As negotiations and potential litigation over the Colorado River intensify, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, ultimately responsible for managing the river, would be wise to pull back from high-stakes gambles and take a hard look at the science.
To help explain the secretariat, I’ve packed the best and most up-to-date science into four tight paragraphs below.
First and foremost, in a new report from the University of Colorado Boulder, the industry’s best scientists predict that climate change could reduce Colorado River flows by an additional 30% by 2050, without returning to pre-climate change flow levels.
Second, a new scientific study by the group Truth About Dams explains how massive dam construction on the Colorado River is a source of greenhouse gas emissions. Not only do reservoirs and hydroelectric turbines themselves emit GHGs, but the depletion of 2 million acres of wetlands in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta caused by dams is the largest source of GHG emissions in the entire system.
Third, another new scientific study published in Nature Communications describes how human interventions to capture and manage water can cause further aridity in arid climates affected by climate change. The study shows that “pumping water for farms, clearing land, and damming rivers primarily exacerbated dry conditions.”
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Finally, a recent scientific study published in Nature Water shows that as the climate warms, reservoirs will become warmer and more polluted, emitting even more GHGs than they currently do. The study estimates that reservoir discharges at Glen Canyon Dam’s latitude could increase by 20% to 80% by the end of the century, depending on how much worse climate change worsens.
I call this the “climate doom loop.” Damming and diversion of the Colorado River will cause greenhouse gas emissions and dry the Southwest, and decision makers will accelerate damming and diversion, accelerating greenhouse gas emissions and drying. In addition, hydroelectric power generation using dams and reservoirs generates greenhouse gas emissions, which will increase as climate change intensifies.
In layman’s terms, we create the problem, and our efforts to solve the problem only make it worse.
In 1936, social scientist Robert K. Merton was the first to formally analyze this concept, commonly known as the “law of unintended consequences.” The law is also closely tied to what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy” regarding the Colorado River, where bureaucracies continue to pursue efforts that fail because they have already invested so much time and money.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s current attempt to “save” Glen Canyon Dam, Powell Reservoir, and its hydroelectric power generation is a perfect example of these loops, laws, and fallacies. Glen Canyon Dam has the unintended consequence of causing greenhouse gas emissions that will further dry the American Southwest, but the agency has invested a lot of time and money into Glen Canyon Dam and wants to save it, but as climate change intensifies emissions and dryness will increase further, saving the dam becomes even less likely.
Similarly, the ongoing and planned dam construction boom in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah in the upper Colorado River basin further exemplifies these loops, laws, and fallacies. Denver Water is rushing to bring a new diversion online — a total reservoir expansion project billed as “climate resiliency” — that would further drain the Colorado River at the top of the Continental Divide, accelerating disruption downstream to Mexico and the Sea of Cortez.
Many of the same social scientists and economists also point to solutions to these problems that revolve around looking to the future rather than looking back. “Ignore the past,” they say, and instead ask the following questions: “Even knowing what we know now, would you still choose to do this?”
The inconvenient truth of the Colorado River climate catastrophe loop forces us to look forward, not backward, in search of solutions to address it. The sooner the Landfill Authority starts thinking about the future, the sooner these solutions will emerge. To be clear, these solutions are difficult and controversial, but the reverse will be even more difficult.
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