Pop quiz, two questions, no Googling or even thinking too long about it:
1. What’s the most immediate and negative human impact of peak oil?
2. What’s the most immediate and negative human impact of climate chaos?
If you answered “no oil” to the first one, give yourself one demerit. If your answer was “higher prices for oil and everything made with or from it”, give yourself half credit. If you said, “a high probability of increased prices for oil and oil-based products”, you get full credit, the gold star, and the job of hall monitor next week.
On the second question, if you said anything about higher temperatures, flooded coastal cities, tropical storms, or any of the other dramatic things that leap to mind, well, don’t get too attached to that Hall Monitor title. If you said something about shortages of fresh water and pointed out that it’s already happening, then break out that box of gold stars again.
My point in this seeming silliness is that we’re all guilty at one time or another of making knee-jerk assessments of large and complex problems, and we all too often latch onto the Big, Scary things that make intuitive sense to the parts of our brains that evolved skills for getting through the night without being turned into Purina Cheetah Chow. But that was then, this is now, and if we work hard enough at sticking to the facts, we’ll be more than adequately “rewarded” with enough things that scare us spitless.
Like water shortages caused by climate chaos….
The southwestern United States is moving headlong toward an environmental catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions.
The already drought-prone region is almost entirely dependent on a shrinking snowpack and sparse rain in the Colorado River Basin. As the planet’s climate changes, an already overtaxed and volatile water supply is expected to get even more unstable.
“A lot of people say that in global warming there will be winners and losers. In the Southwest, we’ll be in the losers’ category,” University of Arizona climatologist Jonathan Overpeck said at a symposium on global warming’s effect on the Southwest.
Overpeck discussed the latest scientific consensus on climate change at the Feb. 19 symposium, hosted by the Urban Land Institute at the Palms.
He was joined by Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy, who discussed what can be done on a local, national and international scale to head off disaster.
The problem of climate change in the Southwest is fairly complex, but can be summed up in one word: water.
The Southwest is the most persistent hot spot on the globe and has a history of severe drought.
As a region, we depend almost entirely on the Colorado River Basin for our water, and all climate change projections estimate that the basin will be among the most heavily hit by drought as the world warms. Most projections say the region will warm by about 7 degrees by 2050 and 10 degrees by the end of the century.
…
The most up-to-date climate models available show that if humans reduce carbon emissions significantly starting now, water flow in the Colorado River Basin will be reduced by 5 percent to 40 percent over the next few decades.
If we do nothing, it will be worse, Overpeck said.
…
“The United States is a voracious consumer of natural resources,” Mulroy said. “Those days are over. We can’t afford to use natural resources at the rate we’re currently using them.”
Much also must be done to halt growing production of polluting fossil fuel-fired power plants in China and India and to fund retrofits or replacement of polluting power plants in poorer nations around the world.
That change has to start at home, Mulroy stressed.
“We need to be part of the solution,” she said. “We can’t be in the eye of the storm and not look at our carbon footprint and energy sources.”
To start, she suggests massive regionwide management and conservation of water resources. This includes regulation of the agriculture industry, indicating what crops can be grown in drought-prone areas, decreases in water consumption by residents and industry, widespread wastewater recycling and more efficient management of snowmelt and rainfall through underground catchment basins.
She also said it’s essential to tap into alternative water sources for urban areas such as Las Vegas.
“The most daunting thing is adaptation, and adaptation has to happen at all levels from large institutional changes to individual behavioral levels,” Mulroy said.
By all means, go read the whole thing.
I honestly believe that over the next three or four decades, “solving” the water problem in the Colorado River system will be tougher than getting the US through the (likely) plateau and then (surely) decline in world oil production. We have far more options for greatly reducing the oil intensity of of the US economy than we do for further reducing the water intensity of Las Vegas and surroundings. What is the water equivalent of a PHEV or EV? (Think carefully about all the relevant factors, including all the ways we use water, what steps have already been taken to conserve it, and the lack of substitutes for fresh water, before blurting out an answer; this is by far the toughest question in the pop quiz.)
