{"id":778,"date":"2026-06-26T14:37:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T14:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=778"},"modified":"2026-06-26T14:37:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T14:37:04","slug":"the-mighty-colorado-is-vanishing-and-the-fixes-are-getting-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=778","title":{"rendered":"The Mighty Colorado Is Vanishing, and the Fixes Are Getting Weird"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story was originally published by\u00a0<\/em>Grist\u00a0and\u00a0is reproduced here as part of the\u00a0<\/em>Climate Desk\u00a0collaboration.<\/em><\/p>

Read more The Anti-Immigrant Supreme Court<\/a><\/p>\n

The crisis on<\/span> the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.<\/p>\n

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has\u00a0balked at resolving the quarrel.<\/p>\n

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply\u2014a reversal of President Trump\u2019s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a \u201cwish list\u201d of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.<\/p>\n

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is something easier for people to agree on,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn\u2019t make it any less worthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

During a\u00a0Senate committee hearing\u00a0last week, the Interior Department\u2019s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn\u2019t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be \u201cthoughtful\u201d about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. \u201cThe basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,\u201d said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.<\/p>\n

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden\u2019s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department\u00a0paid farmers billions\u00a0to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin\u2019s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.<\/p>\n

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.<\/p>\n

Desalination<\/span>As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona\u2019s vanishing Colorado River supplies.<\/p>

Read more They Found Tom Kean Jr.<\/a><\/p>\n

The Interior Department also\u00a0signed an agreement\u00a0in early June with San Diego\u2019s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.<\/p>\n

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.<\/p>\n

Taming tech and power<\/span>Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states\u00a0amid concerns about the tech boom\u2019s growing thirst.<\/p>\n

Squeezing rain from the clouds<\/span>Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River\u2019s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, DC. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding\u2014spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain\u2014has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year\u00a0doing this,\u00a0and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has\u00a0brought about 15,000 homes\u2019 worth of rain\u00a0to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That\u2019s enough to\u00a0close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could\u00a0secure federal funding\u00a0from an administration that loves the tech industry.<\/p>\n

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater<\/span>The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.<\/p>\n

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a \u201cgrave threat\u201d to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.<\/p>\n

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis isn\u2019t a competition; it\u2019s an all-of-the-above situation,\u201d she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.<\/p>

Read more How Brad Lander Won<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desalination. Pipelines. Cloud seeding. 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