The mighty Colorado is vanishing, and the fixes are getting weird
Low water levels and a receded shorline at Lake Powell are marked by the bathtub rings on April 30, 2026 in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, near Big water, Utah. RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty
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The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse.
The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.
“The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future.”
This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the Upper Basin states, led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico), and the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.
Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew of projects that could increase supply—a reversal of President Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.
Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river.
“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”
During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators in both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.
The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of Joe Biden’s administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry.
The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants and desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.
Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.
Desalination
As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015 and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to the Interior Department requests as much as $6 billion to build one across the border in the Mexican state of Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.
The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.
But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.
Taming tech and power
Nevada uses less water than any state on the river and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries: power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but they dominate usage in the Silver State.
The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.
Squeezing rain from the clouds
Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it.
These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington, DC. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding—spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain—has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.
In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.
Mining a hoard of desert groundwater
The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.
This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.
The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.
“This isn’t a competition; it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the wish list sent the Interior Department.
Badenoch blasts 'moaning' female Labour MPs over Burnham jobs 'quota'
Kemi Badenoch has told Labour women to earn a job in Andy Burnham's Cabinet instead of demanding they are handed jobs because of their gender.
The Tory leader lashed out today amid reports that female MPs are demanding the de-facto new prime minister introduce a 50:50 gender split 'quota' in his government.
Amid reports that former foreign secretary David Miliband is being lined up to return to the role, possibly with his brother Ed as Chancellor, one female minister also complained that Burnham could not have 'more Milibands than women' in the top posts.
But in a scathing article in the Times today Mrs Badenoch told them to 'stop moaning' and get chosen on merit instead of retreating into 'more of the failed identity politics that is holding back our country'.
'There are many, many reasons why you shouldn't have any Milibands in the cabinet,' she said.
'But complaining that the boys haven't given them the right jobs or that the boys are taking all the jobs, just shows that Labour's women still don't get it.'
The idea of quotas was also attacked by Baroness Jacqui Smith, Labour's Skills Minister.
Asked by Times Radio if Mr Burnham should reserve jobs for women, she said: 'No, I think what Andy Burnham should be doing is building the very best team around him to change this country.'
A letter written by the Women's Parliamentary Labour Party has called on Mr Burnham to ensure a 50:50 split between men and women in government jobs
Amid reports that former foreign secretary David Miliband (above, right, in 2010) is being lined up to return to the role, possibly with his brother Ed as Chancellor, one female minister complained that Burnham could not have 'more Milibands than women' in the top posts
But Mrs Badenoch told them to pipe down and get chosen on merit instead of retreating into 'more of the failed identity politics that is holding back our country'
A letter written by the Women's Parliamentary Labour Party and seen by the BBC has called on Mr Burnham to ensure a 50:50 split between men and women in government jobs after he succeeds Sir Keir Starmer.
'We are asking you to demonstrate this change from day one and address the toxicity and misogyny within our own party and government,' it said.
Labour has never had a female leader, while the Conservatives have had three, and Mrs Badenoch urged the government to follow its meritocratic example.
'If you run a meritocracy, then you do not have to worry about jobs for the boys,' she wrote.
'Every woman who is a Conservative MP, every woman who has ever won the leadership, has had to fight to get where she is.
'By contrast, Labour women are demanding guarantees from Burnham. But the truth is he doesn't have to give any guarantees.
'If none of Labour's women are prepared to get their hands dirty and challenge him for the leadership, their demands are toothless.'
'In fact, it's quite revealing that the women's parliamentary Labour Party has written to Burnham asking him to commit himself to at least 50 per cent female ministers.
'This has nothing to do with meritocracy. It is yet more of the failed identity politics that is holding back our country.'
