There is enough water for human consumption, but agriculture is over in the basin. There simply isn’t enough water forward looking for the water intensive crops in question.

https://coloradoriverscience.org/Agricultural_water_use

It seems more and more likely the next Great War will be fought over water.

As a Canadian, I get nervous when I see the US running out.

Life will be fine. Exporting alfalfa from the Imperial Valley, however, might be done for.

Who would’ve thought that growing water intensive crops in the middle of the desert and growing cities like Phoenix with suburbs with lush green lawns at a much higher rate than rest of the country was going to be without consequences.

I recommend folks here read "The Dreamt Land" by Mark Arax. I just started it so it might be a premature recommendation, but it has been doing a great job for me as a new California resident of explaining the interaction between business/agriculture and the desert landscape.

I wonder if I'll live to see the evacuation of Phoenix and Las Vegas. (Or Abu Dhabi, for that matter.)

When the West was settled it was widely believed that the act of building a town attracted rain. The 'atmosphere' of human buildings in an area would naturally attract and collect rain from the heavens. Many of the original methods used to estimate water, rainfall, and other essentials for human survival were wrong.

Most of them are catalogued in the outstanding Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - an excellent book with an outstanding audiobook too.

https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...

This year was the first year I finally realized how things are going to be from now on and only getting worse. I’m a gardener and the plants are having such a tough time, many trees in my neighborhood are already bare from dropping their leaves from the heat. I’ve been looking into just landscaping with native plants moving forward that can handle the heat. I have drip irrigation, but that does nothing when air temps stay above 100 for days on end. The world isn’t prepared for this in any way. What happens when the breadbasket of your country gets like this?