The environmental wackos keep trying to paint this as a global warming issue. In reality, it’s an overpopulation and residential planning issue. The massive explosion in growth all throughout the Southwest has outpaced the water supply from the Colorado River watershed and what the Hoover Dam can release.
Actually it’s an over farming issue. In California urban water use is only 10% of the total human use and only half of that is residential.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
Nevada only gets 300,000 acre feet per year which is dwarfed by California water use from that river. Vegas also is the USA leader in recycling water every drop that hits a drain inside a home or business in Vegas gets cleaned up and put back into lake mead to be used again. Casino’s only use ~3% of Nevada human use water and they see 40,000,000 visitors per year that’s an amazing feat of water recycling and conservation efforts.
https://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2014/aug/24/how-our-water-goes-toilet-tap/
California dumps 5 million acre feet of water per year to grow grass in the desert that never should be allowed to be grown there. This is obscene waste of water. Growing grass under ET rates of 60” per year that’s FIVE FEET per sq foot of land area in water depth that must be provided via irrigation this should be a federal crime the EPA should outlaw it post haste under the interstate commerce clause due to the water crossing at least 4 state lines.
“About 1,000,000 acres of alfalfa are irrigated in California. This large acreage coupled with a long growing season make alfalfa the largest agricultural user of water, with annual water applications of 4,000,000 to 5,500,000 acre-feet.
Evapotranspiration
The crop water use or evapotranspiration (ET) is evaporation of water through leaves of the water uptaken by the plant and direct evaporation from the soil. Seasonal values of alfalfa ET range from about 33 inches in the Intermountain Area of northern California to about 60 inches in the Imperial Valley (Table 1). The different values, obtained from a recent study on alfalfa ET reflect climate characteristics of the various locations”