Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
What are we going to do once all the water is gone? Thanks to the worst drought in more than 1,000 years, the western third of the country is facing the greatest water crisis that the United States has ever seen. Lake Mead is now the lowest that it has ever been since the Hoover Dam was finished in the 1930s, mandatory water restrictions have already been implemented in the state of California, and there are already widespread reports of people stealing water in some of the worst hit areas. But this is just the beginning.
Right now, in a desperate attempt to maintain somewhat “normal” levels of activity, water is being pumped out of the ground in the western half of the nation at an absolutely staggering pace. Once that irreplaceable groundwater is gone, that is when the real crisis will begin. If this multi-year drought stretches on and becomes the “megadrought” that a lot of scientists are now warning about, life as we know it in much of the country is going to be fundamentally transformed and millions of Americans may be forced to find somewhere else to live.
Simply put, this is not a normal drought. What the western half of the nation is experiencing right now is highly unusual. In fact, scientists tell us that California has not seen anything quite like this in at least 1,200 years…
Analyzing tree rings that date back to 800 A.D. — a time when Vikings were marauding Europe and the Chinese were inventing gunpowder — there is no three-year period when California’s rainfall has been as low and its temperatures as hot as they have been from 2012 to 2014, the researchers found.
Much of the state of California was once a desert, and much of it is now turning back into a desert. The same thing can also be said about much of Arizona and much of Nevada. We never really should have built massive, sprawling cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix in the middle of the desert. But the 20th century was the wettest century for western North America in about 1,000 years, and we got lulled into a false sense of security.
At this point, the water level in Lake Mead has hit a brand new record low, and authorities are warning that official water rationing could soon begin for both Arizona and Nevada…
Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US, has hit its lowest level ever. Feeding California, Nevada and Arizona, it can hold a mind-boggling 35 cubic kilometres of water. But it has been many years since it was at capacity, and the situation is only getting worse.
“We’re only at 38 percent full. Lake Mead hasn’t been this low since we were filling it in the 1930s,” said a spokeswoman for the US Bureau of Reclamation in Las Vegas.
If it gets much lower – and with summer approaching and a dwindling snowpack available to replenish it, that looks likely – official rationing will begin for Arizona and Nevada.
And did you know that the once mighty Colorado River no longer even reaches the ocean? Over 40 million people depend upon this one river, and because the Colorado is slowly dying an enormous amount of water is being pumped out of the ground in a crazed attempt to carry on with business as usual…
The Colorado River currently supplies water to more than 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles (as well as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe—none of which lie directly on the river). According to one recent study, 16 million jobs and $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity across the West depend on the Colorado. As the river dries up, farmers and cities have turned to pumping groundwater. In just the last 10 years, the Colorado Basin has lost 15.6 cubic miles of subsurface freshwater, an amount researchers called “shocking.” Once an official shortage is declared, Arizona farmers will increase their rate of pumping even further, to blunt the effect of an anticipated sharp cutback.
The same kind of thing is going on in the middle part of the country. Farmers are pumping water out of the rapidly shrinking Ogallala Aquifer so fast that a major crisis in the years ahead is virtually guaranteed…
Farther east, the Ogallala Aquifer under the High Plains is also shrinking because of too much demand. When the Dust Bowl overtook the Great Plains in the 1930s, the Ogallala had been discovered only recently, and for the most part it wasn’t tapped then to help ease the drought. But large-scale center-pivot irrigation transformed crop production on the plains after World War II, allowing water-thirsty crops like corn and alfalfa for feeding livestock.
But severe drought threatens the southern plains again, and water is being unsustainably drawn from the southern Ogallala Aquifer. The northern Ogallala, found near the surface in Nebraska, is replenished by surface runoff from rivers originating in the Rockies. But farther south in Texas and New Mexico, water lies hundreds of feet below the surface, and does not recharge. Sandra Postel wrote here last month that the Ogallala Aquifer water level in the Texas Panhandle has dropped by up to 15 feet in the past decade, with more than three-quarters of that loss having come during the drought of the past five years. A recent Kansas State University study said that if farmers in Kansas keep irrigating at present rates, 69 percent of the Ogallala Aquifer will be gone in 50 years.
At one time, most of us took water completely for granted.
But now that it is becoming “the new oil”, people are starting to look at water much differently. Sadly, this even includes thieves…
With the state of California mired in its fourth year of drought and a mandatory 25 percent reduction in water usage in place, reports of water theft have become common.
In April, The Associated Press reported that huge amounts of water went missing from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and a state investigation was launched.
The delta is a vital body of water, serving 23 million Californians as well as millions of farm acres, according to the Association for California Water Agencies.
The AP reported in February that a number of homeowners in Modesto, California, were fined $1,500 for allegedly taking water from a canal. In another instance, thieves in the town of North San Juan stole hundreds of gallons of water from a fire department tank.
In case you are wondering, of course this emerging water crisis is going to deeply affect our food supply. More than 40 percent of all our fruits and vegetables are grown in the state of California, so this drought is going to end up hitting all of us in the wallet one way or another.
And this water crisis is not the only major threat that our food supply is facing at the moment. A horrific outbreak of the bird flu has already killed more than 20 million turkeys and chickens, and the price of eggs has already gone up substantially…
The cost of a carton of large eggs in the Midwest has jumped nearly 17 percent to $1.39 a dozen from $1.19 since mid-April when the virus began appearing in Iowa’s chicken flocks and farmers culled their flocks to contain any spread.
A much bigger increase has emerged in the eggs used as ingredients in processed products like cake mix and mayonnaise, which account for the majority of what Iowa produces. Those eggs have jumped 63 percent to $1.03 a dozen from 63 cents in the last three weeks, said Rick Brown, senior vice president of Urner Barry, a commodity market analysis firm.
Most of us are accustomed to thinking of the United States as a land of seemingly endless resources, but now we are really starting to bump up against some of our limitations.
Despite all of our technology, the truth is that we are still exceedingly dependent on the weather patterns that produce rain and snow for us.
For years, I have been warning that Dust Bowl conditions would be returning to the western half of the country, and thanks to this multi-year drought we can now see it slowly happening all around us.
And if this drought continues to stretch on, things are going to get worse than this.
Much worse.
Brawndo. Its what plants crave. Electrolytes, its what plants crave. Either that or juice some of those mexicans. I suggest a Breville juice fountain brand juicer, simply from a durability standpoint. Stainless steel construction and all.
Shades of Sam kinison. Nothing grows here. Not without water.
Could this be the trigger for thefourth turning crisis?
It isn’t only the unusually wet conditions of the west in the early 20th that lulled us into a false sense of security.
We have been lulled into a false sense of security in almost every area of life by the unprecedented and spectacular technological advances of the past 200 years. Look back through history, and, while we read of many societies that have managed impressive achievement in their ability to build and manipulate their environment, they really don’t come near what has been achieved in the past 200 years in Western countries, because these societies did not harness fossil fuels, nor did they experience the unique confluence of freedom, intellectual inquiry, and plentitude of raw materials to work with, that we have had in recent centuries.
The early-to-mid 20th century was the apogee of technical brilliance, and human arrogance. It was the Age of No Limitations, and did it ever feel good. We were going to make every desert bloom and make every river run where we wanted it to. We were going to vanquish every human ailment and bring unlimited prosperity to every human in the country. We were also going to “conquer” space and spread our seed to distant planets.
Worse, we were deliberately and wantonly wasteful. Waste began to be seen as good, and we squandered this continent’s spectacular endowment of natural resources in promoting lifestyles that were prodigiously wasteful, with disposable everything. We shredded our traditional cities in the east and midwest first, to build auto dependent sprawl burbs where you need to make a half dozen car trips a day just to run your daily errands and where a family needs 3 cars just to lead a normal life; then, we trashed and taxed the eastern half of the country to make it possible to put cities with millions of people in them, in the middle of the desert. We encouraged dependence on an ever-expanding array of welfare programs and thus created entire populations of millions of people who cannot fill any useful economic or social roles, not to mention classes of well-positioned parasites who are sucking what there is left of worth from our dying cities and towns and brittle, resource-dependent systems- and who are collapsing our society, city by city, region by region, class by class
Now we are in the Age of Reckoning for the heedless extravagance, wanton waste, and delusional thinking bred by our previous spectacular successes. No one knows how ugly things will get, but that slide downhill sure burns the backside.
The people of California need to rescind their farmers’ sacrosanct water “rights” and make them and everyone else pay a market price for water. They and everyone else out there will only conserve when it saves them money. Quit the BS about shaming people for watering their lawn (or having a lawn). If farmers had to pay an equal prices for water, they’d adopt better practices. If that means ceasing to grow certain crops, so be it. If residential customers saw their water bills quintuple, they’d tell the Delta Smelt to go fuck off. Yes, farmers will drain the aquifers. It’s a prisoners’ dilemma. The cure for high prices (of water or anything else) is high prices. I’m certainly not going to worry about it.
Iska, you are so correct.
When I read about the massive water subsidies that CA growers receive- they pay something like $30 an acre-foot for water that costs thousands of dollars an acre foot to store and deliver to them. In extreme cases too numerous to list, dams have been built that can benefit only a relative handful of farmers, who each receive over $1,000,000 worth of free water benefits, to water crops that are barely worth a few hundred dollars an acre. The dry alfalfa field in CA that caught fire a week or so back illustrates the point- alfalfa is a low-value crop that demands a lot of water to grow, and that could not be grown there without prodigious water subsidies. Meanwhile, agricultural concerns in Alabama, Louisiana, and other boggy states where water-guzzling crops like rice could easily be grown, are paid “price support” subsidies to NOT GROW these very crops.
Makes the same kind of sense as paying unproductive people to have babies while making it difficult and punishing for middle class people to form families.
The federal water projects that made the west as we know it, possible, are together this country’s largest, longest, and most destructive welfare program. Like all welfare, its most destructive effect has been to set up its recipients for catastrophic failure.
@Chicago,
I concur with your post and raise you “belief in magic.”
Human beings understand very little of the world they inhabit. As I constantly note, almost no one grasps the unimaginable complexity of the system that delivers a standard #2 lead pencil to the store.
How then do most people understand a cell phone? A personal computer? An automobile and the fuel that powers it?
They don’t.
To 99.9999% of the world’s populace (including highly educated Americans), most of the technology they take for granted is actually magic to them.
Magic. Think about that for a while.
A populace conditioned to believe in magic that surrounds them can easily spread that belief to magic that is no more real than alchemy. We live in a time saturated with alchemists wearing the white coats of scientists.
What else are economists? “Climate” researchers? Or a host of people publishing studies of crime, sex, race relations, etc. whose conclusions either cannot be replicated or violate every ounce of common sense extant?
We are conditioned to accept the pronouncements of “experts” whose positions are often bat-guano crazy. Emperor’s New Clothes, and all that.
It’s because today we are surrounded by what appears to be magic, and people can’t tell the difference between engineering, science and Cargo Cultism.
In the debate between reason and belief, belief comes first.
Regarding the water shortage, if you think this is all crazy now, just wait.
Wait until the proposals begin to construct pipelines to begin draining the Great Lakes.
Frankly, that’s when civil disobedience should turn to militancy.
d.c. sunsets, there is NO FUCKING WAY that we of the Great Lakes states will permit this.
And, anyway, it would take massive federal money far in excess of what has already been lavished on Western water projects – hundreds and hundreds of dams, aquaducts, and pipelines- over the past 85 years. I have no time to work through the numbers, but given that lifting the water over the 3000 ft elevation of the Tehapachi mountains consumes 5/6 of the power generated by the California State Water project, the energy demands of piping Great Lakes water 2000 miles west AND lifting it over the Rockies- about an 8000 ft lift, is almost unimaginable.
Will CA denizens pay for that? Given that the water supply of the west already is steeply subsidized by the rest of us, I have to doubt it.
CA needs to depopulate by 50%, and having to pay rates for water that would fully offset the cost of providing it, would accomplish that. I have always believed that CA didn’t have a single problem that couldn’t be solved by relocating half the population. Let market forces do that. The agriculture could move to places more appropriate for the respective crops. Same with all the “high tech” that needs prodigious quantities of energy- you can tell how clueless Elon Musk is by the fact that he wants to build a battery factory in bone-dry Nevada. The people could move to cities where you do not have to pay $500K for a 800 sq ft shanty in a slum neighborhood. I mean, if you’re going to live in a slum, why not go somewhere where you can buy a house for $50K in a slum, or even a few thousand, that has an ample water supply and lots of nice farmland near at hand that does not need irrigation?
I didn’t say tapping the Great Lakes made sense. Can anyone imagine Canadians sitting still for that one, eh? (smiling)
But we live in times when, every time you think “they” can’t get more absurd, “they” push things even farther.
Could you have IMAGINED, ten years ago, that having a has-been celebrity publicly discuss having his penis, testicles and scrotum surgically removed, presumably getting surgically-inserted breast implants, taking female hormones (you know, the ones that actual WOMEN don’t take because they appear to significantly raise cancer rates) and putting on women’s make-up would constitute BRAVERY?
On the box of Wheaties? How about putting Bruce’s picture on the poster for, Americans have lost their ()-ing MINDS?
We are so far into Absurdity Land that the Rubicon is no longer even a distant memory.
I put NOTHING beyond the policy prescriptions of a society that has veered so far off reason.
d.c., however senseless our policy makers may be, and yes, there is no limit to their irrationality, there just might be limits to our ability to finance such a project and methinks we are hitting these limits about now. If it’s a choice between financing such a boondoggle, and feeding our war machine, you know what the choice will be.
And very soon, nobody here is going to be able to “finance” anything, as one huge debt after the other is reneged on, and there is no one left, not even the Fed, to buy government or municipal bonds. Seems implausible now, but no one ever thought Wiemar Germany would happen, either.
Watch how things play out here in Chicago. This city, as you surely have heard, is comprehensively, completely, hopelessly broke, and there is formidable resistance already to offering any assistance in the event that we hit the wall completely… an event that looks to be imminent if not immediate. When it happens, all the state laws protecting public servants’ pensions and outlawing municipal bankruptcy will be just so much paper. What isn’t there, isn’t there.
Methinks that within another 5 years, or even less, we will be so hopelessly broke and gridlocked, that almost everything but war spending and welfare entitlements will be tabled.
As John Michael Greer has written, we are in the midst of an ongoing collapse, and collapse is fractal. It hits the most brittle, complex, and dependent parts of a society first, and cascades.
Something about this subject brings out the dipshit in people. It’s only a shadow, don’t be so scared. Iska wants to put farmers out of business. Eat an ipad, you dumb fuck. Chicago and DC are clutching the worry beads. This is a deliberate charade. Refuse to play.
I don’t want to put farmers out of business… .I just don’t want to continue to subsidize farmers in desert states at the expense of farmers in the midwest, southeast, and mid-Atlantic states, which are all more appropriate areas for farming, and which all have vast acreage that farmers are paid NOT to farm.
I ask you, does it make sense to strip-mine every other area of the country to give CA farmers almost-free water in the middle of a desert? Is it fair or just to make farmers in other parts of the country subsidize their competition, to their own destruction?
These Central Valley farmers should never have been there to begin with. Listen, people, the time for spending the wealth of the nation on outrageously uneconomical activities that benefit the few at the expense of the rest of the country, is over. Be it our entitlement programs for the “poor”, or water subsidies for farms in the deserts, or space exploration with the idea that we will one day “colonize” places where we literally cannot draw breath without trillions of dollars in fragile technological props…. anything that exists solely to enable people to live beyond the means of the resources available to them is going to be over, as it should have been a long time ago.
I live in SoCal, where almost every morning I am privileged to see what sure looks like planes spraying stuff across the sky, while we’re in the middle of this 1,000 year drought. Pure coincidence, I’m sure:
http://climateviewer.com/2013/11/16/us-military-discusses-future-of-weather-warfare-despite-enmod-ban/
I agree fully that there should be a market price for water, but there can’t be a free market in water as long as the gooberment is controlling the water supply.
Chicago, you’re making my head hurt.
I don’t want to put farmers out of business. I want to let them go out of business – if that’s what the free market would require (which I doubt).
Iska, farming is how you get to eat, and it’s not always straight line profitable. Tell you what, this is a good discussion subject, when we get a nice piece on the front page, let’s have at it.
If they live off of welfare and don’t work, then let them eat dirt.
Star,
I like to eat. If I needed to pay more to be able to do so, I would. I have nothing against farmers, but I also have nothing special for them. I’m not going to play my guitar for them like john cougar Mellencamp. They sell us a product, and they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it for money. Saying if not for farmers,I couldn’t eat is like saying if not for miners I couldn’t have indoor plumbing. It’s true, but so what? If farmers’ input costs went up, they’d have to raise their prices or quit. Either I could get my food from elsewhere or I’d have to pay more. Whatever. The California drought doesn’t currently affect me. If Californians want to let most of their snow melt run into San Francisco Bay, it’s no sweat off my balls. It’s ridiculous to let CA farmers take a lot of the remaining water to grow alfalfa, though. Californians probably won’t fix the problem until it gets worse. Again, whatever.
Iska, agreed, california not my problem. But this, evidently not known to you, is central planning stuff. Let’s wait for a better essay, and I’ll make my case. They tried it here 15 years ago, I know the playbook
California has over 1200 Golf course’s. If there’s one, just one, green golf course July 1st those Liberal Bastard’s don’t give a damn. Let them eat sand!
The price of mozzarella cheese, and cheddar, will skyrocket. California has some of the largest cheese plants in the US.
Don’t worry, we can stop paying price supports to cheese-head dairy farmers in Wisconsin, so they can ramp up production. You can graze cattle much more cheaply on far less land in wet Wisconsin, than you can the arid west. Maybe we can take a few hundred Wisconsin dairy farmers off their expensive welfare, known as “price supports”. There are quite enough of them to keep this country well supplied with cheese.
Had a farmer client up there a couple of decades back, inherited from another broker who owned a neighboring farm up there. The broker was fired for taking his farmer clients’ money and making “secret investments” away from the firm- he was speculating on commodities with their money and lost most of it. Anyway- this fat, obnoxious, dishonest asshole was getting paid $150,000 a year in “price support” welfare for NOT GROWING ANYTHING on the farm he inherited and never worked an acre of. Wouldn’t you think that if you got paid $150K a year to not work, that you could at least stay solvent enough to not have to barrow money from your customers? And when I talked to his client, the guy, a dairy farmer with a lot more acreage, whined to me that he was about to get the $400,000 a year in price supports he’d been receiving for over a decade, jerked. Boo hoo hoo. I had to get off the call because I just could not act sympathetic.
I thought, how do I get a gig like that? Where’s MINE?? A question many millions of people in this country ask as they watch other people game the system and gather thousands to millions of dollars in welfare both corporate and personal, and tire of being the ones to pay but never collect.
And we wonder why this country is broke. The amounts these two men received were offensive to me in the extreme, being that I worked 12 hours a day for straight commission and as an independent contractor, couldn’t even claim unemployment- no safety net whatsoever. Yet these amounts are piddling relative to the massive subsidies awarded the really huge farming corporations in this country, many of which are massive holdings ranging from a few hundred thousand acres to over a million acres, and many of the largest of which are in CA. Irvine Ranch, which was one of the largest holdings in the state before it was parceled up and sold off to housing developers a few decades ago, was said to have been one of the largest recipients of dirt-cheap water on the taxpayers’ dime.
Too costly to pump water over the Rockies. Great Lakes are safe.
Michael Snyder and others are wrong when they assert that California is in the process of becoming the desert it used to be. The coast, central valley, and mountain ranges cover far more of the state than the desert areas of the eastern and southern regions. There are redwood trees along the coast that are two thousand years old and there are sequoias in the Sierra forests that are at least 4000 years old. There are areas in the valley where the topsoil is 40-50 feet deep. The terrain and native vegetation are too diverse to sustain the desert claim.
Of course, like every other economic component in this country, California Big Agra is certainly as corrupt as it can get away with being. I suspect it is no worse than Iowa or Nebraska, though. I don’t pretend to know the technicalities of water rates for farmers; it would seem, though, that a “fair” price for irrigation water could result in $5.00 tomatoes. Also, one wonders, for example, how bright minds concluded that sucking water out of the gigantic aquifer under the Coachella Valley to grow vast acreage of produce and water dozens of desert golf courses around Palm Springs would not extract a high price down the road (ironically, that area is not yet suffering from the severe water shortages that are manifesting elsewhere – although land at some golf courses is beginning to sink).
It seems the problem is rather simple and has been obvious for a long time: our lovely Mediterranean climate cannot provide enough water for millions of acres of crops as well as keep 38 million people clean, hydrated, and entertained. The tipping point has been passed and now we will see how the crisis will be resolved. We are always awaiting the Big One (earthquake) and now we wait to see if this is the other Big One (drought), either of which will completely rearrange our way of life.
By the way, I know a couple of families in L.A. county who have already been paying $300-$400 a month to keep their lawns watered in the summer, and they do not have extravagant yards.