Drought and the climate change "hoax" are rapidly depleting the water supply. The Colorado River is running out of water, and Arizona is first on the list for cutbacks. Arizona agreed to that in 1968, in exchange for a 336-mile concrete ditch to haul the water uphill across the desert. California wanted assurances. Arizona gave them and got its canal. "Junior's rights would last forever, and everybody in the room knew what that meant."
It has now happened. On Friday, August 21, Doug Burgum signed the paper. Arizona gives up 760,000 acre-feet a year in 2027 and again in 2028, about twenty-seven percent of its share. California gives up ten percent of its share. Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico give up nothing they are required to give up. They were asked to help. Arizona was told what it was losing.
The Colorado River is a serious current problem, and it will only get worse. Arizona is losing 760,000 acre-feet of river water this year. Not conserving it, not deferring it—losing it, by federal order. After 2028 the losses can run three times that deep. The whole Lower Basin can be stripped of three million acre-feet a year, and Arizona takes the deepest share of it, because in 1968 it agreed to put the Central Arizona Project last in line to get the canal built at all. Arizona has hired Sullivan & Cromwell — the firm currently handling Trump's criminal appeal — which tells you where Katie Hobbs thinks this gets decided. Phoenix takes about sixty percent of its water off the Salt and Verde rivers and forty percent off the Colorado. Groundwater is two percent. The Salt and Verde were always the reliable ones, the local ones, snowmelt off the Mogollon Rim into seven reservoirs. In February, the snowpack in the Salt Basin was two percent of normal. The Verde was at 19. Then in March a heat wave took what was left, and eight western states set record lows for April snowpack on the same day.
Both taps at once. That has not happened before.
Deeper and deeper wells are a temporary solution, but they are mostly not Phoenix's solution. It belongs to the farms and the towns on the edge. Those wells will be depleted as the ground sinks, and the sinking is the part nobody wants to talk about, because when you pump an aquifer faster than it fills, the clay underneath collapses. Arizona has mapped a hundred and sixty-nine miles of earth fissures. Cracks extend two miles in length, twenty-five feet in width, and ninety feet in depth. Nineteen feet of subsidence near Eloy and Luke Air Force Base since the fifties. The state has measured subsidence across thirty-four hundred square miles.
And it is permanent. Once that clay compacts, the aquifer can never hold water there again. Rain could return tomorrow, and the storage is gone. We are not borrowing from our grandchildren. We are currently in the process of filling the well.
God has no prejudice; some areas are flooding, and the West is in drought.
The warnings began in 1856. A woman named Eunice Foote, in Seneca Falls, put a thermometer in each of two glass cylinders, pumped carbon dioxide into one and air into the other, and set them both in the sun. The one with the carbon dioxide got hotter. She wrote that an atmosphere holding more of that gas would give the earth a higher temperature. That is the entire discovery. Kitchen equipment.
Her paper was read aloud at the scientific meeting by a man because women did not read their own papers. It was left out of the proceedings. Three years later, John Tyndall did the same work in London with better instruments and has had the credit ever since. Whether he ever heard of her, nobody knows. The historians argue that her obscurity was due in part to her gender and in part to her less sophisticated tools, which is likely a fair assessment. Nobody buried Tyndall.
Arrhenius did the arithmetic on coal in 1896. By 1912 it was filler in country newspapers in Australia and New Zealand, four sentences between the shipping notices. So call it a hundred and seventy years of knowing and continuing anyway.
That's understandable. Our economic systems depend on growth, and growth has depended on burning fossil fuels. We burned coal and oil longer than necessary, even within our economic system, because the industry spent decades undermining nuclear power. Now it is knifing solar and wind.
In service to whom? That one has a date on it.
April 11, 2024, Mar-a-Lago: twenty-odd oil and gas executives at dinner. Trump asked them to raise a billion dollars and told them a billion would be a deal, given what he would spare them in taxes and regulation. Friends of the Earth put the tax breaks alone at a hundred and ten billion. Eleven thousand percent. The industry drafted his executive orders for him before the election.
They got what they paid for. The tax credits for wind and solar died on the Fourth of July, and the Energy Secretary said he was thrilled. Interior ordered that every solar and wind project on federal land get Burgum's personal signature, not the agency's, his. Wind and solar were barred from the wildlife consultation system everyone else uses. The Corps was instructed to rank permits based on capacity density, which is a criterion that wind and solar energy sources cannot meet by definition. The administration paid Duke Energy a hundred and twenty-nine million dollars to walk away from a finished offshore wind project, and Duke put the money into gas.
The courts have thrown out almost all of it. The administration has lost essentially every case that reached a judge. It does not matter much. An injunction two years late does not unbuild a canceled project. The delay was the product.
And the man who signed the order strangling solar permits is the man who signed away Arizona's water.
Other countries went the other way. Scotland generated seventy-three percent of its electricity from renewables in 2024, ninety-one percent from low-carbon sources, and in a good year it produces more renewable power than it consumes and sells the surplus into the British grid for billions. Last year wind and solar together outproduced fossil fuels across the entire European Union for the first time. Britain closed its last coal plant in 2024. The United States is at about twenty-six percent of its electricity from renewables, which is climbing fast and climbing in spite of Washington rather than because of it.
We voted for Trump; we know what he is and chose to ignore the global warming warnings, so we got what we wanted. Everyone should be happy with their conscious choice. So, I chose to be happy, but our children are fucked, and we're responsible.
Currently the whole world is on fire. More than seven and a half million acres this year, a hundred and seventy percent of average, and the season is not over. The country has been at Preparedness Level 5 since July, which means every federal firefighting resource is committed and there is nothing left in reserve. They sent Army infantry from Fort Lewis. Oregon has lost two million acres. In Spokane a fire took seven hundred buildings and put sixty-five thousand people on the road in a week, the worst disaster in that city's history. Utah has burned a record amount of forest. Nebraska had its largest wildfire ever, in March, in grass.
Ancient forests are being destroyed and replaced by open fields filled with saplings. They will recover, though not in our or our children's lifetimes. The results of global warming are upon us, and it is our choice. I find it hard in my heart to forgive us. Only our stupidity can outshine human intelligence and creativity.
The United States, known for its successful capitalism, if not its democracy, has been a leading contributor to pollution, and supporters of Trump insist on continuing this trend. Windmills bad; gas guzzlers with manual transmissions good. They're getting what they prayed for, and god doesn't give a shit.
Strangely, as we travel through the west, Trump country, there are forests of windmills and acres of solar panels. While Trump opposes renewable energy, his supporters are the first to adopt it. Texas builds more solar than any state in the union. Almost all the new generating capacity in this country this year will be renewables and batteries. The man with the sticker on his tailgate is leasing his back forty to a wind developer and cashing the check because the check clears and the sticker doesn't.
Phoenix is facing a dire situation, and it has more alternatives than the rest of the state does. That is the whole story, and it is uglier than running out.
The city holds senior rights, water banked underground, three hundred million dollars of new pipe, and lawyers. It is building plants to purify sewage into drinking water. It already ships half its treated effluent thirty-six miles west to cool Palo Verde, the largest nuclear plant in the country and the only one on earth that does not sit beside a body of water. Four million people already get their power off Phoenix's toilets. Soon the residents will drink it back. Let them drink shit. They will be fine.
The farms go first, because farms are always last in line, and they use seventy percent of the state's water. Then the subdivisions out past Buckeye and Queen Creek, built on a pump and a promise. Three years ago, the state ran its groundwater numbers again and found it had certified about five million acre-feet more hundred-year supply than exists under the basin. Half a million planned houses stopped. The builders sued and won on procedure, and now it is a lawyer's annuity.
Phoenix will not die of thirst. It will bill its way out, and the people who can pay will stay, and the ones who cannot will go somewhere else and be somebody else's problem. Out past the last streetlight the ground will keep dropping four millimeters a year, and one morning a fissure will open under a road they paved last spring.