For those who say the American Southwest is up a creek without a paddle in terms of the future water supplies in the Colorado River Basin, they can take comfort in the fact that at least Interior Secretary Ken Salazar now has one.
Hard to imagine in a year when snowpack up until recently has been more than 200 percent of normal in the Colorado River Basin and its major tributaries on the state’s Western Slope, but the long-term prognosis for the river that provides water to more than 30 million people in the Desert Southwest is not good. A new interim report released this week by the federal government, Colorado and six other states along the river suggests that “by mid-century the average yield of the Colorado River could be reduced by 10-20 percent due to climate change.
A victim of the ongoing federal budget battle, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is backing off of last December’s Wild Lands Order, which would have compelled the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to make millions of acres of federal land eligible for wilderness protection.
Population growth on Colorado’s Front Range and Western Slope, coupled with rising demand for energy production, will have the state in dire need of more water by the year 2050, according to a new report by the Statewide Water Supply Initiative.
A pair of articles on the future of two very different Colorado rivers this week in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel and the Denver Post surfed right past the very real environmental concerns presented by ongoing energy development.
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