Way back in the 1980s, Alaska’s leading entrepreneur, Walter Hickel, proposed an outlandish scheme: why not create two 20’ pipelines from the coast of Alaska to California and sell them the billions of gallons of water? The plastic pipe would be laid from barges much like a water hose, and if a spill happened. . .well. . .it’s water. He was laughed at by pretty much everyone, including most Alaskans. Seems he was ahead of his time now.
OK, so almonds are a relatively thirsty crop. But put almonds up against every other food product combined, and they’re still probably a fairly small percentage of total water usage. Stop growing almonds altogether, and you’d still have a big problem.
Almonds are a problem in general, but very little, if any, are grown in the Imperial Valley. So even if removing them entirely was feasible, it would do nothing to help the Colorado River situation.
California’s water woes aren’t limited to the Colorado River so almonds (and other heavy water usage crops) will need to be dealt with at some point. But they are unrelated to the brewing water war in the OP.
There is a region a ways north of Granby, opposite the west side of RMNP across the valley that the Colorado River traverses, that is literally named the Never Summer Range.
I recall a thread from years and years ago where that subject came up. An idiotic policy that I argued against . It forced me to do some research to see if my gut feelings held water…thank you, It was fascinating to find out how different the reality of rainwater harvesting was compared to the how the water rights owners portrayed it.
Wish I could find that thread, I had links to some interesting papers in it that I couldn’t ever locate again.
Glad to see that the nonsense policy has ended though the “two barrels” limit seems like a pointless restriction.
I’m like two miles from the ocean. Any water I would catch would otherwise be in the Pacific in a few minutes. Those laws were insane.
I think climate change forces us to address these issues now, instead of next year, or in a decade or two. Climate change can be fickle; so far this year western watersheds have above average snowpack, especially in CA. I think that a couple of wet years in the west, and the problems are kicked down the road, again. I think we (humans) are facing numerous icebergs. But we are innovative and adaptive. I just hope that’s enough…
Problem is, the righties still deny that it’s happening at all because they’re in the pocket of the biggest energy abusers. Hard to get anything done when half the country doesn’t believe it to be true.
Another problem is that some people can characterize half the population, and not consider that to be bigotry. Said with humor and all due respect… 
The Antelope valley has both chaparral and desert , but no big cities. Palmdale & Lancaster are not “big cities” (at least in CA, anyway, Lancaster has about 170K, which isnt peanuts, sure, but it ranks like 31st in CA).
Great book, but as you mention, it goes over the history of water in the LA area before it
gets to the disaster- which occurred very near where I live.
Yep, CA even has it’s very own rain forest. Parts of CA are pretty wet. But not most of SoCal.
Los Angeles was chaparral, mostly.
No, they dont grow much in CA deserts. Most of the AG lands were grasslands, with scrub oaks, etc.
Yes, but the Imperial valley is a very small part of CA Ag. CA makes about $50 Billion from Ag. The Imperial Valley produces about $1B of that or 1/50th. CA could give up that % of AG, and still be happy.
Simplistic, but more or less true.
Almonds use about 17% of the AG water usage, and Ag uses 80% of the water in CA.
California Almond Water Usage — California Water Impact Network.
Q: How much of California’s developed water supply do almonds use?
A: Almonds use approximately 4.9-5.7 million acre-feet of water per year, which is up to 17% of the total agricultural water use in California and 13% of the total developed water supply.
Since California’s developed water supply is 43 million acre-feet, 5.7 million acre-feet is 13% of the total developed water supply in California, or conservatively 11% of the total supply.
While there is some desert under cultivation in California, that line was meant as hyperbole. I live in the north east. We get enough rain to fully meet the needs of local crops. Farmers who want to make sure a drought doesn’t kill their trees put in a pond or two, which passively gather rainwater and can be pumped if needed. Maybe potted tomatoes need some additional water. But i have a lawn because i couldn’t keep the grass out of my ground cover, and i don’t irrigate it.
Most of California, including most of the lands under agricultural, need to be irrigated to be productive. And that really does give California a competitive advantage, as long as the water flows. Because those dry summers mean they have few wild plants that are closely related to water-hungry crops. Which means fewer insect pests, fewer diseases, heck, fewer critters that eat the cross. And fewer fungal diseases.
It’s not as easy as “move the crops”, because those same crops are more difficult to grow elsewhere.
OK, that’s a lot more than I expected: Almonds are, indeed, a significant contributor to the problem. But still not enough that it’s accurate to say that cutting all almond production would solve the problem, because 83% of our current agricultural usage is still way too much.
And I’d also like to say that I’m very glad, at least, that we finally have a federal government that recognizes the problem, and was willing to impose an ultimatum on the states, and to enforce it when they failed to do anything.
Perhaps it just seems like half the country because they’re the only idiots one hears from. I have little use for either extreme of the political parties, even less so for the more vocally stupid and willfully ignorant.
Odd, been in Colorado since '75. Never heard of the Never Summer Range. That range is NNE of me. I live on the Mosquito Range. Continental divide. Mt Lincoln and Bross peaks (Fourteeners) are about 1.5 miles away as the crow flies. I see them from my deck on the other side of the valley. I can see people climbing those 14 teeners. With binoculars. I can tell what they are wearing.
My wife and I prefer to sit on our deck, play chess, listen to music and have a beer.
Summer is wonderful. Winter can get… interesting.
My mistake. On one of our trips out skiing, I thought 70 passed reasonably near you. We musta gotten 3-4" today! 
True, but since almonds, all by themselves, use more water than all residential uses- it’d be a good start.
This, plus maybe a tax break on using less.
If I have my geography right, I believe there is a place up in that area that is on-topic, where you can look across one of those alpine valleys and see along the flank of the opposite range the giant metal straw that Denver is using to suckle upon the sweet wet nipple of the western side of the divide.
It might be a small part of CA ag, but it’s almost all the ag usage of Colorado River water. The main agricultural areas of CA are fed from the Sierras.
And given that CA is fighting hard to keep their allotment from the Colorado River, I’m going to say that they would not be happy to give it up.
Yeah. We’ll get right on that just as soon as we fold-up DeBeers.