Quantified: Redefining Conservation for the Next Economy by Joe Whitworth

Author:Joe Whitworth [Whitworth, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, Rivers, political science, General, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, science, Environmental Science
ISBN: 9781610916141
Google: xFdjCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2015-09-08T23:41:14.213521+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Lessons from an Aussie Water Shock

IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN to Las Vegas, you’ve probably seen the elaborate hotel fountains that shoot 500 feet into the air. You’ve probably swum in a Roman-themed swimming pool or played golf on a lush course kept green by hundreds of sprinklers. Maybe you’ve even ridden around in a gondola on an artificial canal modeled after the city of Venice.

Yet like a lot of things in Las Vegas, the seemingly endless supply of water is an illusion. The city, whose population has skyrocketed from 400,000 to two million residents over the last decade, relies on Lake Mead for 90 percent of its water.1 But the problem is that Lake Mead is running dry.

Created by the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, Lake Mead was filled to the brim less than 2 decades ago. But in 2000, the nation’s largest reservoir started to drop, and today it is about 40 percent full.2 If the water level drops below 1,000 feet above sea level, Lake Mead will be too low to carry water through the two tunnels that supply Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and several states. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. Today, Lake Mead stands at about 1,100 feet above sea level. If we continue to gobble up water at the current rate, the water level will sink far below 1,000 feet, with a 50 percent chance of becoming a “dead pool” by 2036.3

Anticipating the crisis, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has been busy drilling a new $1-billion tunnel to suck up the last remaining water as the water level continues to drop. In addition, Las Vegas wants to build a $15.5-billion pipeline that would pump groundwater from an aquifer 260 miles away in rural Nevada. But environmentalists are challenging the proposal, and so far the courts have agreed with their argument that the project would harm habitat for trout, birds, deer, and elk.

In the meantime, Las Vegas has taken significant steps to cut back its water use. It’s subsidizing the cost of water-efficient appliances. It’s offering a rebate program to convince residents to rip out their grass lawns.4 And it’s been recycling almost all water used indoors by its 40 million annual visitors and returning it to Lake Mead.5

As admirable as these actions are, they’ve been no match for the scope of the problem, and Las Vegas continues to lose its gamble with water. “The situation is as bad as you can imagine,” said Tim Barnett, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s just going to be screwed. And relatively quickly. Unless it can find a way to get more water from somewhere Las Vegas is out of business.”6

Las Vegas isn’t the only place that’s hurting from a diminished Colorado River (figure 7.1). For 6 million years, the 1,450-mile river flowed from the snowy Rocky Mountains in Colorado southwest through seven states, emptying 14 million acre-feet of freshwater into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.7 Yet today, the Colorado

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