[RL/Drought]

New water cuts coming for Southwest as Colorado Rive...

Welp. This is gonna get ugly.

Especially since I don't doubt for a moment that the MAGA repubs up for election in November (and beyond) are gonna try and claim its just federal overreach and if you vote for them they'll refuse to make the cuts / stop them, etc.

Even though, no, that is authority clearly delegated to the federal government and its to keep us all from running out of water in the middle of a fucking desert

Most important words: california has not had to make cuts yet

That is going to be a MAJOR problem.

Yeah, that's because of the stupid way the water rights are managed

which basically boils down to "first come, first serve" which...doesn't really work out so well at this scale

it's why they've been spared so far

and why states with nowhere near the population or water usage of California were already having to make cuts while California could just continue as they were

because we came later

yep. and it's not like *there hasn't almost been armed conflict before'

shit this is done so fucking stupidly

if the government had actually listened to the guy they sent down the Colorado River we also wouldn't HAVE this problem

Powell straight up warned them "hey, this area is prone to extremely long droughts and you shouldn't open it for settlement outside of a few small areas-"

"Settle all of it? Excellent."

like, just try to find his proposed map of what territories should be made and where, it's a hell of a lot different from what we have now

There's also the part where the water allotments of the Colorado River were based on the ten wettest years in recorded history.

once again showing that the US government ignoring scientists until it's way too late is something of a national tradition

ban nestle and almond farming and shit