Question for more broad group: Will politicians end up moving agriculture development elsewhere to preserve the water? Will they build a de-salination pipeline from the rising ocean to the river? Strategist with opinions?
They can make the water more expensive / less available to encourage movement, but that's about it.
Viewed through that lens, I come back again and again to: We don't really have a water problem -- we have a water-pricing problem. Charge more for water, particularly marginal-use water, and a lot of problems in this space are reduced or eliminated.
Marginal analysis. Must have done an economics course.
Marginal analysis only works on the margins. If the Colorado river is producing 2/3 of the water that is actually being used (if I read the article correctly) they are a long way from the margins and marginal analysis will not help.
If they had set the prices correctly at the beginning, but the silly people probably relied on market mechanisms, which only work on short time frames.
The actual problem, fundamentally, is that our engineering capabilities ran away from our economic and political control mechanisms a century ago, and the chickens are coming home to roost.
Even more fundamentally our problems are cause by the greed and hubris of a small but powerful section of the population tat will not listen to reason
Changing the water prices in the southwest will hit consumers across the US.
What do you mean by this? We would surely produce more calories per gallon of water if we, say, swapped beef with chicken (or plants). I guess we might not replace beef with beef, but that wouldn't be a replacement, so that wouldn't make sense.
For example, maybe lettuce grown and sold from California can be bought at $2/head. If you were to truly factor in the misuse of water, maybe the cost should be $3. Maybe at $3, lettuce grown in Florida, Oregon, Vermont and Iowa is cost-competitive. A lot of maybes, sure, but the point is that if you were to charge for the water what the water actually should cost, then that cost actually gets built into the system, and the market can work. You can't have your cake and eat it - for a market system to work, you need to actually allow pricing to reflect the actual costs.
There is cool documentary episode on them on Amazon Prime, show called Off The Cuff and episode called Earthships.