Las Vegas: A Water Conservation Trailblazer Amid the Worst Drought in 1,200 Years | WSJ 

only one stat really matters: over 80% of water used in the west is for agriculture. Gotta eat, right? Well, we have abandoned farms all over in the east bc the disconnected, segmented fields aren't easily consolidated into factory farms (except when they are, and those have been consolidated into CAFOs). Plus, some of the food and cattle feed grown in the west is shipped overseas. Bust worst of all: our choices of food types. I'm a meat eater always will be. But i rarely eat beef due to its impact. Chicken is best, in terms of water usage and carbon footprint What world will i leave my young daughter? My parent's generation really screwed stuff up and my gen hasn't done much to help yet

@@burtan2000 Your parents probably thought the same thing about their parents generation. Pointing fingers doesn't fix problems. We all need to work together to create a chicken that tastes like beef.

@@The_Savage_Wombat Yep...Beef is the biggest water waster...so is growing crops like alfalfa, avocados and almonds grown in the middle of a desert....do you realize that many foreign entities (Saudi, Chinese and others) have bought thousands of acres of land in the desert Southwest and received water rights...now they are growing thirsty crops while depleting America's groundwater (which is already depleted in many locations in the West)...Ironically they are sending these crops to their homelands...from one desert to another...and America has ALLOWED this!! America deserves it when all the water is gone!!

In top of that, the constant use of it has caused the central valley to sink. In some areas by 30ft

In kansas treated waste water is pumped back underground since the arkansas river stopped flowing in western kansas in the late 1990s.

Yet they still have hundreds of tropical palm trees. Like replacing them with a different tropical tree that adds shade would be ok but a subtropical or even desert native tree that adds lots of shade would be better. Also they need to stop topping there trees let them grow and be trees if you top or cut a branch you make a maintenance tree. Ok rant over have a good day friend.

Non functional grass unless your a casino or a wealthy snob

wonder how they fight soil erosion

The major portion of the corn plant that is fed to cattle is the stalk and the leaves, usually turned into silage, or chopped and added to a feed mixture, but also consumed as forage in the field after the money crop is harvested. Similarly cows don’t drink whiskey, but they eat the grain that is left after we make whiskey. This gets manipulated by vegans into "omg, they're eating all our human food!!!" This is just upcycling and basic supply chain efficiency.

@@wealth1ness In the SW, much farmland is used to grow alfalfa, particularly in AZ, which is then fed to cattle. The farmers grow alfalfa because stupidly drafted laws impose a "use it or lose it" policy, so if they don't use their full water allocation, they lose it in future years. Corn may be the primary staple for cattle elsewhere, but not in the SW. Besides, we shouldn't be growing much at all in the SW - it's a desert, and we're too stupid to treat it like one, so we give farmers massively subsidized rates on extremely scarce water. I don't want my tax dollars going to pay farmers to use up water in the desert.

I love steak hamburg roast beef and all things dairy. Both my parents and all 4 grandparents grew up on dairy farms. I lived there every summer. BUT , we have to drastically reduce beef and even dairy (beef is worse). It's destroying our environment Agriculture uses 80%+ of the water in the American west. That is INSANE people.

True that actually - the climate of the whole region is changing - it’s permanent not temporary… but wouldn’t that also imply that they eventually have to reduce population and (in the worst case) even abandon some places and move north (or to some place where the conditions are better?)

Well, this will depend on the area. According to the wsj, in Nevada, residents are the largest consumers, accounting for 60% of the year's water usage.

@@CharlesReinmuth They word it quite sneakily, but the graph showed only relates to water use in Las Vegas. They also don't elaborate on whether it is city itself (600k inhabitants) or metro area (2.2M inhabitants). There is no mention of agriculture anywhere.

@@lielakoma this is all fair points. Yet, amount of agriculture use will depend on the area. Blanket statements like the op aren't super helpful. 😕

Yeah, they should quit growing food, that would save water. Do you hear yourself?

Yeah absolutely - California is a huge producer of water intensive crops! I know this because I lived for some time in Canada (a country with much! more water than the Southwest of the US) and in the supermarket the cheapest lettuce was from CA - THIS needs to stop. Other countries in the north with more rainfall should ramp up their production so that CA can stop it altogether (they have Silicon Valley & Hollywood so they are anyways fine on the economic side w/o agriculture)

Isn't Australia suffering from huge floods right now?

It should be required reading in high school instead of some of the garbage they make you read

How can you prove that the beaver is the breaking water ecosystem?

@@user-bo6bg4jt5p they are good for ecosystems

Pine trees not even crops. What a waste of money and resources

The senior water rights that you are referring to are either underground water rights or the rights of the different farmers in each basin state with rich topsoil from millions of years of seasonal flooding ... which is pretty much California and Arizona. Being that the federal government controls what goes to the states, they don't deal with the state-level water rights ... the fed will just ratchet down ALL states' water output at the same time then each state's court system will have to deal with all the bickering over water rights regarding each state's portion of the Colorado River water. As mentioned at 1:37, that's 17% for Arizona and 27% for California. Nevada just gets 2% of which most of that goes to Las Vegas. (Reno gets its water from Lake Reno.) The interesting part not covered in this video was that in the 1990s, there was a push to try to increase that 2% share due to Las Vegas's growing population ... but the city's water czar at the time, Patricia Mulroy, pretty much said, "screw that ... we first need to conserve water better ... I will show you how!" She was the one who pushed for removing grass and replacing with rocks and palm trees and other desert plants and implementing residential drip irrigation and went as far as threatening to sue businesses and other agencies which didn't comply. She would storm out of meetings slamming the door behind her ... and in one meeting, she stormed back in to pick up her cell phone which she had forgotten, and then stormed back out and slamming the door behind her again. She worked with the casino magnates to make sure they were conserving, and when they met her conservation goals, she then ensured them and their investors that their casinos would get the water they needed to continue attracting investments, grow The Strip, and generate even more tax revenue for the city's budget of which a large portion went to her agency, the Las Vegas Valley Water District. Her tactics were a bit aggressive so she ended up with the moniker of "The Water Witch" ... and yet, people got in step with her ... eventually. It took 10 years as the city's water czar before water consumption started declining significantly as seen in the chart at 0:38. She was so successful that when Nevada's state government needed a negotiator to haggle with the water bosses from the other six states shown at 1:37, she was tapped for that. Because of the success she had already achieved in conserving water in Las Vegas, she had a great deal of leverage over the other states and in the eyes of the federal government as well, which was the ultimate decision maker. Even with California having the most reps in the U.S. Congress and making all sorts of excuses why they shouldn't have their water cut and that it should be taken out from the other six states, The Water Witch still got everything she wanted. That's why The Strip is still thriving as of today after housing bubbles and COVID and multiple recessions. Seeing Lake Mead's very low water level now, she doesn't apologize for being a hard azz for so many years ... and rightly so.

Is it done by all the people pulling the levers slot machines to generate electricity? 😆

It's hard water. Yes you can drink it, it's just not the most pleasant.

Someone needs to enforce water conservation laws! They don’t carry guns or anything like that. The name is more designed to convey the seriousness of wasting water than anything else.

I mean... seeding clouds is a thing, doesn't work too well though I think

Plants

You're right Cynthia

Do you even hear yourself

Probable

It's good be aware of that trees would help alot.

BS

Well that’s a lie. Arizona is a water wreck as discussed in various news sources.

No, AZ uses a huge chunk of the water of the Colorado River for agriculture. If these farmers paid residential rates for this cheap water, things would change fast.

actually the big issue here is the grand ditch which takes a majority of snowmelt water away from calorado river

thats not the issue here, the problem is the grand ditch. Which was built to divert allot of the snowmelt water flowing into the colorado river and diverts it east

Nah we good.

Neither should you

It's hard for kids to get the exercise they need running around a cactus garden.

Move to a place where grass grows naturally then if you need it so much. It doesn't grow naturally in the Mojave it shouldn't be planted there either

I hope you mean all states excpet NV. All other states are super guilty of wasting water.

The solution isn't that simple