Certainly. On that, everyone in this thread agrees. As has been said main times upthread, we shouldn’t be growing almonds and alfalfa and the other silly water-heavy crops. No arguments here.
Strong agree here as well. Efficiency should come first in all climate-change mitigation efforts. In many areas, efficiency is most or all of the wins needed.
For sure. Unfortunately, I think we will end up at “engineering solutions” in this case, not because it’s a good idea, but because the political clusterfuck that is western water rights will never be sorted out. The incentives in the system are all wrong, and the incentives to fix it are not present for the people who need to do the fixing. That was my thesis at the top of this thread, though I didn’t articulate it well initially.
Short of some sort of Federal court order to redo the whole system of water regulation and rights across western states, I’m not sure there’s any way out of this. We literally have farmers growing alfalfa to intentionally waste water so they don’t lose their allocation. That’s a seriously broken system that needs to be nuked from orbit.
