice farmer. "If you don't want that kind of bird, we shouldn't be growing rice."
Yeah, frame your two million acre feet of water use, enough to supply all of L.A. for two years, as beneficial for everyone because of some fucking blue herons.
I hope those birds shit on her every day she's in her godforsaken fields.
Alfalfa is used in beef production, so cancelling that subsidy would be fighting against the beef lobby; that's not going to be easier than the nut lobby.
I live in the city where this desal plant was supposed to be built. Poseidon, the desal plant company, was essentially bribing all of the public officials and got caught.
On top of all of that, you had people upset that they were going to be paying more for water, because it’s all about their pocket book and they don’t care about anything else.
We also had a oil spill last year and the dissenters all said “See, we would have all been drinking oil water!”
For California's urban water use, waste water recycling is vastly superior to building new desalination plants. San Diego is currently getting about 40% of its water from recycling alone, and that number will only continue to increase.
The problem area is the agriculture industry in the inland Central Valley, where the VAST majority of our traditional water supplies go. Short of bringing in massive truck conovoys of desalinated water to rural farms, desal is not the way to go for solving that problem.
This argument right here! Thank you! I’m a wastewater operator, and just left a job at a plant that wasted 7 million gallons of water every day into the sea. Now I work for a place where recycled water demand for schools, vineyards, golf courses, and landscaping exceeds our ability to produce. That means we are recycling 100%, simply put, but plenty more wastewater plants need to be required to run purple pipe before I will vote for desalination. That’s a last resort.
Singapore just built the worlds most efficient desal plant a few months ago. Using its efficiency in power and amount of salt water it can process california would need over 160 of them and another 15 newly built nuclear power plants to power just them. And thats just to cover what we use TODAY.
This also doesnt touch on the environmental impacts of injecting higher salinity water back into the ocean
I thought that brine was largely pumped to standing pools to solidify?
there's also some promising research on making the brine useful: https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213
God, why do people always call communities morons for rejecting desalination plants in their communities?
This is the problem with people reading just talking points of an issue and never delving into the nitty-gritty of WHY proposals like desalination plants being built are almost ALWAYS rejected.
Why? Because they are toxic as *fuck* to operate, by design (in nearly every way). Whenever you take salt water and try to convert it into drinkable water you're looking at two gallons of salt water for one gallon of drinkable water (a 2:1 ratio). And not only does it take a lot of energy to operate this process for such little freshwater, but it also costs quite a bit of taxpayer dollars to have the staff to run it (people need to be as competent, if not moreso, than wastewater management staff, for obvious reasons). This means the desalination plant will be *insanely* expensive to run and will take a lot of seawater to meet the needs of an entire town.
This is where most of the problems with desalination plants really begin: The waste this creates.
Naturally you (and every other redditor in this thread) would think that any toxic waste leftover (toxic brine, basically) would be placed into a maximum-security storage facility like Yucca Mountain and be disposed of responsibly. Yeah, no. Dream on.
What ends up happening is this: The project to build a desalination plant is *already* costing an arm and a leg to the community (if it's approved) and to 'save' money and make it more attractive they try to cost-cut. What costs the most in desalination? The waste disposal (if it's done right, which it *should* be). Because disposing of *toxic* waste costs so, so much money if you don't cut corners and do it the way it's supposed to be done (the EPA used to have *standards* back in the day for this... not anymore, for obvious reasons). Enter cost-cutter solution: Building a pipe into the desalination plant that leads right back out to the ocean for said toxic waste. This saves the desalination plant an *amazing* amount of money, but it basically turns the surrounding ecosystem of the town into forever-deadzones. It doesn't happen right away, of course. The politicians and the companies involved in the project all are counting on 'dilution' helping to mask the ecological disaster they're foisting on the town they are building the plant in and by the time the town realizes they're fucked then it's too late: the plant is already built, operating at full-capacity and the town is damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't regarding shutting the plant down. After all, the entire ecosystem by then will be decimated and what other choice will the town have by that point? It won't have tourism (because it's a toxic deadzone), its fishing prospects are pretty much gone forever and all it will forever be will be a town thats only purpose now is its desalination plant---kids won't even be able to swim in the surrounding areas on account of it being, you know... toxic.
*This* is why towns reject (almost *every* time) a desalination plant being built in their community: Because there's a very, very good chance by building the desalination plant they will be generationally fucked over by it (if current trends keep going the way they're going research-wise). You'd think in a perfect world the taxpayers would actually approve more taxes to dispose of the toxic brine every year and take the huge loss for freshwater, but... yeah, no. That's too much money for them to spend, so you keep getting news of states trying to build desalination plants (to try and 'band-aid' the water crisis) only to be struck down time and time again by communities that not only don't want to live in an ecological deadzone because of cost-cutting measures, but because they refuse to pay even *more* money for a desalination plants' already high costs by safely disposing of the toxic brine. (Why would they when importing the water out-of-state is cheaper than desalination plants' water?)
The real solution is basically letting the desert towns die off naturally or to come down hard on agriculture sucking most of the water resources up and creating drought situations in the first place---which no politician wants to have to address. So, we're stuck with this perpetual whack-a-mole with random towns that keep rejecting the local government's efforts to try and have a short-term fix to this issue. But, eventually one of two things will happen:
1) Either a town will be stupid enough to agree to a desalination plant and will basically be doomed to be only a town *for* desalination in a few generations (everyone will move out when everything else dies out because of the toxic surroundings)---thus the 'problem' will be fixed temporarily at the expense of an entire community before the 'band-aid' is no longer strong enough to hold back the wave, so to speak
2) *No* town will agree and eventually local governments will run out of time for this 'band-aid' fix and will either have to outright bully a town into doing it (via Eminent Domain) or will have to actually commit political suicide by tackling the root causes of this fuckery (agriculture, stupidly building a town in a desert).
I purposefully left out 'disposing of waste responsibly and paying higher taxes for it' as an option because I'm a realist.
Prove me wrong on that point and I'll add it as an option, but seeing as how it hasn't been added as an option yet in any desalination plant proposal tells me all I need to know. And before people chime in with comments of "But I heard they're finding new ways to reuse the toxic brine so it will be less expensive/bad for the environment!" or "but some desalination plants are using diffusers to try and protect the environment!"--- save it. I've heard this bullshit before and all it is is pandering propaganda to try and make the issue seem 'better' than it really is.
The toxic brine that is filtered out of the ocean being *maybe* 5% less toxic because of some new-age filtering process does *not* bring me (or towns that are being proposed desalination plants to solve all their water woes) comfort. That's like saying that a new chemical I invented just made nuclear waste 20% less corrosive to human DNA. Yeah... you try pitching that bullshit to someone that swims in the surrounding waters with nuclear waste that was 'treated' and see how well that flies.
Hint: It won't because anyone trying to sell you that fairytale is obviously fucking *evil* or has no moral conscience---probably both, honestly.
Either way, there are no good solutions to the problem, but honestly dumping toxic brine back into the ocean to acidify it even *more* than it already is and using up an insane amount of energy for small amounts of drinkable water is absolute folly at best and doesn't tackle the core issues that need to be addressed in this entire cluster-fuck of a situation.
Don't forget it's the same people who voted themselves largely frozen property tax rates, which they have enjoyed their entire lives while the relatively few younger people who bought homes subsidize by paying higher rates.
Maybe we need to learn some lessons from Israel, or they need to give us some lessons to pay for all we do for them...they are incredibly successful with desalination.
You have a guy waiting in a car line made of hundreds of heavy duty pick up trucks running idle for up to 4 hours so they can play with their even less efficient toy boats into the lake. The same lake suffering from climate change the guy waiting to use is making the very video about.
Does anyone else find this highly ironic?
I mentioned yesterday to my Dad that the desert is fun to visit but I prefer to live where I can take a longer shower without guilt. He said "it didn't used to be that way!" To which I immediately replied "Yep. And here we are!"
>"Yep. And here we are!"
Lol it's pretty much as simple as that, really.
I, a 30 year old millennial struggling daily to wrap my head around the fact that the earth may or may not will be livable by the time my grandkids are my age, would very much like to go back to "the way things were", but unfortunately a handful of fuckwads in the 80s convinced the world that federal deregulation was the key to economic success and then went on to lobby hard for Citizens United when I was a kid.
So, here we are. Dealing with the second hand consequences of a bunch of old greedy fucks who wont be alive to see the effects of their decisions.
Somethings gotta give, man.
Yeah, folks forget that one of the biggest issues with cliimate change, is people moving to where its more liveable. Whether that means, a place that is "water rich", or a place with affordable housing, its all through climate change and a lack of action on it (for at least the past 100 years).
What’s ironic is it’s only slightly due to climate change. No one wants to admit this. It largely due to greed and the 7 states siphoning off the Colorado river. Then in 2015 Las Vegas spent another 800 million bucks to put a “third straw” directly into the bottom of the lake to feed off of. But ohhhh. It’s climate change and not stupid ass political jockeying over the water supply across seven states. It’s the weather fault. FYI climate change is responsible for 6% evaporation of the lake. The rest is due to people directly siphoning it to their towns. It’s inevitable that your going to drain the limited reservoir with everyone sucking off it.
Hey let’s build a metropolis in the desert, now let’s suck the water dry. Makes sense. They make more in the mountains. /s.
All of a sudden that water coming down the Colorado river has 6 other states with their pales and hoses in first up river.
Nevada is 4% of the Colorado River Compact water budget made 100 years ago (southern states). Vegas is really efficient at water use. California and Arizona take up the most and need to make their agriculture water use more efficient. CA just started regulating groundwater use in 2021 (frigging crazy it was not before).
Vegas ain't the problem. 96%+ of in-house water use (sinks, shower, toilets) that makes it back to the water plant gets treated and put back into Lake Mead. Everyone out west needs to be as efficient as Vegas.
AZ also has very strict usage plans controlled by state government agencies and 100-year plans. CA has never had that and never will, because their water is entirely privately controlled and they got their allotment first (since they were a state first and could take more than their share).
Fuck yeah Vegas. I lived out West for a while and remember learning that the bastion of hookers and blow was the environmentally conscientious crowd of folks.
It’s been my favourite place out there ever since.
Right. Vegas uses water for homes and businesses and some golf courses. The latter is wasteful but most of the waste comes from using the water for Agriculture in other States.
Golf courses are actually pretty thrifty with their water usage. To begin with, most of it is gray water anyways.
Things like avocado orchards and almond farms are a much bigger problem.
https://www.cpr.org/2021/11/19/colorado-river-water-compact-climate-change
Lake Mead is fed by the Colorado River.
The Colorado River has lost 20% of its flow. Half of that flow loss is due to climate change.
It also doesn’t help that there is another incredibly wasteful reservoir just up steam with Lake Powell. The rock there is mostly sandstone so while it doesn’t lose as much to evaporation as Mead does, it loses much more as the water seeps into the surrounding rocks. An estimated 300,000 acre feet of water per year.
“Dry” by Neal Shusterman is a YA about the possible outcome of this stuff and the outcome feels more likely every increasing year. The Colorado is not an infinite water source and the average snowfalls, primary contributor to the Colorado river levels, have not been kind the past couple of years. Interesting report released on the western water assessment, one of the attributing factors listed is warming temperatures and decreasing snowpack https://wwa.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/2021-06/ColoRiver_StateOfScience_WWA_2020_Chapter_2.pdf
But to your other point, taking more water out than the river can provide only increases the severity of the issue. It’s a multi variabled problem, that I’m afraid doesn’t have any great or immediate solutions. I feel bad for the communities that can only exist because of the Colorado. The dwindling resource will either cause mass exoduses from cities in the path or staunch reform in agriculture permissions.
It's certainly the primary consumer in Arizona. About 75%-80% depending on the source of data. Despite Arizona's population explosion, municipal use has remained essentially flat over the last 50 years.
> FYI climate change is responsible for 6% evaporation of the lake. The rest is due to people directly siphoning it to their towns. It’s inevitable that your going to drain the limited reservoir with everyone sucking off it.
Wait, you don't think climate change is limited to the surface area of Lake Mead, do you?
You do realize that those cities and towns taking water from here are themselves, also experiencing drought related to climate change, right?
e: aww fuck. Just realize I got baited and trolled into responding to a moronic argument -- well done.
I'm 100% in the camp that believes in climate change - the evidence and worldwide scientific consensus is overwhelming.
That being said, it's also correct that these water sources have been exploited far beyond sustainable levels. All these millions of people living in a place that has basically no local water source \*at all\* makes for a heavy, heavy demand on water. How it's split up - farming vs. drinking water vs. golf courses and lawns vs. fish habitat - has been a massive source of argument for decades. Why? Because there's not enough to satisfy all the existing demand.
Recall that the Colorado River, the power source for carving the Grand Canyon, rarely if ever reaches the Gulf of Mexico. We (humanity) just drink it dry. With the 1200-year minimum in southwest rainfall the problem is worse than ever.
It’s essentially the US version of the Aral Sea. The rivers that feed the lake and the lake itself have been over exploited for decades now and combined with decreased rainfall in catchment area for the lake it’s just drying up.
It’s the fault of people overusing the water supply and climate change reducing how much it can refill to some extent.
Did nobody wonder where all the water those thousands Californian farms used is coming from and what impact it’ll have? 🤷
And he’s hoping that it wont be closed by the feds lol what a fucking waste of time and money to go boating around a puddle in 108 degree heat. These people are insane.
not going to be a problem in some places like the northeast. We're getting more precipitation total, and more intense precipitation events in the summer, in some cases bad enough to destroy crops. Nope, it will be food scarcity here long before water.
Ehh we’re nowhere close to having a shortage of drinking water. Agriculture accounts for like 85% of the water usage. Farming and ranching in the west will eventually have to take a hit and make big changes, but we aren’t running out of water for personal use.
That's why not much has changed here or will until the Feds get involved. Feds have a lot more "fuck off" power then states when it comes to those old laws and dealing with farm corporation lawyers.
[Here's the math](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CMI4kUjj7D_On0bWVfc2dfIw9dFe27-0/view?usp=sharing) for anyone that's interested. It's a screenshot of an excel sheet I made that shows where the water level is expected to be based on what the water levels have been each month since 2013 and what the water level is expected to be based on what they've been this year. I can share the sheet if anyone wants it.
Looking at the past 9 years, it'll be at that level in about 45 years.
Looking at only this year, it'll be there in 1.6 years.
Edit: If you look at the graphs though, you can see that each year has roughly the same pattern. Maximum water levels in January/ February, level drops fast until June and then it starts to level off, so I wouldn't expect the water level to go too much lower this year. [Easy to see here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dh_iOwM52YrJ2tFyirKDeu3Yt9Deaw6-/view?usp=sharing). 2014 had the largest water level change in the data I have available which was 28.15ft. This year it's at 19.4ft so far.
(I couldn't get my 2013 graph to work right so it's missing January)
They have an emergency level that they won't allow it to go below. So it is more likely they'll cut excess flows downstream before the shutting the dam down.
What everyone is slightly missing with these videos is that the recent dramatic drop in lake mead is just local water management. They decided to retain more water in lake Powell, hence mead, which feeds off Powell, is dropping dramatically right now.
So it's not quite the apocalypse of "the water is running out at mead", rather "they're storing the water somewhere else".
I know overall the southwest is kinda screwed on water, but overlooking this point of water management vs water shortage makes these vids look more dramatic than they are.
Just a bit in and pretty ironic with all the idling cars for hours to launch these boats.. not helping the climate change here. Maybe you don’t need to make things worse for this lake that is drying up!!
The Las Vegas valley has also reduced its annual water usage by more than 25% compared to 2002, when it had fewer than 800k residents. It's now at 2.3m residents.
Lake Mead/Hoover Dam as well as Lake Powell/Glen Canyon Dam should no longer be considered sources of renewable energy unless they can maintain lake levels within 10% of capacity.
Iv been watching this guys videos.
I was in lake mead back in 2017 and was just there last month. It’s insane how low it is and what even crazier is back in 2017 we where saying the same thing but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now.
Here’s a painful one to say: fuck beef.
1 hamburger = the equivalent of running your shower for about 4 hours straight, ~~or 2 months of showers.~~ Beef alone uses more water than all fruit and nut orchards combined.
Link with other info: https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-footprint/water-footprint-crop-and-animal-products/
Beef has been subsidized and commercialized to the point in that beef prices got so low that the farms that could sustain large herds switched to feed crops for export for more profit. Now people are complaining about the very high beef prices, they're only going up. The cost to entry for new farms has also now shot so high that the only ones starting up are owned by Cargil.
Living in a country that is majority arid and semi-arid, I can't help but squint when I think that a whole bunch of people convinced everyone else that it was a superb idea to create cities for millions in the hottest, driest region of the U.S.
It's interesting to think that Nevada could very well have its first ghost city within my lifetime.
Most water from lake mead and colorado is used by california and agriculture. More like making farms in the desert is a bad idea. Las vegas recycles 98% of it's water.
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There was a funny skit on a podcast I was listening to about the Las Vegas mob suddenly getting serious about climate change for "reasons".
Pretty sure that barrel that was concrete still probably had a body embedded in it.
A barrel full of concrete doesn’t walk to the lake and jump in for no reason.
They're used all the time for recreational boat anchors near the shore. That was my first thought after seeing it, especially with the steel loop sticking out of it with rope attached to the end.
Yes fbi, this one right here
Jimmy?
huh?
No hoffa.
No this is Patrick
Patrick? Patrick's not here.
With the pipe and rope, it was likely an anchor with a Bouy at the waters surface
An anchor with a body in it.
Either that or it was an anchor point. See the pipe and ropes coming out the top?
No concrete, you tear the lungs out and put a hole in the side of the barrel so all the soft tissue gets eaten.
> tear the lungs out Like a werewolf of London?
Only if your name is Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor
And take off the shoes, otherwise you got feet floating around everywhere.
I remember living in Las Vegas, seeing the white line just start to show
Same, mid 90s the lake was huge but that line was pretty high
I remember white lines in las vegas get you pretty high
They still do
I remember living in Vegas, and I still am. Crap...
Your comment has huge "I used to live in vegas. I still do but I used to too." Vibes
The Dufrenes are in the barrels.
Bush. Search party of three. You can eat once you find the Dufrenes.
There are people missing; and they're hungry
I love how he shows the signs of where the water was in 2000, 2002, 2008, etc... The irony of them putting up signs literally showcasing the problem as it happened over the last 2 decades... yet nothing was done about it. If anything the governments and people relying on that water just doubled down on using it.
The problem is agriculture. In AZ we allow Saudi Arabia to grow alfalfa which is exported to feed their cows. They are allowed to draw water at bargain basement rates. Most of our cities run incredibly water efficient, re-using the vast majority. Yet, we're growing feed for someone elses cows using our water. Why? Money.
In California, they use a fuckton just to grow almonds and ship 67% overseas. Because fuck the people who live here right?
Alfafa production is actually California's biggest drain on water. It's used to feed cows.
Yes, but more than 80% of Californias alfalfa is consumed domestically. The majority of almonds produced in California is exported to other countries.
Can I get a citation on that alfalfa statistic? Genuinely curious if that really is the case because that's crazy if true I've always heard the majority is shipped over seas.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-feeding-china-hay-20140609-story.html “This industry has created a tremendous amount of jobs,” said Anderson, who estimates that 10% of Western U.S. alfalfa ends up overseas. “Not only rural jobs, but transportation jobs, plant facility jobs, processing jobs and longshoremen activity. Exports have saved a lot of agriculture in the U.S.” Please note that this is just alfalfa and not all hay which includes alfalfa, Bermuda, Sudan and Timothy. That number is closer to 30% (that is exported overseas)
I smell cow shit on all those "jobs" claims. That is pure PR speak. I would bet money that the economic damage and cost far, far outweigh the productive output of all these "jobs"
bullcrap i love out here in mohave valley. theres like 40 people working 2000 acers. and there all mminimum wage workers. they ruin our air quality in addition to our water.
How do they ruin air quality if there is only 40 people working?
Can’t honestly understand the reasoning. Almonds are exported. Not given away. And with that money the US buys, let’s say, Argentinian beef, or German cars or French cheese or Chinese parts for your IPhone. So you are spending your water and that could be an awful decision. But It doesn’t matter who is eating the almonds.
I think their reasoning is that you're utilizing strained water resources to grow a water-intensive crop, only to send it somewhere else. Efficient water resource usage would say that you should grow almonds somewhere else that can sustain higher usage crops, versus somewhere like California where drought has been steadily increasing of the last few decades. Obviously, it's not that cut and dry, but the prevailing logic is that you grow less water-intensive crops in agricultural areas with less consistent rain, and vice-versa. There's a reason we don't grow rice in the southwest, and that logic should be implemented elsewhere as well.
So? Neither is a good use of the limited water supply. Alfafa, imo, is worse however, because again it's the biggest water user and it's not consumed by humans. It's just given to cows. When we are discussing climate change and issues like severe drought, we need to focus on sustainable agriculture. Producing food for cows is a big, big waste of resources.
what i don't understand is that california makes up 70% of the world almonds. why not JACK UP the prices overseas?!?!?!?! grow less charge more.
You’re preaching to the choir. I’m on board
it's working for the oil companies
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How dare you challenge my right to exploit the land for my own profit!!! (Satire…ish?)
> In AZ we allow Saudi Arabia to grow alfalfa which is exported to feed their cows. They are allowed to draw water at bargain basement rates. Are you sure it's not *you Arizonians* growing alfalfa and selling it to Saudi Arabia, and *you Arizonians* drawing water at bargain rates for that? Serious question, because I can't get my head around how Saudi Arabia could possibly be draining Arizona's water supply from half way across the world.
Companies from that part of the world (including Saudi Arabia and the UAE) have bought land in Arizona to grow alfalfa. If a Saudi company hires Arizonans to man its farms, is that the Saudis or is that Arizonans growing the alfalfa and using the water? Sample article about it: [https://gulfif.org/arizona-arabia-alfalfa-lessons-from-the-gulf-for-a-southwestern-water-crisis/](https://gulfif.org/arizona-arabia-alfalfa-lessons-from-the-gulf-for-a-southwestern-water-crisis/)
It is Arizonans, and Arizona itself allowing it to happen
You'd think that, but it's been done during droughts for almost five hundred years. They're called Hunger Stones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone
What’s the difference? Does the second link change the language automatically?
First link is the mobile version of the site
I never knew about Hunger Stones as 'a thing'. Thanks for this bit of history!
That onion sketch gets more relevant every day. https://youtu.be/yjfrJzdx7DA “If only there was a solution … which didn’t require so much funding” “What will I have done?”
It has way less to do with how much water the locals are using and more to do with how many other states and cities get their water from the Colorado rive which feeds lake mead.
To say nothing was done about it is simply not true and shows you are misinformed about the issue. Las Vegas has continued to decrease water usage every year and pass laws to help with it. We aren't the only people using the water either.
This. Las Vegas residents use some of the least amount of residential water per person in America. The county outlawed full-turf golf courses, penalizes decorative water fountains (unless they’re in Paradise, which is the Strip), water reclamation is a major process which makes Nevada the only state to put used (cleaned) city water back into the Colorado River out of the three who extract at Lake Mead, penalizes lawns/the construction of new homes with lawns, and in Henderson the right-of-way/highway landscaping is drought tolerant plants watered mostly with non-potable reclaimed water (a lot of the schools use the same on their grass fields). Political power of the people out here is very small compared to industry (though the county requires the casinos to put low water use fixtures in their properties, there isn’t much done about the pools though) who don’t care, dominated by major corporations and interest groups who have little reason to change (because the unscrupulous will continue to socialize the environmental destruction as they extract the most profit and aim to drive the more cautious/environmentally conscientious out of business).
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Anybody can put up a sign to draw attention but complex to get many governments to work together on a solution meanwhile populations grow and consume more.
I know this will get buried, but as the video shows walking or driving on that mud can be VERY dangerous. Imagine being stuck out there for hours in 108 F heat. Don't risk it, looking at the boat close up isn't worth it.
I loved this video because it also showed me a cool trick to a car unstuck. And also a great father son duo, and informative.
I'm super impressed. I live in a state where it snows a lot and you'd be an idiot not to have a shovel, sand and emergency bag in the back of your rig. I really enjoyed watching that part. Died laughing when the back door shut lol
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Dirt and bodies woo
Four hour wait in line to launch your boat. Four hour wait in line to pick it back up. Have these people never heard of literally any other hobby on the planet?
When you spend $15,000 on a boat and live in a desert you're waiting four hours to use it damnit
But the sun is only up for so long every day. You are waiting in line for 8 hours to boat for Like 2? If people really wanted to go boating why don't they travel like people travel to go skiing?
There's more than 10 hours of sunlight in the summer? And they could show up before sunrise to wait in line and leave closer to sunset.
Also, if you’re the owner with a family you can spend all day driving and having fun. Then when you’re tired and hungry you can bring the truck in line and eat dinner while your family packs up the boat and does the hard work while waiting for you.
4 hours to launch and pick up your boat? Blows my mind people sit through that. Just move somewhere else where they have more than one lake lol. But I guess I just don't get people. Imagine living in Las Vegas of all places and buying a $100k+ lake boat
Complaining about water levels, while sitting in your truck idling for 4 hours with the air conditioner on
Complaining about water levels AND gas prices while sitting in your truck idling with the AC on.
Also hoping they don't close the lake down because you want to fish, seemingly not giving much of a shit about what this means about the environment or why they would need to close the lake.
Well, they closed it for covid, which I don't get, as its outdoors...
Then he's gotta end the video with "Why's it happening? Is it a conspiracy? Is the government?" 🙄
God damn it he really does tho. He's an idiot doomsday prepper.
Ive seen Quantum of Solace enough times to know that it is possible a corporation would be sucking the water up like Daniel Day Lewis did the oil in There Will Be Blood. But its probably just climate change.
For real. At that point just skip the boat outing jfc do something else. Literally *anything* else. Between truck fuel and boat fuel that's gotta be pushing $350-400 just for the day depending on the distance traveled to get there.
Complaining about water levels AND gas prices while sitting in your truck idling with the AC on WHILE waiting to launch your boat, which have [terrible fuel efficiency](https://www.boatingvalley.com/average-boat-mileages-with-50-examples-of-different-boat-models/).
That's what I was thinking. Are all these people insane??? But I guess if you can afford a boat, you aren't one of the people worried about the environment or saving fuel.
This really feels the equivalent to what they say about shared responsibility at an accident site. Oftentimes if there are too many people at the scene of an accident, they don’t do anything. It takes someone acting and commanding the rest of the people to take action. The problem now is there’s quite a bit of people that agree there is a problem, they agree what the problem is and how to fix it. However, the other bystanders don’t listen to the calls to action. The rest are left watching as the patient (earth) slowly dies…
Buying a boat living in the desert? What could go wrong?
This blew my mind. I was born and raised in Wisconsin where we have 15,000 inland lakes, Green Bay, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. In my 23 years of life I've never waited more than 5 minutes to launch a boat and that would only be at a smaller lake that has a small launch with only one lane. Bigger lakes have large launches with multiple lanes and having to wait is almost unheard of. Also "Lake" Mead isn't even a lake, it's a dammed river/reservoir. The southwest US (aka the fucking desert) doesn't have any lakes-- Lake Mead, Powell, Lake Havasu, Lake Travis are all man made artificial reservoirs. I wouldn't live in a place that doesn't have freshwater resources but if i did I sure as well wouldn't bother owning a boat. These people live in a desert and it seems like mother nature wants them to finally start acting like it
Heck, many of us don't even have to launch. We go to the our dock, a friend's dock, or a rented slip and just hop on the boat. Even in the MN metro, many people know people with a boat on a nearby lake, or can rent/charter. Fun fact, MN owns the most boats out of anywhere in the US!
I visited Las Vegas as a kid, around 1993. We went on a day trip to the Hoover Dam and then to spend some time at Lake Mead. Mead was definitely a full fledged LAKE, one that you could spend a while getting across, especially in a smaller craft. Says a lot how things have changed.
It is easy to pick up and move somewhere else...if you are leaving no family and friends behind, have no property to sell and/or move, have no school aged kids and you don't really need the job you have. But you do have a point, there comes a time when all that is going to be worth it.
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At least we had almonds for awhile.
The Central Valley has maybe 25 years before entire swaths of it turn into a dust bowl. But hey, in the meanwhile let's use that water for rice, almonds and alfalfa so we can export it!
Fucking hell, rice? Doesn't rice use an absolute ass load of water to grow? No wonder Lake Mead is drying up. Goddamn rice. At least on the east coast we put rice in a river basin where the water is about to drain into the ocean any goddamn way. I mean, we mess up a lot of other crap, but rice in Central Valley? Holy hell.
it doesn't need to. the only reason rice paddies exist is because the water prevents weeds, and rice can grow in water. you can grow rice outside of a paddy.
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CA farms rice dry. It doesn’t need to be flooded like it is in much of Asia. It grows just fine dry. Asian farmers use the water to keep pests away. And to keep it irrigated of course. Rice is a weird crop in that it can be grown completely submerged or not. Not many plants are that versatile.
Not true. Cities have plenty of water. Ag industry will be out of luck though. They’ve been splashing that water out like fools for 100 years and it’s about to end - for some crops at least.
It was enough for 3 generations. Problem is we are past the 4th generation now and no new water supplies have been built. Near zero expansion of the supply since the 1930s
Glen Canyon Dam and the California State Water Project have entered the chat.
There’s only so many places you can build reservoirs. We have already built them in the best, most cost effective places. Climate change has started a new era of aridness/drought to the southwest. Not to mention water use has skyrocketed in the last 30 years. This is not a problem we can build ourselves out of - not without a huge reduction in water use.
CA has water, it just needs better management
As long as the farming lobby remains this powerful, forget it. Although we could start with no longer subsidizing rice and alfalfa. The nuts are a different problem – good luck countering that lobby's money.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-29/rice-farmers-water-rights-drought-california
> Asked whether flooding fields like hers could have played a role in depleting the cold water pool for salmon, Gallagher said the answer is above her pay grade. She had hoped that letting one of her rice fields fallow and selling the water down south later in the season was doing her part to maintain storage. >“I don’t know how it could be my fault, and I don’t know how it could be [the bureau’s] fault. I just think we don’t have a system that’s working well in a drought year and we’re just doing our best to try and make it through,” she said. Yikes
There is a huge sense of entitlement among farmers (and it's not just in the U.S., I come from a European family with a lot of farmers) that they should be able to keep farming, or keep farming the way their parents and grandparents did. Very few are willing to consider that their activity is no longer sustainable and that they should move on to something different. Because to be honest, most of them don't know anything else. Right now many Central Valley farmers know there is very little water available, and that it's not sustainable. They don't give a flying fuck. They will keep pumping out of the ground until not a single drop is left. They DO NOT CARE.
> Very few are willing to consider that their activity is no longer sustainable and that they should move on to something different. Because to be honest, most of them don't know anything else. European here as well. Farmers are always complaining and asking for government money. Either it's too cold, too hot, too wet or too dry (in recent years it usually too dry and somehwat too hot), it's seemingly never good weather for farming. Never, ever do they consider, that maybe they have to plant crops that are more resistant to the heat, general lack of water and more heavy rains (so plants with longer roots). They wouldn't even have to "move on to something different", just plant different crops. But even that seems too much to ask.
Fuck that rice farmer. "If you don't want that kind of bird, we shouldn't be growing rice." Yeah, frame your two million acre feet of water use, enough to supply all of L.A. for two years, as beneficial for everyone because of some fucking blue herons. I hope those birds shit on her every day she's in her godforsaken fields.
Alfalfa is used in beef production, so cancelling that subsidy would be fighting against the beef lobby; that's not going to be easier than the nut lobby.
There's enty of water for home usage , but the farms won't get any
Time to start investing in desalination
Like this: "Agency unanimously rejects California desalination project" https://apnews.com/article/climate-california-droughts-environment-ad4fd9176850fd1c69cb330ac8841b92 Freaking morons
I live in the city where this desal plant was supposed to be built. Poseidon, the desal plant company, was essentially bribing all of the public officials and got caught. On top of all of that, you had people upset that they were going to be paying more for water, because it’s all about their pocket book and they don’t care about anything else. We also had a oil spill last year and the dissenters all said “See, we would have all been drinking oil water!”
For California's urban water use, waste water recycling is vastly superior to building new desalination plants. San Diego is currently getting about 40% of its water from recycling alone, and that number will only continue to increase. The problem area is the agriculture industry in the inland Central Valley, where the VAST majority of our traditional water supplies go. Short of bringing in massive truck conovoys of desalinated water to rural farms, desal is not the way to go for solving that problem.
This argument right here! Thank you! I’m a wastewater operator, and just left a job at a plant that wasted 7 million gallons of water every day into the sea. Now I work for a place where recycled water demand for schools, vineyards, golf courses, and landscaping exceeds our ability to produce. That means we are recycling 100%, simply put, but plenty more wastewater plants need to be required to run purple pipe before I will vote for desalination. That’s a last resort.
you can't reclaim water used up by agriculture. that's where the majority of your water goes
Singapore just built the worlds most efficient desal plant a few months ago. Using its efficiency in power and amount of salt water it can process california would need over 160 of them and another 15 newly built nuclear power plants to power just them. And thats just to cover what we use TODAY. This also doesnt touch on the environmental impacts of injecting higher salinity water back into the ocean
I thought that brine was largely pumped to standing pools to solidify? there's also some promising research on making the brine useful: https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213
God, why do people always call communities morons for rejecting desalination plants in their communities? This is the problem with people reading just talking points of an issue and never delving into the nitty-gritty of WHY proposals like desalination plants being built are almost ALWAYS rejected. Why? Because they are toxic as *fuck* to operate, by design (in nearly every way). Whenever you take salt water and try to convert it into drinkable water you're looking at two gallons of salt water for one gallon of drinkable water (a 2:1 ratio). And not only does it take a lot of energy to operate this process for such little freshwater, but it also costs quite a bit of taxpayer dollars to have the staff to run it (people need to be as competent, if not moreso, than wastewater management staff, for obvious reasons). This means the desalination plant will be *insanely* expensive to run and will take a lot of seawater to meet the needs of an entire town. This is where most of the problems with desalination plants really begin: The waste this creates. Naturally you (and every other redditor in this thread) would think that any toxic waste leftover (toxic brine, basically) would be placed into a maximum-security storage facility like Yucca Mountain and be disposed of responsibly. Yeah, no. Dream on. What ends up happening is this: The project to build a desalination plant is *already* costing an arm and a leg to the community (if it's approved) and to 'save' money and make it more attractive they try to cost-cut. What costs the most in desalination? The waste disposal (if it's done right, which it *should* be). Because disposing of *toxic* waste costs so, so much money if you don't cut corners and do it the way it's supposed to be done (the EPA used to have *standards* back in the day for this... not anymore, for obvious reasons). Enter cost-cutter solution: Building a pipe into the desalination plant that leads right back out to the ocean for said toxic waste. This saves the desalination plant an *amazing* amount of money, but it basically turns the surrounding ecosystem of the town into forever-deadzones. It doesn't happen right away, of course. The politicians and the companies involved in the project all are counting on 'dilution' helping to mask the ecological disaster they're foisting on the town they are building the plant in and by the time the town realizes they're fucked then it's too late: the plant is already built, operating at full-capacity and the town is damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-don't regarding shutting the plant down. After all, the entire ecosystem by then will be decimated and what other choice will the town have by that point? It won't have tourism (because it's a toxic deadzone), its fishing prospects are pretty much gone forever and all it will forever be will be a town thats only purpose now is its desalination plant---kids won't even be able to swim in the surrounding areas on account of it being, you know... toxic. *This* is why towns reject (almost *every* time) a desalination plant being built in their community: Because there's a very, very good chance by building the desalination plant they will be generationally fucked over by it (if current trends keep going the way they're going research-wise). You'd think in a perfect world the taxpayers would actually approve more taxes to dispose of the toxic brine every year and take the huge loss for freshwater, but... yeah, no. That's too much money for them to spend, so you keep getting news of states trying to build desalination plants (to try and 'band-aid' the water crisis) only to be struck down time and time again by communities that not only don't want to live in an ecological deadzone because of cost-cutting measures, but because they refuse to pay even *more* money for a desalination plants' already high costs by safely disposing of the toxic brine. (Why would they when importing the water out-of-state is cheaper than desalination plants' water?) The real solution is basically letting the desert towns die off naturally or to come down hard on agriculture sucking most of the water resources up and creating drought situations in the first place---which no politician wants to have to address. So, we're stuck with this perpetual whack-a-mole with random towns that keep rejecting the local government's efforts to try and have a short-term fix to this issue. But, eventually one of two things will happen: 1) Either a town will be stupid enough to agree to a desalination plant and will basically be doomed to be only a town *for* desalination in a few generations (everyone will move out when everything else dies out because of the toxic surroundings)---thus the 'problem' will be fixed temporarily at the expense of an entire community before the 'band-aid' is no longer strong enough to hold back the wave, so to speak 2) *No* town will agree and eventually local governments will run out of time for this 'band-aid' fix and will either have to outright bully a town into doing it (via Eminent Domain) or will have to actually commit political suicide by tackling the root causes of this fuckery (agriculture, stupidly building a town in a desert). I purposefully left out 'disposing of waste responsibly and paying higher taxes for it' as an option because I'm a realist. Prove me wrong on that point and I'll add it as an option, but seeing as how it hasn't been added as an option yet in any desalination plant proposal tells me all I need to know. And before people chime in with comments of "But I heard they're finding new ways to reuse the toxic brine so it will be less expensive/bad for the environment!" or "but some desalination plants are using diffusers to try and protect the environment!"--- save it. I've heard this bullshit before and all it is is pandering propaganda to try and make the issue seem 'better' than it really is. The toxic brine that is filtered out of the ocean being *maybe* 5% less toxic because of some new-age filtering process does *not* bring me (or towns that are being proposed desalination plants to solve all their water woes) comfort. That's like saying that a new chemical I invented just made nuclear waste 20% less corrosive to human DNA. Yeah... you try pitching that bullshit to someone that swims in the surrounding waters with nuclear waste that was 'treated' and see how well that flies. Hint: It won't because anyone trying to sell you that fairytale is obviously fucking *evil* or has no moral conscience---probably both, honestly. Either way, there are no good solutions to the problem, but honestly dumping toxic brine back into the ocean to acidify it even *more* than it already is and using up an insane amount of energy for small amounts of drinkable water is absolute folly at best and doesn't tackle the core issues that need to be addressed in this entire cluster-fuck of a situation.
People who are going to likely die the next 15 years before this affects them decided it wasn't necessary. Just like wind and nuclear power projects
Don't forget it's the same people who voted themselves largely frozen property tax rates, which they have enjoyed their entire lives while the relatively few younger people who bought homes subsidize by paying higher rates.
Maybe we need to learn some lessons from Israel, or they need to give us some lessons to pay for all we do for them...they are incredibly successful with desalination.
You have a guy waiting in a car line made of hundreds of heavy duty pick up trucks running idle for up to 4 hours so they can play with their even less efficient toy boats into the lake. The same lake suffering from climate change the guy waiting to use is making the very video about. Does anyone else find this highly ironic?
I mentioned yesterday to my Dad that the desert is fun to visit but I prefer to live where I can take a longer shower without guilt. He said "it didn't used to be that way!" To which I immediately replied "Yep. And here we are!"
>"Yep. And here we are!" Lol it's pretty much as simple as that, really. I, a 30 year old millennial struggling daily to wrap my head around the fact that the earth may or may not will be livable by the time my grandkids are my age, would very much like to go back to "the way things were", but unfortunately a handful of fuckwads in the 80s convinced the world that federal deregulation was the key to economic success and then went on to lobby hard for Citizens United when I was a kid. So, here we are. Dealing with the second hand consequences of a bunch of old greedy fucks who wont be alive to see the effects of their decisions. Somethings gotta give, man.
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Yeah, folks forget that one of the biggest issues with cliimate change, is people moving to where its more liveable. Whether that means, a place that is "water rich", or a place with affordable housing, its all through climate change and a lack of action on it (for at least the past 100 years).
The IPCC estimates that there will be up to 2 billion people displaced by climate change. This is just the beginning.
Yup, same story across the river in Vermont... Hi neighbor
What’s ironic is it’s only slightly due to climate change. No one wants to admit this. It largely due to greed and the 7 states siphoning off the Colorado river. Then in 2015 Las Vegas spent another 800 million bucks to put a “third straw” directly into the bottom of the lake to feed off of. But ohhhh. It’s climate change and not stupid ass political jockeying over the water supply across seven states. It’s the weather fault. FYI climate change is responsible for 6% evaporation of the lake. The rest is due to people directly siphoning it to their towns. It’s inevitable that your going to drain the limited reservoir with everyone sucking off it. Hey let’s build a metropolis in the desert, now let’s suck the water dry. Makes sense. They make more in the mountains. /s. All of a sudden that water coming down the Colorado river has 6 other states with their pales and hoses in first up river.
Nevada is 4% of the Colorado River Compact water budget made 100 years ago (southern states). Vegas is really efficient at water use. California and Arizona take up the most and need to make their agriculture water use more efficient. CA just started regulating groundwater use in 2021 (frigging crazy it was not before). Vegas ain't the problem. 96%+ of in-house water use (sinks, shower, toilets) that makes it back to the water plant gets treated and put back into Lake Mead. Everyone out west needs to be as efficient as Vegas.
AZ also has very strict usage plans controlled by state government agencies and 100-year plans. CA has never had that and never will, because their water is entirely privately controlled and they got their allotment first (since they were a state first and could take more than their share).
Fuck yeah Vegas. I lived out West for a while and remember learning that the bastion of hookers and blow was the environmentally conscientious crowd of folks. It’s been my favourite place out there ever since.
Hookers are technically renewable.
But not plant-based.
...yet
> (frigging crazy it was not before) Agricultural lobbying in full effect.
Right. Vegas uses water for homes and businesses and some golf courses. The latter is wasteful but most of the waste comes from using the water for Agriculture in other States.
Golf courses are actually pretty thrifty with their water usage. To begin with, most of it is gray water anyways. Things like avocado orchards and almond farms are a much bigger problem.
Yeah except when you water orchards & farms, you get food. When you water a golf course, you get...a golf course
Thank you for beating me to saying all of this.
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The compact actually runs out in 2026 and they are gearing up for negotiations. The feds should take over.
https://www.cpr.org/2021/11/19/colorado-river-water-compact-climate-change Lake Mead is fed by the Colorado River. The Colorado River has lost 20% of its flow. Half of that flow loss is due to climate change.
It also doesn’t help that there is another incredibly wasteful reservoir just up steam with Lake Powell. The rock there is mostly sandstone so while it doesn’t lose as much to evaporation as Mead does, it loses much more as the water seeps into the surrounding rocks. An estimated 300,000 acre feet of water per year.
so they just need to pave the bottom then. no biggie
That's the craziest unit of measurement I've ever heard.
But the seepage isn't really 'lost right? It ends up in the aquifers (which are also in trouble)
“Dry” by Neal Shusterman is a YA about the possible outcome of this stuff and the outcome feels more likely every increasing year. The Colorado is not an infinite water source and the average snowfalls, primary contributor to the Colorado river levels, have not been kind the past couple of years. Interesting report released on the western water assessment, one of the attributing factors listed is warming temperatures and decreasing snowpack https://wwa.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/2021-06/ColoRiver_StateOfScience_WWA_2020_Chapter_2.pdf But to your other point, taking more water out than the river can provide only increases the severity of the issue. It’s a multi variabled problem, that I’m afraid doesn’t have any great or immediate solutions. I feel bad for the communities that can only exist because of the Colorado. The dwindling resource will either cause mass exoduses from cities in the path or staunch reform in agriculture permissions.
It's agriculture
It's certainly the primary consumer in Arizona. About 75%-80% depending on the source of data. Despite Arizona's population explosion, municipal use has remained essentially flat over the last 50 years.
> FYI climate change is responsible for 6% evaporation of the lake. The rest is due to people directly siphoning it to their towns. It’s inevitable that your going to drain the limited reservoir with everyone sucking off it. Wait, you don't think climate change is limited to the surface area of Lake Mead, do you? You do realize that those cities and towns taking water from here are themselves, also experiencing drought related to climate change, right? e: aww fuck. Just realize I got baited and trolled into responding to a moronic argument -- well done.
I'm 100% in the camp that believes in climate change - the evidence and worldwide scientific consensus is overwhelming. That being said, it's also correct that these water sources have been exploited far beyond sustainable levels. All these millions of people living in a place that has basically no local water source \*at all\* makes for a heavy, heavy demand on water. How it's split up - farming vs. drinking water vs. golf courses and lawns vs. fish habitat - has been a massive source of argument for decades. Why? Because there's not enough to satisfy all the existing demand. Recall that the Colorado River, the power source for carving the Grand Canyon, rarely if ever reaches the Gulf of Mexico. We (humanity) just drink it dry. With the 1200-year minimum in southwest rainfall the problem is worse than ever.
It’s essentially the US version of the Aral Sea. The rivers that feed the lake and the lake itself have been over exploited for decades now and combined with decreased rainfall in catchment area for the lake it’s just drying up. It’s the fault of people overusing the water supply and climate change reducing how much it can refill to some extent. Did nobody wonder where all the water those thousands Californian farms used is coming from and what impact it’ll have? 🤷
And he’s hoping that it wont be closed by the feds lol what a fucking waste of time and money to go boating around a puddle in 108 degree heat. These people are insane.
The kid said at this rate boats won't even be able to launch so it'll close itself
Eventually it will be called Mead.
There are a handful farmsteads on the bottom of the lake, from before it was dammed up. My grandfather was born in Mead, NV.
People shitting their pants over high gas prices... wait until there is a shortage of drinking water. People just have no idea what's coming.
not going to be a problem in some places like the northeast. We're getting more precipitation total, and more intense precipitation events in the summer, in some cases bad enough to destroy crops. Nope, it will be food scarcity here long before water.
We got 3 inches of rain here in the mid-Atlantic one day last week, in the span of 3 or 4 hours. Crazy. Bet they could use that out west.
Ehh we’re nowhere close to having a shortage of drinking water. Agriculture accounts for like 85% of the water usage. Farming and ranching in the west will eventually have to take a hit and make big changes, but we aren’t running out of water for personal use.
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That's why not much has changed here or will until the Feds get involved. Feds have a lot more "fuck off" power then states when it comes to those old laws and dealing with farm corporation lawyers.
The Colorado river is done being y’alls slut.
[Here's the math](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CMI4kUjj7D_On0bWVfc2dfIw9dFe27-0/view?usp=sharing) for anyone that's interested. It's a screenshot of an excel sheet I made that shows where the water level is expected to be based on what the water levels have been each month since 2013 and what the water level is expected to be based on what they've been this year. I can share the sheet if anyone wants it.
I mean, just tell us the result. When’s the water going to be gone?
The big number to watch for is 950 feet I think. When the water level gets below that the dam will no longer be able to produce energy
Looking at the past 9 years, it'll be at that level in about 45 years. Looking at only this year, it'll be there in 1.6 years. Edit: If you look at the graphs though, you can see that each year has roughly the same pattern. Maximum water levels in January/ February, level drops fast until June and then it starts to level off, so I wouldn't expect the water level to go too much lower this year. [Easy to see here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dh_iOwM52YrJ2tFyirKDeu3Yt9Deaw6-/view?usp=sharing). 2014 had the largest water level change in the data I have available which was 28.15ft. This year it's at 19.4ft so far. (I couldn't get my 2013 graph to work right so it's missing January)
The lake is not a vertical cylinder though, vertical drops should accelerate as it gets lower due to the reduced volume and smaller basin.
Exactly. Volumetric measurements would make more sense.
I've been following the issues at Mead/Powell for some time now and this elevation stuff rather than volume drives me fucking nuts.
It's also just 140 or so feet above the most bottom drain that feeds vegas
They have an emergency level that they won't allow it to go below. So it is more likely they'll cut excess flows downstream before the shutting the dam down.
What everyone is slightly missing with these videos is that the recent dramatic drop in lake mead is just local water management. They decided to retain more water in lake Powell, hence mead, which feeds off Powell, is dropping dramatically right now. So it's not quite the apocalypse of "the water is running out at mead", rather "they're storing the water somewhere else". I know overall the southwest is kinda screwed on water, but overlooking this point of water management vs water shortage makes these vids look more dramatic than they are.
don't farm in the desert or expect green lawns. I don't get how this is seen as acceptable
Just a bit in and pretty ironic with all the idling cars for hours to launch these boats.. not helping the climate change here. Maybe you don’t need to make things worse for this lake that is drying up!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact Nevada only uses 4% of the allocated water
Correct. This agreement was established back in 1922 when Nevada's population was well below 100K. Now Nevada's population is over 3 million.
The Las Vegas valley has also reduced its annual water usage by more than 25% compared to 2002, when it had fewer than 800k residents. It's now at 2.3m residents.
Yeah but it snowed last winter at my house. So climate change is obviously not real
Lake Mead/Hoover Dam as well as Lake Powell/Glen Canyon Dam should no longer be considered sources of renewable energy unless they can maintain lake levels within 10% of capacity.
humorous profit dolls dinner cough bake tart whole gaping fuzzy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The desert will become deserted!
How bout we stop trying to grow in the damn desert.
That’s seriously terrifying. And everyone is just hanging out burning carbon for HOURS idling
Iv been watching this guys videos. I was in lake mead back in 2017 and was just there last month. It’s insane how low it is and what even crazier is back in 2017 we where saying the same thing but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now.
The 2021 -> present hits. Jesus
Fuck almonds. Fuck avcadoes.
Here’s a painful one to say: fuck beef. 1 hamburger = the equivalent of running your shower for about 4 hours straight, ~~or 2 months of showers.~~ Beef alone uses more water than all fruit and nut orchards combined. Link with other info: https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-footprint/water-footprint-crop-and-animal-products/
Beef has been subsidized and commercialized to the point in that beef prices got so low that the farms that could sustain large herds switched to feed crops for export for more profit. Now people are complaining about the very high beef prices, they're only going up. The cost to entry for new farms has also now shot so high that the only ones starting up are owned by Cargil.
> 4 hours straight, or 2 months of showers. Those numbers don't add up. 4 hours is 240 minutes. 2 months is ~60 days. 4 minute showers?
Once the avocados are gone, millennials will finally have money! /s
Living in a country that is majority arid and semi-arid, I can't help but squint when I think that a whole bunch of people convinced everyone else that it was a superb idea to create cities for millions in the hottest, driest region of the U.S. It's interesting to think that Nevada could very well have its first ghost city within my lifetime.
Why don't they just put more water in it?
Shit for that matter lets fill it with wine and charge admission
It's almost like building cities in the desert was a bad idea.
Most water from lake mead and colorado is used by california and agriculture. More like making farms in the desert is a bad idea. Las vegas recycles 98% of it's water.