Read more here: https://www.counterpunch.org/author/erik-molvar/(Counterpunch) Across most of the arid West, snowpack is low, rainfall is scarce, and residents are staring down the barrel of another year of major drought. Water levels are dropping, native fishes have become endangered, and a battle royale is heating up between western states to decide whose water uses will go unfulfilled.
Right now, water is allocated based on Wild-West-era laws that allowed the first settler who filed a claim to get priority rights to use that water. You could claim as much water as you could use – or squander – with the proviso that any unused water at the end of the season could be hijacked by a downstream water user who wanted more, and that portion of the original water right would be lost forever. Almost always, the first user was a rancher or farmer, because they arrived before the growth and incorporation of towns and cities. This led to today’s absurd reality that the least-important water use (from a societal standpoint) — feed to subsidize cattle in arid environments where they otherwise couldn’t survive — takes precedence over every other use including keeping enough water in rivers and streams for fish to survive.
The Colorado River, which flows through the Grand Canyon, is a prime example of this absurdity. Colorado River flows into Lake Powell are projected to be only 22 percent of normal this year, and could hit record lows. This giant reservoir was built as a “water storage savings account” to allow water to be accumulated during wet years and released during dry years so Upper Colorado River Basin states could meet their obligations under the multi-state Colorado River Compact. But spreading out and slowing down the river maximized water loss to evaporation. And the savings account is already overdrawn, with reservoir levels approaching deadpool levels at which hydropower at the dams can no longer be generated. This scenario occurs ever-more-frequently as climate change produces longer and more frequent droughts. Clearly, there is not enough water in the Colorado River to keep both Lake Powell and Lake Mead at levels that allow for hydropower generation and that prevent dam failure.
Big takeaways
- A new desalination method produces drinking water from seawater without chemical additives.
- The solar-powered system uses specially engineered black metal to absorb sunlight.
- Its self-cleaning surface separates and collects salts, instead of dumping them as harmful brine waste.
- From the salts, the system can extract lithium, a key material for rechargeable batteries.
- The approach could help address global water shortages and growing mineral demand.
Read more here: https://www.futurity.org/ocean-water-d ... -3338592(Futurity) A new desalination method produces drinking water from seawater without chemical additives.
The solar-powered system uses specially engineered black metal to absorb sunlight.
Its self-cleaning surface separates and collects salts, instead of dumping them as harmful brine waste.
From the salts, the system can extract lithium, a key material for rechargeable batteries.
The approach could help address global water shortages and growing mineral demand.
Read more here: https://grist.org/politics/nevada-prea ... s-water/(Grist) Nevada officials have long presented themselves as a voice for compromise and conservation in debates over the Colorado River. The Las Vegas area, home to two-thirds of the state’s population and most of its economy, has become a model of urban water conservation. As the river has declined from overuse and a decades-long drought exacerbated by climate change, southern Nevada water planners built extensive water reuse facilities and implemented tight restrictions on new turf and fountains, dropping the region’s per capita water use by 58 percent in roughly 20 years. Meanwhile, in interstate negotiations over the management of the Colorado River, state representatives have positioned themselves as bridge-builders, sometimes referring to themselves as the “middle basin” between the river’s divided upper and lower basin states.
When the federal government’s new management plan for the river was announced earlier this month, most observers thought Arizona, which stands to take the largest immediate cuts, would launch the first lawsuit over the plan’s implications for its water supplies. So it came as a surprise to many Colorado River experts when Nevada became the first to sue the federal government over the plan this week.
“I expected that there would be litigation, but it was surprising to me that Nevada fired the first shot,” said Anne Castle, former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
Nevada’s lawsuit comes after more than two years of negotiations among the seven Colorado River states and the federal government over how to reduce water use on the declining river. The states failed to reach a long-term agreement before the river’s current management procedures expire in October, leaving the Interior Department to impose its own plan. The federal government’s plan largely relies on cuts to water use among the Lower Basin states — Arizona, Nevada, and California — to prop up water levels in the river’s largest reservoirs. Those reservoirs have been draining so quickly that the dwindling water depth could threaten hydropower and dam operations within months without intervention.
Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-water-report(Common Dreams) The world’s water cycle “has become more erratic and unpredictable,” and recent trends have “serious implications for people and economies in the future,” the United Nations’ weather agency said Thursday, announcing the release of its annual report on one of the planet’s most important natural resources.
Speaking at the launch of the “State of Global Water Resources 2025,” World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Celeste Saulo explained that “some parts of this cycle—such as precipitation, river flow, soil moisture—are fast. They respond to weather within hours, days, weeks. Others, like groundwater and glaciers, are slow. They accumulate or decline over seasons to decades or longer.”
“Traditionally, these slow reserves have acted as the planet’s savings account: a buffer that absorbs bad years so that a single drought or a single dry season does not translate directly into a water crisis,” she continued. “One of the central stories of the 2025 report is what is happening to that savings account. And the simple answer is that we are depleting it. We are spending our reserves.”
According to the WMO’s new report, terrestrial water storage—or the total stored in groundwater, lakes, rivers, soil moisture, vegetation, ice, and snow—has been falling since the mid-2010s. Saulo stressed that “this is not a single bad year, but it is a persistent, decadelong signal.”
The agency also found that 2025 was among the driest years for river discharge worldwide in more than three decades, with below-normal flows over a third of the global basin area—and for the seventh straight year in a row, the number of river basins with “normal” conditions was in the minority.
