https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/16/us/colorado-river-water-cuts-lake-mead-negotiations-climate/index.html
Hey gang, check out this open letter written by the head of Nevada's water allocation program. Some choice quotes in there:
"Despite the obvious urgency of the situation, the last sixty-two days produced exactly nothing in terms of meaningful collective action to help forestall the looming crisis,”
“The unreasonable expectations of water users, including the prices and drought profiteering proposals, only further divide common goals and interests. Through our collective inaction, the federal government, the basin states and every water user on the Colorado River is complicit in allowing the situation to reach this point."
Thanks for bringing it to everyone's attention, but damn the lib brain is deep once you're a high level in the institutions
This link will open a PDF
https://www.8newsnow.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2022/08/SNWA-Letter-pdf-combined.pdf?segment=1
Are we ready to see how our completely hollowed out neoliberal government handles a crisis that requires central planning? Yes we are. :antelope-popcorn:
That stood out to me, both in this letter and his one in June. He keeps talking about working together, collective planning, all stuff that is simply impossible between these entities, as we're witnessing
Capitalism is an absolutely zero-sum game. The best case scenario for the land owners is they get bought out by the government, and maybe they get off okay if they're given a decent price. But at least some of them just aren't going to get the water they need to operate their farms, which makes that land utterly worthless. All the value just gone. And unless the feds pony up some very attractive buy-outs no one has any incentive what so ever to be the one who makes a sacrifice. It's a war of all against all.
And of course regardless of who does and does not get water all kinds of small towns, small operations, and lots and lots of workers are going to get totally, utterly fucked and thrown out into the streets of LA or Vegas.
"federal intervention" is theoretically the next option after the absolute failure of cooperation so far, but again, who knows how forceful that will be without actually sending in the troops
there would not be water shortages if we ended large-scale animal agriculture (or even just meat agriculture)
Just outlaw almond farming, grass lawns, and golf courses. The level of "sacrifice" to stop this being an issue is so small.
if you banned golf courses the capitalists would have their chud dogs murdering people in 24hrs
Symbolically and realistically I’d like the think that even the zombie chud contingent could be brought to their senses about the “elite “ assholes who play golf and their crony capitalist culture being the real enemy.
Seems more than a few would be reachable, no?
Keep that picture of Trump, Clinton and Bloomberg together on the fairway handy.
youre being too optimistic about this I think, they'd go nuts.
If you don't believe we can ever convince people to get rid of (most) golf courses, what do you think the chances of a communist revolution are? Buck up!
I think we can convince most people! I just think you'd see violence from some dedicated lone wolf right wing weirdos.
Just outlaw grass lawns
Boomers seem to love mowing down their grass twice a week every time it reaches 2 inches high anyway, revealing all the white spots/dead thatch
Seems like getting rid of the lawn altogether would be more efficient
livestock is literally the lowest category of usage on the Colorado river, its horrible land for it.
grass, intensive cash crops like almonds, and flood irrigation need curbed
That's not accounting for cattle feed, which is an enormous land and water use, and drives the concentration of human-destined crops into places like California
Is cattle feed typically grown locally? I'd think corn/grains at least would be shipped in. I don't know if its economically viable to ship bales of hay in.
The midwest farmland being used to grow cattle feed could be reoriented towards human-destined food. Those places receive way, way more rain than California. I'm looking at the whole US food system: animal agriculture has caused our most critical farmland to be concentrated in a region of the country extremely vulnerable to climate change.
I think that's misleading because although livestock don't directly use a lot of water...
Irrigation of crops is the largest offstream use of water in the CRB, averaging 85% of total offstream use
And a lot of those crops are no doubt food for livestock.
reducing irrigation is absolute. it doesnt matter if it was 100% for human consumption, it must go down.
Damn if only we had a centrally planned economy that could mobilize industry to build out water-efficient irrigation systems across the entire effected area. Alas, that would be communism!
Capitalism is the dumbest economic system.
Agreed, but making it go down by eliminating the large part of it used for livestock feed would no doubt drastically help, which was jack's original (and valid) point.
It's amazing some of these chuds want to kill fbi agents or overthrow the government in favor of their flavor christian nationalism, but giving up steak and watering their lawns so they don't lose their hydroelectricity or just die of thirst is a step too far. Peoples sense of what constitutes a sacrifice is completely out of whack.
but giving up steak
they don't even have to give up steak, they just have to not gorge on it like subhuman fucking fatasses
average amerishart eats 55 lbs of beef a year
I tracked my own consumption and it came to 15 lbs a year
Chinese consumption is about 15 lbs a year
Europena consumption is 30 lbs a yearHow the fuck do you even crave a pound of beef every week? Like, in addition to the other meat/fish/poultry that you eat? What the fuck?
the funniest part is that 55 lbs figure is not at all equally distributed, so it's more like half of us eat 20 lbs a year and the other half eats 90 lbs
people really be out here eating 2 pounds of beef every week, which is equivalent to 1.1 burgers a day--every single day
I don't think most of them can really imagine and internalize the reality of consequences. They're still locked in to just world fantasies where nothing bad will happen to them and they'll always come out on top somehow. Just not having water is too big in scale for them to cope with.
pretty sure they just flatly don't believe that's going to happen, despite all available evidence.
my guess would be they internalize it as "evil commie democrats trying to destroy [their] way of life"
You would have to genocide the ranchers to get them to stop raising cattle. Like you'd literally have to go to war and hunt them down all across the west.
If the Kulaks were like the western rancher quasi-aristocracy then DeKulakization makes a lot more sense.
It’s going to be interesting to see the reaction to the federal government dictating what cuts these states will make.
Idk but it's going to be hilarious watching the government actually do something when there are god knows how many billions of dollars worth of capitalists, some percentage of whom are just going to be screwed. Deciding which states and cities will live and which will die is exactly the kind of central planning the US was built to make impossible.
They say “If you can’t learn to share, no one gets the water!” And give every drop to Mexico
Come on guys. All we gotta do is make a pipe line from the Mississippi. They do it with oil.
Unironically they have the ability to just build loads of desal plants like Saudi Arabia, which alone produces 5% of the Colorado river's freshwater flow rate.
the US has 30x the GDP of Saudi Arabia, and it would require only 20x the desal to completely replace the entire Colorado river (which isn't even needed) so all this means is that the US cares much less for its citizens than Saudi Arabia
this is getting cliché, but remember not to get addicted to water my friends...
Great Lakes Region: Buckle up, motherfuckers. We're coming for our water. Sincerely, the ghost of William Mulholland
Yeah if I was Chicago I'd be forming a regional coalition to fortify the Mississippi. Maybe build some gun boats.
:elmofire: :elmofire: :elmofire: :elmofire:
BURN! BURN! Burn for thy sins!
JUST SLOW DOWN A TINY BIT OF THE WATER INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE
or no just reduce water usage by the 1% that goes into peoples mouths
Hey maybe stop doing fucking flood irrigation for alfalfa plants in the middle of the fucking desert
