WASHINGTON — After months of fruitless negotiations between states dependent on the dwindling Colorado River, the Biden administration on Tuesday proposed setting aside legal precedent and saving what remains of the river. by reducing the amount of water evenly distributed, reducing the amount of water delivered to California, Arizona and Nevada by a quarter.
The scale of those cuts and the prospect of the federal government unilaterally imposing them on the states were unprecedented in American history.
Overuse and a 23-year drought made worse by climate change threatened to provoke water and electricity disaster throughout the West. The Colorado River provides drinking water to 40 million Americans as well as two states in Mexico and irrigate 5.5 million acres of farmland. Electricity is generated by dams on the river’s two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, providing electricity to millions of homes and businesses.
But the river’s flow has recently fallen by a third of its historical average. Water level in Lake Mead and Lake Powell are so low that the water may soon fail to turn the turbines that generate electricity — and may even drop to the point where the water cannot reach the intake valves that control the flow out of the reservoir. If that happens, the river will essentially stop moving.
The Biden administration is doing its best to prevent that condition, known as deadpool. But it faces a political and ethical dilemma: How to share the necessary cuts.
The Department of the Interior, which governs the river, released a draft analysis on Tuesday looking at three options.
The first alternative is to take no action — a path that could pose a risk to the deadpool. Two other options are to make cuts based on top-level water use or to distribute them evenly across Arizona, California and Nevada, by reducing water supplies by up to 13% from what each state has agreed to. idea.
If the changes are based on seniority of water rights, California, of the seven states that are the largest and oldest users of Colorado River water, most will be exempt. But that would be hugely damaging to Nevada and force serious cuts in Arizona: drinking water drains to Phoenix and Tucson would be reduced to near-zero.
“Those are consequences that we don’t allow to happen,” Tommy Beaudreau, deputy secretary of the Interior Department, said in an interview on Monday.
Water shortage in the United States
The consequences of climate change and aging infrastructure are increasingly being felt across the United States.
Arizona and Nevada are both key swing states for President Biden, should he decide to run for re-election next year. Both states also have Senate seats valid for Democrats to be voted on in 2024.
Chuck Coughlin, a political consultant who worked for former Republican governor Jan Brewer, said that if the Biden administration can limit the pain Arizona has caused, he has “no doubt” it will. politically favorable to Mr.
Another challenge with letting cuts fall disproportionately in Arizona: Doing so harms Native American tribes that depend on that water and their rights to it. that is guaranteed under the treaty. Governor Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila Indian Community, which enjoys a significant portion of the Colorado River’s waters, said the goal should be “a consensus approach that we can all live together.”
Dividing the cuts equally will reduce the impact on Arizona’s tribes, while helping to protect the state’s fast-growing cities. But it would hurt Southern California’s agricultural industry, which feeds the nation, as well as lead to lawsuits. Long-standing legal precedent, commonly known as river law, is the allocation of water based on seniority of rights to water.
Draft analysis did not officially confirm any of the selections; A final analysis is expected this summer and it may include other approaches.
But Mr Beaudreau said he was “quite assured” that an even distribution of the cuts would help the department achieve its goals — preventing water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell from dropping below dangerous levels, protecting health and safety, and not beyond the legal authority of the department.
He defended the government’s willingness to abandon long-standing rules on rights to water, arguing that the shocks of climate change cannot be predicted once those rights have been agreed upon from the start. many decades ago.
The proposal marks a new and painful phase in America’s efforts to adapt to a decades-long drought in the West. So far, the federal government has responded to drought primarily by paying farmers, cities, and indigenous tribes to voluntarily use less water.
The Interior Department has accelerated that approach, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to conserve water along Colorado. But it’s not necessarily enough.
Beaudreau said he wants Colorado-dependent states to reach an agreement so the federal government doesn’t have to impose the cuts. In addition to Arizona, California, and Nevada — the so-called lower basin states, which draw water from the Colorado River primarily from Lake Mead — that group includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, which draw water directly from the river system.
The federal government has only the power to impose cuts on watershed states that depend on water drawn from Lake Mead and Lake Powell. As a result, the draft analysis focuses on how the cuts are distributed among those three states.
At a press conference to announce the results of the assessment, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s lead negotiator in the Colorado River negotiations, endorsed the idea of cutting each state’s share. He said Arizona has long sought what he calls “a fair outcome.”
John Entsminger, Nevada’s lead negotiator, said that while he is still reviewing the report, his state generally favors a fair approach to the cuts.
He agrees with the Home Office’s assertion that cutting water primarily by seniority may no longer make sense in times of climate change.
Mr. Entsminger said in an interview: “We have 19th century laws, we have 20th century infrastructure and we have 21st century climate. “And those three things don’t match. together.”
The Southern California Metropolitan Water Authority, one of the largest users of Colorado River water, said it was concerned that the options reviewed by the federal government would lead to painful cuts.
The district’s superintendent Adel Hagekhalil said in a statement: The draft proposal “is a strong indication of what could happen if we fail to reach consensus.”
However, recent experience has shown that getting countries to agree to an alternative system of reductions is a difficult requirement.
Last summer, the water level in Lake Mead sink to all-time low. The department gave the states two months to agree on a plan to reduce their Colorado River water use by about 20 to 40 percent of the river’s entire flow. The states disagree; The federal government has taken no action.
Last fall, the department again asked the states to come up with a plan. In January, six of the states — all but California — reached an agreement: They proposed that most of the cuts come from California.
California, in return, offers own plan: The majority of the cuts must come from Arizona.
Since then, the countries have continued to negotiate without reaching an agreement. The Interior Department made clear on Tuesday that it would still welcome an interstate agreement, which it could study in its final review due out this summer.
According to Sharon Megdal, director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Water Resources Research, two things could increase the likelihood of states reaching an agreement.
First, an unusually wet winter reduced the size of the cuts needed to avoid deadpools. But Dr. Megdal stressed that the pardon was only temporary; yet another bad winter “could put us back in real danger.”
The second reason an interstate agreement is now possible is that, after months of negotiations, the federal government is finally ready to act, says Dr. Megdal.
“They are showing that they are going to tell the states what to do,” she said. “Now it will be up to the states to say, we have a better idea — and here it is.”
