Now look at them yo-yos, that’s the way you do it,
You play the guitar on the MTV,
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it,
Money for nothing and your chicks for free…
— ‘Money for Nothing’, by Dire Straits, 1985
People getting paid money for playing guitars is certainly one disturbing element of modern society.
The fact that they also get chicks for free is perhaps even more disturbing.
If someone is going to get chicks, we expect them to be doing some kind of honest work. Get their hands dirty so to speak.
Like a farmer, for example. Farmers get their hands dirty on a regular basis. Or at least, they used to.
But times change.
I’m reading where Colorado farmers — and farmers in New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — might get paid for doing nothing, as various governments and environmental groups scramble to keep Lake Powell and Lake Mead from getting completely drained.
I read about this hustle and bustle on the ‘Water Education Colorado’ website. I was feeling a bit depressed over the weekend, and when I feel depressed, I generally pick up the newspaper, because they’re always talking about people who’re worse off than me. It cheers me up.
Times change, but the you can always count on finding bad news, when you really need it. And the ‘Water Education Colorado’ website is a great source of bad news, especially when the American West is suffering from a severe shortage of water.
The story I was reading over the weekend, by reporter Jerd Smith, had the uplifting headline…
Emergency Colorado River rescue plan likely to include more Flaming Gorge releases, payments to cut water use
…and an equally uplifting final sentence, quoting the manager of the Ute Water Conservancy District in Grand Junction, Colorado:
“It’s hard to fill a bathtub when the drain is open,” he said.
He’s not actually talking about a bathtub. He’s talking about Lake Powell. Even during a drought, Colorado and the ‘Upper Basin’ states have been sending almost 3 trillion of gallons of water down the river, every year, trying to keep Lake Powell full, only to watch the water get sucked out by farmers in the ‘ Lower Basin’ — mainly, Arizona and California.
It’s like trying to keep your gas tank full, while raising teenagers who keep borrowing the car.
But more tragic than that, because we don’t even own the car, in this case. Lake Powell belongs to the federal government, and they are worse than teenagers when it comes to wasting money.
When I was raising teenagers, I did what any reasonable father would do. I let my wife Darlene keep the tank full.
And that’s sort of the approach that certain environmental groups have been suggesting.
From Jerd Smith’s article:
Melinda Kassen, a former environmental water attorney for Trout Unlimited and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said watching the Colorado River unravel has been disappointing, because so many people have been trying for years to get the states and the federal government to act sooner.
“This all could have been prevented,” she said, “and it’s particularly painful for me to watch, given that we gave the Upper Basin a chance with the DCP [the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan] to think hard, do a lot of testing and try some things, and they chose to do nothing.”
Well, that’s not exactly the case. It’s not like we did ‘nothing’. Colorado did, in fact, run some experimental programs to see how much it would cost us to pay farmers to let their fields go fallow. In other words, to pay farmers to do nothing.
(I assume, while the farmers were doing nothing, they might pick up a guitar?)
The quote from Ms. Kassen continued:
“We could have stored 500,000 acre-feet in Powell,” she said. “We could have put together a program to pay people not to farm. The water wouldn’t have been lost. Instead we squandered an opportunity to figure out how to do this.”
But the other Colorado River states were sort of sitting on their hands, watching, and waiting for Colorado to drain its annual budget, paying farmers to do nothing. To see how that might work out.
Darlene could have told you how it would work out.
When Colorado noticed that the other states weren’t paying their farmers to do nothing, we canceled the programs and let Lake Powell do its thing. Its thing, being, getting drained dry by California and Arizona.
So it appears that the federal government will probably end up taking control of the river.
As I mentioned, I often go looking for bad news when I’m depressed.
I’m feeling much better today.
Louis Canon
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.
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