California’s drought raises questions about the future of the West
California is already grappling with a warmer, drier reality thanks to climate change.
In late April, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in two Northern California counties. Less than a month later, he extended that declaration to 41 of the state’s 58 counties.
“The hots are getting a lot hotter in this state, the dries are getting a lot drier,” said Newsom at a news conference. “We have to recognize that we’re living in a world that we were not designed to live in.”
The declaration comes at the tail end of a five-year drought, and amid what some are calling a megadrought, which can last decades. A study published last year found that this current dry spell, which started in 2000, is the worst in 500 years. And it’s not just California. About 84% of the West is currently in drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
All this leads to larger questions about the future livability of not only the Golden State, but more broadly, the American West. And no one is heeding the warnings.
Ten of the 15 fastest growing cities in the U.S. are in the South or the West, the same areas that are increasingly threatened by these climate impacts. Phoenix, which clocked a record 34 110-degree days last summer, is one of these booming cities, adding 230,000 people in the last decade.
This influx obviously stresses a water-scarce landscape — but it also stresses state budgets. Newsom’s recent declaration came with an investment of $5.1 billion into water resiliency and infrastructure. And though Newsom is using federal stimulus to fund much of this effort, in the future, the government may not be so generous.
Like the ballooning bailout costs of coastal developments wiped out by major hurricanes, the West may soon be in a position to repeatedly rely on billions of dollars of taxpayer money to survive. And just how far the federal government will go is a big question.
Part of the problem is the historical precedent established by the federal government. In the late 19th century, federal officials gave land grants to encourage settlers to move West. The intrigue was further amplified by American ideals of independence, freedom, and adventure.
But since the white man settled there, the West was never a Garden of Eden, as peddled by the politicians of the era — it’s been a land parched, incapable of reliably providing water to its residents.
People chose to ignore these trends, however, going so far as cultivating an agricultural haven, with the little water they had: California now provides a third of the nation’s vegetables and two third of its fruits and nuts every year, an output that requires 34 million acre-feet of water and 80% of California’s water use.
Rather than discourage this behavior, the federal government actively supported it, building extravagant and expensive man-made interventions, like dams, reservoirs, and canals to store and transport all that water. But these interventions made their own mess of problems, ensnaring states in decades-long legal battles, while failing to solve the long-term problem of dwindling water supplies.
Decades later, the West is now dealing with climate change, the ultimate wild card, and it’s pushing the region to its limits. Most of California’s reservoirs are operating at 50% capacity, drought is fueling record wildfires, and yet another water war may already be underway.
According to Newsom, in the last few weeks, the state lost roughly 500,000 acre feet of runoff compared to what was expected — the equivalent of 1 million household’s annual water intake.
“Oftentimes we overstate the word historic, but this is indeed an historic moment,” Newsom said at a news conference, three weeks before the most recent declaration.
Though that ignores the reality of the West: Since its first influx of settlers, the West has always teetered on livability. How livable it will be in the future will depend as much on the climate as our wallets.
