Lake Mead is drying up. The biggest reservoir in the country just dropped to 1,040.4 feet above sea level, the lowest it has been since they filled the thing 90 years ago. That beats the old record set in July 2022 by a whisker, and here is the part nobody in charge wants you to dwell on: they have had four years to fix this, and it got worse.
Federal data confirmed the new low on Friday. The Colorado River Basin just came off the worst snowpack winter on record. No snow means no melt, no melt means no river, no river means 40 million people across seven states, tribal nations, and Mexico are all staring at the same shrinking glass. Farmers, ranchers, whole towns. But sure, let’s have another task force.
Here is how the game works. Seven states, California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah, were told to figure out how to share what is left. They could not do it. They could not agree on a long-term plan for a river that is literally vanishing. So the federal government rode in last week with a “short-term proposal” that amounts to California, Nevada, and Arizona taking turns eating the losses. A band-aid on a hemorrhage. And they call it leadership.
NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsAsk yourself who benefits from a system where nothing gets solved until the crisis is so bad that nobody has a choice anymore. The big agricultural operations in California’s Imperial Valley will get their water. The developers in Phoenix and Las Vegas will keep pouring concrete. The little guys, the family farms, the small towns, they will be the ones told to conserve. Funny how that always works.
Then there is the fish. Federal officials announced Thursday they will not release cool water from Lake Powell through Glen Canyon Dam to protect a threatened native species whose habitat sits between the two reservoirs. They chose hydropower over the fish. Now, I am not a fish guy. But if you have been lectured for years about how every environmental rule is sacred and how the experts have it all under control, watching those same experts sacrifice an endangered species to keep the lights on should tell you something. The priorities shift the moment the powerful feel the heat. The fish was useful when the water was high. Now it is expendable.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell together are at their lowest combined level in nearly seven decades. In 2022, the drought got so bad that human remains turned up in the mud at Lake Mead and Las Vegas had to extend its intake pipes deeper just to keep pumping. Bodies in the reservoir and the response was to pump from lower down. That is the establishment’s answer to everything. Do not fix the problem. Engineer around it. Bill the taxpayer. Move on.
Jay Huang from Pleasanton, USA (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsAnd here is a detail the Associated Press buried at the bottom of their own story like it was nothing. The AP’s water and environmental coverage receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The Waltons. The biggest retail empire on earth, bankrolling the news you read about water policy. You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether the coverage of who gets cut and who gets protected might be shaped, just slightly, by the people writing the checks. But go ahead, trust the experts. They have done a terrific job so far.
Years of overuse, drought, and rising temperatures. That is the official explanation. Overuse by whom? Drought caused by what? They give you the what and never the who, because the who has lobbyists and the what does not. The Colorado River did not mismanage itself. Seven states did not fail to reach an agreement by accident. The feds did not wait until the reservoir hit a 90-year low because they were caught off guard. They waited because crisis is leverage, and leverage is power.
The water is almost gone. The people who let it happen are still in charge. And they are already writing the next short-term proposal.
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