
In a Warming West, the Rio Grande Is Drying Up - farseer
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/24/climate/dry-rio-grande.html
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techsupporter
This is what worries me the most about my home region. The surface water is
turning to be unreliable, the groundwater is being siphoned out at an alarming
rate, yet we still continue to add more and more pressure to the system.

Not just farming and agriculture, either. People are moving to Phoenix and
Santa Fe and Dallas and Houston at amazing rates, but the water systems can't
keep up. In the Dallas suburbs, one public water system owns exactly one lake
and has partial rights to three others but all of those lakes drop to alarming
levels almost every summer. Yet, the cities inside that water district keep
adding more and more houses and commercial buildings and water connections
because nobody wants to say "we might not have enough water for those who are
already here." I don't even know if a city government _could_ say that.

But here we are. More people moving into dry areas expecting to be able to
drink, wash, and clean, but with less water every day with which to do it.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Understand that agriculture water use and people water use are not comparable.
There is typically 10x to 20x water use per acre of farm as there is for one
person, Penn state ran some numbers for their region [1], it is even worse in
California where people are literally farming in land that is essentially
desert.

The bottom line is that if people and communities are replacing farmland then
there is a net increase in the availability of water by a large margin.

Something to keep in mind when looking at water availability.

[1] [https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-
estimating-w...](https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-estimating-
water-needs)

~~~
stevenwoo
That's not the only competition for water. In Texas somewhere between 10-50%
(depends upon location) of fresh water is used for fracking, not to be used
again for human consumption for generations, if ever.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-
rises-a...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-rises-as-
fracking-expands/)

IIRC it's even encroaching upon Dallas' suburbs.

~~~
maxxxxx
10-50% is nuts, especially for technology we ideally should want to get rid of
and replace with cleaner energy.

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ianai
To say nothing of all of the other negative external costs of fracking. I wish
one of the carbon cost agreements had gone through.

~~~
zubiaur
The fracking I’m familiar with tries to reuse the fracking fluids as much as
possible. Still some oil and gas activities do consume large quantities of
water: pressure maintenance injection and Steam assisted gravity drain, the
last one is used a lot in the Canadian tar sands.

~~~
stevenwoo
This article is five years old, they don't because recycling costs more than
fresh water from the ground and injecting used fracking water is easy and
cheap. Contrast to Pennsylvannia where they recycle 90% (and I don't think
they had the same drought conditions Texas went through for a long time before
2017).

[https://www.texastribune.org/2013/03/19/texas-recycling-
oilf...](https://www.texastribune.org/2013/03/19/texas-recycling-oilfield-
water-has-far-go/)

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nkrisc
> Others may not have to hope for rain. Chris Sichler, who farms 650 acres
> near San Antonio, has wells to pump groundwater onto his fields should the
> irrigation canals dry up and the rains not materialize. “I’m droughtproof,”
> he said. “When we plant in the spring we don’t even take into consideration
> how much snowpack or surface water there’s going to be.”

What an astonishing attitude for someone who is watching one natural resource
actively disappear. He's only "droughtproof" for as long as the groundwater
remains.

I'm sure past farmers could never imagine the Rio Grande being used up.

~~~
antisthenes
Maybe he means he's droughtproof for as long as he lives, which is a
reasonable assumption (albeit quite selfish).

After all, the Rio Grande didn't dry up overnight, and for someone who was a
farmer, say, 50 years ago, it was reasonable to assume that it would last
their lifetime as well.

~~~
nkrisc
You're probably right, but that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

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lumberingjack
Meanwhile around the great lakes where water is plentiful we are bulldozing
farm land for new homes. I wonder if this could make problems later on when
water is rare out west and the farms can't produce. They will be bulldozing
homes to put the farm land back in because it is near water.

~~~
robohoe
We'll just pump it out and run it hundreds of miles away like it's done with
Lake Mead. What could go wrong?

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diebir
We have not had a good snow year since 2011 or so. The upside is that maybe
Lake Powell will finally dry out. Too many people, too many farms and
ranchers. Desert was not meant for people, it will expel them. Good. The needs
to be wild again.

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rayiner
The south west is a damning indictment of big government short sightedness.
The army corps of engineers diverted all these rivers to create irrigation,
and now you’ve got all these people populating a region that wouldn’t
naturally have been able to handle that kind of population.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
You could say the same thing about CA

Earthquakes, fires and mudslides but it's ok because "surf and ski in the same
day bro".

Something something glass houses, stones, pots and kettles...

~~~
tmh79
california has plenty of water for the people here, we do not have plenty of
water to grow almonds and alfalfa in millions of acres in the central valley.
Agriculture is like 80% of all CA water usage. If you include golf courses and
lawns in that, it bumps it up to ~95%.

~~~
adventured
Water used to grow almonds - 1.1 trillion gallons per year - is just about
enough to provide water for around 23 million people in California (~59% of
the population).

A $5-$6 billion crop, consuming half the residential water for a $2.7 trillion
economy. If you include alfalfa, which is even worse than almonds, it's
something comparable to 150% of all the residential water use in California.

It's a spectacular failure on the part of the state of California. Where are
the famous CA voter propositions when you need them? A large share of the
alfalfa and almonds - aka California's water - gets exported to Asia. It's
social and economic suicide for meager benefits.

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Bjorkbat
In case anyone is wondering why on earth we're growing so much food in the
middle of the desert, you can look to lack of disease as an answer.

I mean, there's more to it than that. The warmer climate means the southwest
has more growing days, but that's kind of a no-brainer for a lot of people.
The disease part is a little less obvious though.

Take a look at grapes. A lot of grapes are grown in very arid environments.
Why is that? Well, that's because grapes are susceptible to a particular
fungus called Black Rot. In parts of the United States with particularly wet
and humid summers, this disease can pretty much destroy your entire harvest.
In dry, arid parts of the country, however, it's unheard of.

So that's just on example, but the rule can apply for just about any type of
fungus. If you are growing fruits and vegetables in a water-rich but
particularly humid part of the United States then you are going to have to
contend with more fungus than those parts of the United States that are
considered a desert.

It's not just fungus either mind you. Pretty much every agricultural pest
known to man thrives in water-rich but humid parts of the country, but is less
common in those parts of the country considered desert.

So, there you go, that's why we don't grow more fruits and vegetables in, say,
southeastern Texas, which is especially wet.

That being said, overcoming the pests that come with humid weather isn't a
terribly hard problem to solve. There are plant varieties out there that have
been bred to be more resistant to humid-weather diseases. Some of these are
even heirloom crops, meaning they've been around for a while. Unfortunately,
there's usually some kind of downside. Maybe the crops in question are less
flavorful. Maybe the yields are smaller. Maybe they don't ship well over long
distances. Each of these are pretty serious commercial considerations that
usually restricts these crops to the niche market of quirky local organic
farmers. When it comes to grapes in southeastern Texas, you're dealing with a
less familiar taste and an utter lack of brand recognition. As a consequence,
southeastern Texas wine producers really need to rely on agritourism to sell
their product, otherwise I doubt a single one of them would be in business.

I see ag-tech as a potential solution, but the end result wouldn't necessarily
be solutions that make urban farming more feasible, but rather solutions that
make it possible to control pests more effectively, preferably in a non-GMO
and organic fashion, so we can grow the same crops cultivars typically grown
in the desert. Removing the various middle-men that stand between small farms
and the consumer would also help. Smaller farms can manage pests more
effectively and they're more open to trying out atypical crop cultivars,
including cultivars that may taste better but have smaller yields or don't
ship well. Problem is, small farms typically aren't economically viable due to
the bargaining power that crop buyers and grocers possess. If you want to stop
growing food in the desert, give them more price bargaining power so they can
at least make a living.

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Animats
This could work out. We can build the Trump Wall right down the middle of the
river.

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cozzyd
I wouldn't put it past Trump to run the wall down the middle of New Mexico.

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mainliningfbs
Those who don't believe in Natural Selection will be victims of it.

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imbokodo
Texas's governor, Greg Abbott sued the federal government to stop climate
change regulations.

Then when Hurricane Harvey hit, he said the federal government needed to give
him over $100 billion for the cleanup.

~~~
warmwaffles
What is your point?

