In the mean time, the national media continue to zero in on our ecological ticking timebomb along the Colorado River… Well, that is, when they’re not cutting back their climate change coverage to focus on the critical “Breaking News!” of billionaires shooting themselves into outer space.
As we hinted last month, the Colorado River’s water levels are dropping so low that it’s virtually guaranteed that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will officially declare a “Tier One Shortage” at Lake Mead next month. As we look at the growing possibility of a more permanently diminished Lake Mead, we must again ask ourselves: Have we been ignoring the basic laws of Mother Nature and economics for far too long?
Most likely next week, we’ll return “To the Water Front” to examine some critical lessons from the ongoing saga of St. George’s spiral of sprawl, that one attempt to extend the Las Vegas metro area into Lincoln County that ended in ghastly scandal, how a system of reservoirs in Colorado and Wyoming tie into our situation in Nevada, why the recent thunderstorms are nowhere near enough to end the current “mega-drought”, and why both urban planning and water resource planning must be part of any and all efforts to address climate change going forward.
