Originally published at: Lake Mead at 35% capacity – marking an all-time low | Boing Boing
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It’s the largest in the United States, but Lake Kariba on the Zambezi river spans two countries and has almost five times the volume and ten times the surface area of Lake Mead.
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Nestle sells plastic with public owned H2o inside that they get for next to free.
There’s another piece to this unsolvable puzzle! /s
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almonds and rice (wtf!?) are two crops in the Sacramento valley that really need to be retired.
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Why, who could have possibly foreseen this?
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From a water-used-per-calorie-of-food standpoint both of those crops still fall far below meat production.
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The climate emergency has ruled out Vegas as a place I’d like to live. This is one of the reasons why.
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Newly online!
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Being super fucking hot is why I’d never live there.
I got some family that move to Phoenix, and I think they are fools 
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I think it is a shame that the engineers didn’t call it Pumping Station: Limbo (how low can you go?)
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Pumping Station: What nothing is wrong?
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I was under the impression that most almonds and rice are, as you say, in the Sacramento Valley, which is generally north of the delta, north of Stockton. I don’t think that Lake Mead water goes that far north. It’s the San Joaquin valley that’s between Stockton and, say, Bakersfield. Even then, doesn’t Lake Mead water go to the Inland Empire, like Brawley, El Centro? That’s a whole different region.
I was down at Anza Borrego recently, and in planning for that, checking out maps. The satellite maps really show what areas south of the Salton Sea are irrigated. And what’s not. It’s strikingly apparent.
BTW, I used to follow the summer tomato harvest from the south (Calexico) to the north (Woodland) as a field service tech on harvesting machines.
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I recently considered moving back to Albuquerque, but ruled it out for the same reason. Very glad to be a mile from one of the Great Lakes.
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Deserts should not have golf courses, non-xeriscaped/-xeno gardens, baseball diamonds, football fields, soccer pitches, nor massive fountains. All are ridiculously unnecessary water wasters. You live in a desert, you should live like it’s a desert.
It is beyond infuriating that the next big soccer thingy will be held in Qatar, run by the corrupt AF big soccer league, in a vast stadium built with imported slave fucking labor, in a fucking desert where it routinely reaches 1000℃. [← That last bit’s hyperbole, but still!]
It’s also beyond infuriating that the Oakland As baseball team may well move its franchise to lost wages, of all the unsuitable AF places.
Cities in AZ are growing at such rates, it’s becoming untenable water-wise. It would be more tenable should grass lawns what require watering and golf courses be eliminated.
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This is really interesting. In California people talk a lot about the evils of almonds (a gallon of water per almond for anyone unaware) but calories-per-gallon-of-water-used is not a metric people talk about. Clearly they should, because beef is off the charts on that:
That said, almonds are killing the aquifers in central California without a doubt, so we do need to stop growing those.
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If I remember correctly the only commercially farmed animal protein that has a return on calories-per-unit-of-water even close to plants is insect protein.
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Yet even the baby-eating protagonist in Snowpiercer found that source of protein to be off-putting. Guess we’ve still got a public perception issue to solve.
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Ball fields can be surfaced with artificial turf, but heaven help you if you try to play a game or practice on a summer afternoon. When my daughter played soccer tournaments on turf in the desert, her feet would cook. I used automotive heat shield tape on the inside of her shoes to reflect some of that heat away from her feet.
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