This transcript has been edited for size and readability.

California and Arizona are at the moment
combating one another over water from the Colorado River. However this isn’t
new — it’s truly been occurring for over 100 years. At one level, the states actually went to struggle about it. The issue comes all the way down to some actually unhealthy math from 1922.

To some extent, the disaster might be blamed on local weather change. The West is in the midst of a once-in-a-millennium drought.
As temperatures rise, the snow pack that feeds the river has gotten
a lot thinner, and the river’s predominant reservoirs have all however dried up. 

However that’s solely a part of the story:
The USA has additionally been overusing the Colorado for greater than a
century because of a byzantine set of flawed legal guidelines and lawsuits often called
the “Regulation of the River.”
This authorized tangle not solely has been over-allocating the river, it additionally
has been driving battle within the area, particularly between the 2
largest customers, California and Arizona,
that are each making an attempt to safe as a lot water as they will. And now, as a
large drought grips the area, the legislation of the river has reached a
breaking level.

The Colorado River begins within the
Rocky Mountains and winds its means southwest, twisting by way of the Grand
Canyon and getting into the Pacific at Baja California. Within the late nineteenth
century, as white settlers arrived within the West, they began diverting
water from the mighty river to irrigate their crops, funneling it
by way of grime canals. For a short while, this labored very well. The
canals made an industrial farming mecca out of desert that early
colonial settlers considered as “nugatory.”

Even again then, the most important water
customers have been Arizona and California, which took a lot water that they
began to empty the river farther upstream, actually drying it out.
Based on American authorized precedent, whoever makes use of a physique of water
first normally has the strongest rights to it. However different states quickly
cried foul: California was rising a lot sooner than they have been, they usually
believed it wasn’t honest that the Golden State ought to suck up all of the
water earlier than they bought an opportunity to develop. 

In 1922, the states got here to a
resolution — sort of. On the suggestion of a newly appointed cupboard
secretary named Herbert Hoover, the states agreed to separate the river
into two sections, drawing an arbitrary line midway alongside its size at
a spot known as Lee Ferry. The states on the “higher” a part of the river —
Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — agreed to ship the states on
the “decrease” finish of the river — Arizona, California, and Nevada — what
they thought was half the river’s total circulate, 7.5 million acre-feet of
water annually. (An acre-foot is sufficient to cowl an acre of land in a
foot of water, about sufficient to produce two properties for a yr.)

This settlement was imagined to
stop anyone state from drying up the river earlier than the opposite states
might use it. The Higher Basin states bought half and the Decrease Basin states
bought half. Easy.

However there have been some severe flaws to this plan. 

First, the Regulation of the River
overestimated how a lot water flowed by way of the river within the first
place. The states’ numbers have been primarily based on primitive knowledge from stream
gauges positioned at arbitrary factors on the waterway, they usually took samples
throughout an unusually moist decade, resulting in a really optimistic estimate
of the river’s dimension. The river would solely common about 14 million
acre-feet yearly, however the settlement handed out 15 million to the seven
states.

Whereas the states weren’t in a position to
instantly use all this water, it set in movement the underlying downside
immediately: The states have the authorized proper to make use of extra water than truly
exists within the river.

And also you’ll discover that the Colorado
River doesn’t finish within the U.S. — It ends in Mexico. Initially, the Regulation of
the River simply straight-up ignored that truth. A long time later, Mexico was
squeezed into the settlement and promised 1.5 million acre-feet, additional
straining the already over-allocated river.

On high of all of this, Indigenous
tribes that had relied on the river for hundreds of years have been now compelled to
compete with states for his or her share of water, main to those drawn-out lawsuits that took many years to resolve.

However within the short-term, Arizona and
California struck it wealthy — they have been promised the biggest share of
Colorado River water and may have been primed for progress. For
Arizona, although, there was a catch: The state couldn’t put their water
to make use of.

The state’s largest inhabitants
facilities in Phoenix and Tucson have been lots of of miles away from the river
itself, and it will take a 300-mile canal to convey the water throughout
the desert — one thing the state couldn’t afford to construct by itself.
Bigger and wealthier California was in a position to construct all of the canals and
pumps it wanted to divert river water to farms and cities. This allowed
it to gulp up each its share and the additional Decrease Basin water that
Arizona couldn’t entry. California’s highly effective congressional delegation
lobbied to cease Congress from approving Arizona’s canal challenge, because the
state needed to maintain the Colorado River to itself.

Arizona was livid. And so, in 1934,
Arizona and California went to struggle — actually. Arizona tried to dam
California from constructing new dams to take extra water from the river,
utilizing “army” power when needed.

Arizona despatched troops from its Nationwide
Guard to cease California from constructing the Parker Dam. It delayed
development, however not for very lengthy as a result of their boat bought tousled in
some electrical wire and needed to be rescued.

For the following 30 years, Arizona and
California fought about whether or not Arizona ought to be capable of construct that
canal. In addition they sued one another earlier than the Supreme Court docket no fewer than
10 instances, together with one 1963 case that set the document for the longest
oral arguments within the historical past of the trendy courtroom, taking 16 hours over
4 days and involving 106 witnesses.

That 1963 case additionally made some fairly
massive assumptions: Regardless that the states now knew that the preliminary
estimates have been too excessive, the court-appointed knowledgeable stated he was “morally
sure that neither in my lifetime, nor in your lifetime, nor the
lifetime of your kids and great-grandchildren will there be an
insufficient provide of water” from the river for California’s cities.

A number of years after that courtroom case, in
1968, Arizona lastly struck a fateful cut price to make sure it might declare
its share of the river. California gave up its anti-canal marketing campaign andthe
federal authorities agreed to pay for the development of the 300-mile
challenge that will convey Colorado River water throughout the desert to
Phoenix. This transfer helped save Arizona’s cotton-farming business and
enabled Phoenix to finally develop into the fifth-largest metropolis within the
nation. It appeared like successful — Arizona was flourishing! 

However in change for the canal, the
state made a fateful concession: If the reservoirs at Lake Powell and
Lake Mead have been to run low, Arizona, and never California, could be the
first state to make cuts. It was a choice the state’s leaders would come to remorse.

Within the early 2000s, as an enormous
drought gripped the Southwest, water ranges within the river’s two key
reservoirs dropped. Now that each Arizona and California have been absolutely
utilizing their shares of the river, mixed with the opposite states’ utilization,
there abruptly wasn’t sufficient melting snow to fill the reservoirs again up. A shrinking Colorado River couldn’t sustain with a century of rising demand.

At this time, greater than 20 years into the
drought, Arizona has needed to bear the most important burden. Because of its
earlier compromise many years earlier, the state had “junior water rights,”
which means it took the primary cuts as a part of the drought plan. In 2021,
these cuts formally went into impact, drying out cotton and alfalfa
fields throughout the central a part of the state till a lot of the panorama
turned brown. Nonetheless, these cuts haven’t been sufficient.

This century, the river is barely
averaging round 12.4 million acre-feet. The Higher Basin states
technically have the rights to 7.5 million acre-feet, however they solely use
about half of that. Within the Decrease Basin, in the meantime, Arizona and
California are gobbling up round three and 4 million acre-feet
respectively. In complete, this overdraft has brought about reservoir ranges to
fall. It’s going to take loads various wet seasons to repair this downside.

So, for the primary time for the reason that Regulation
of the River was written, the federal authorities has needed to step in,
ordering the states to scale back complete water utilization on the river, this time
by practically a 3rd. That’s a jaw-dropping demand!

These new cuts will lengthen to
Arizona, California, and past, drying up 1000’s extra acres of
farmland, to not point out cities round Phoenix and Los Angeles that rely
on the Colorado River. These new restrictions may even put elevated
stress on the various tribes which have used the Colorado River
for hundreds of years: Tribes which have water rights will probably be pressured to promote
or lease them to different water customers, and tribes with out acknowledged water
rights will face elevated opposition as they attempt to safe their share.

And Arizona and California are nonetheless
combating over who ought to bear the most important burden of those new cuts.
California has insisted that the Regulation of the River requires Arizona to
shoulder the ache, and from a authorized standpoint they could be proper. However
Arizona says additional cuts could be disastrous for the state’s financial system,
and the opposite 5 river states are taking its aspect.

Both means, the painful cuts have to come back from someplace, as a result of the Regulation of the River was constructed on math that doesn’t add up.