Phoenix to limit new construction due to water concerns.

About time they figured out how much each area can hold and then limit those areas that can't cope.

However you get the feeling that people will start attacking this, simply because it's fun.

No ... they build anyway ... without water service ... Rio Verde residents have been trucking water in from Scottsdale, but Scottsdale doesn't have enough water to send anymore ... {Cite} ...

"Despite months of work and disagreements among neighbors in pursuit of solutions, that deadline came and passed with no plan — and Scottsdale turned off the taps. Now, residents are in a crisis and bitterly divided." ...

Roll on, Columbia, roll on ...
 
That was four words.

Humans can and have ate for centuries without the crops or cattle in Arizona.

Count how many words this is and tell us how this is what you require to live, these are Arizona's largest crops.

Pecans, Dates

Arizona gets their human-consumption food from California ... the alfalfa is shipped to Saudi Arabia ...

"Oregon is the number one U.S. producer of: blackberries, hazelnuts, peppermint, cranberries, rhubarb, grass seed, florist azaleas and Christmas trees." ... we have water ... still cheaper to buy food from California ...
 
Fifty miles south of the U.S. border, at the edge of a city on the Gulf of California, a few acres of dusty shrubs could determine the future of Arizona.

As the state’s two major sources of water, groundwater and the Colorado River, dwindle from drought, climate change and overuse, officials are considering a hydrological Hail Mary: the construction of a plant in Mexico to suck salt out of seawater, then pipe that water hundreds of miles, much of it uphill, to Phoenix.

The idea of building a desalination plant in Mexico has been discussed in Arizona for years. But now, a $5 billion project proposed by an Israeli company is under serious consideration, an indication of how worries about water shortages are rattling policymakers in Arizona and across the American West.

On June 1, the state announced that the Phoenix area, the fastest-growing region in the country, doesn’t have enough groundwater to support all the future housing that has already been approved. Cities and developers that want to build additional projects beyond what has already been allowed would have to find new sources of water.

State officials are considering whether to set aside an initial $750 million toward the cost of the desalination project, although Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has yet to endorse it.

“Desal in Mexico is a highly likely outcome for Arizona,” said Chuck Podolak, the state official in charge of finding new sources of water. Last year, lawmakers agreed to give his agency, the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona, $1 billion toward that mission. He said whatever water project gets built “will seem crazy and ambitious — until it’s complete. And that’s our history in Arizona.”

Desalination plants are already common in coastal states like California, Texas and Florida, and in more than 100 other countries. Israel gets more than 60 percent of its drinking water from the Mediterranean.

The Arizona project would be unusual because of the distance involved and the fact that the state is landlocked. The water would have to travel some 200 miles, climbing more than 2,000 feet along the way to reach Phoenix.

“We live in a world with gravity,” said Meagan Mauter, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and an expert on desalination. “The minute you have to move water around, you have huge fixed costs.

The plant would allow Arizona to continue growing — but at a high cost.

It would flood the northern Gulf of California with waste brine, threatening one of Mexico’s most productive fisheries. It would carve a freeway-sized corridor through a U.S. national monument and UNESCO site, established to protect a fragile desert ecosystem. And the water it provided would cost roughly ten times more than water from the Colorado River.


 
There is no natural resource like water

water = life

Anecdotally, i built my farm on a site the last on burnt down on

I dug a hole, threw lumber on top, and called it home

But the BIG turnabout was when i could get water

That was like when Moses struck the rock in the desert

at least to me.....


~S~
 
It is so dry in the Midwest we have not had rain for weeks. Hot and dry (beautiful weather, actually, sunny and low humidity). Anyway, 8 days ago the weather people were talking about rain tonight into Sunday, and now the forecast is to receive 0.10" of rain. The air is just too dry and most won't make it to the ground. No rain in the extended forecast.

Farmers are anxious right now.
 
Not in Phoenix. Geography was never your strong point.
We could pump from the Gulf of California. The distance looks to be less than 150 miles through open desert. There is already a nuclear power plant near Tonopah forty five miles south west of Phoenix for power. Pump raw seawater into the US and do the distillation near Phoenix to minimize the sensitive infrastructure in or near Mexico. No real technological challenges other than dealing with the extremely corrosive sea water. It could even be done in open aqueducts rather than pipelines to cut costs.
 
Nuclear power is needed everywhere

Desalination requires a nuclear power plant
Actually it doesn’t, Catalina Island has had an operational desal plant for a couple of decades. All you need is either electricity for a powered plant, or hot sunlight for a passive evaporative plant. I’ve seen evap unpowered solar stills in liferafts. They aren’t terribly efficient, but they are cheap and totally environmentally friendly.
 
Actually it doesn’t, Catalina Island has had an operational desal plant for a couple of decades. All you need is either electricity for a powered plant, or hot sunlight for a passive evaporative plant. I’ve seen evap unpowered solar stills in liferafts. They aren’t terribly efficient, but they are cheap and totally environmentally friendly.


The warmers have sued to stop desal because of the "brine" issue.

They used taxpayer funding to sue too...

Desal is something we need now, but in the future the human population growth must stop.

Stop population growth and increase desal, and completely defund the Co2 fraud - what is best for the actual Earth environment
 
In what could be a glimpse of future as climate change batters the West, officials ruled there’s not enough groundwater for projects already approved.
That is a lib lie

Phoenix is in a desert that existed long before European settlers decided to move there

Its a growing population problem that has nothing to do with the lib climate change doomsday hoax
 
We could pump from the Gulf of California. The distance looks to be less than 150 miles through open desert. There is already a nuclear power plant near Tonopah forty five miles south west of Phoenix for power. Pump raw seawater into the US and do the distillation near Phoenix to minimize the sensitive infrastructure in or near Mexico. No real technological challenges other than dealing with the extremely corrosive sea water. It could even be done in open aqueducts rather than pipelines to cut costs.
which is a good idea, but is it a good idea if the water is for industrial sized agriculture, if the water is for agriculture than we are subsidizing pecan production

or, we subsidize pecan growing in south carolina, north carolina, georgia, alabama,

the only thing that happened to all the water, is not drought or anything like that, it is simply every state now has now built their own allocation and they have reached the limit of the colorado river.

Greed, I remember 20 years ago they had no water for new development now they are trying to get around the limits of nature.
 
That is a lib lie

Phoenix is in a desert that existed long before European settlers decided to move there

Its a growing population problem that has nothing to do with the lib climate change doomsday hoax
there is enough for the population, just not enough for agriculture to grow what normally gets grown on the east coast.
 
Actually it doesn’t, Catalina Island has had an operational desal plant for a couple of decades. All you need is either electricity for a powered plant, or hot sunlight for a passive evaporative plant. I’ve seen evap unpowered solar stills in liferafts. They aren’t terribly efficient, but they are cheap and totally environmentally friendly.
yes, all you need is electricity, which california and the west is running out of, have run out of
 
Seems they are being forced to accept reality. Of course, most of the limitations fall on affordably priced new construction, while the big budget stuff will still get built. Money talks.


Arizona Limits Construction Around Phoenix as Its Water Supply Dwindles


In what could be a glimpse of future as climate change batters the West, officials ruled there’s not enough groundwater for projects already approved.

Arizona has determined that there is not enough groundwater for all of the future housing construction that has already been approved in the Phoenix area, and will stop developers from building some new subdivisions, a sign of looming trouble in the West and other places where overuse, drought and climate change are straining water supplies.

The decision by state officials marks the beginning of the end to the explosive development that has made the Phoenix metropolitan region the fastest growing in the country.

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, gets more than half its water supply from groundwater; most of the rest comes from rivers and aqueducts as well as recycled wastewater. In practical terms, groundwater is a finite resource; it can take thousands of years or longer to be replenished.

The announcement of a groundwater shortage — what the state calls “unmet demand” for water over the next hundred years — means Arizona would no longer give developers in areas of Maricopa County new permits to construct homes that rely on wells for water.

Phoenix and nearby large cities, which must obtain separate permission from state officials for their development plans every 10 to 15 years, would also be denied approval for any homes that rely on groundwater beyond what the state has already authorized.

The decision means cities and developers must look for alternative sources of water to support future development — for example, by trying to buy access to river water from farmers or Native American tribes, many of whom are facing their own shortages. That rush to buy water is likely to rattle the real estate market in Arizona, making homes more expensive and threatening the relatively low housing costs that had made the region a magnet for people from across the country.

“We see the horizon for the end of sprawl,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

“There is still capacity for development within designated cities,” Ms. Porter said, referring to cities whose growth plans had already been approved by state water officials. Those cities would not be able to get approval to build anything beyond that amount.

The new restrictions would be felt hardest and most immediately in small towns and unincorporated swaths of desert along the fringes of the Phoenix metro area — where most lower-cost homes tend to get built. “Those have been hot spots for growth,” Ms. Porter said.

The announcement is the latest example of how climate change is reshaping the American Southwest. A historic 23-year drought and rising temperatures have lowered the level of the Colorado River, threatening the 40 million Americans in Arizona and six other states who rely on it — including residents of Phoenix, which gets water from the Colorado by aqueduct.

Rising temperatures have increased the rate of evaporation from the river, even as crops require more water to survive those higher temperatures. The water that Arizona receives from the Colorado River has already been cut significantly through a voluntary agreement among the seven states. Last month, Arizona agreed to conservation measures that would further reduce its supply.

The result is that Arizona’s water supply is being squeezed from both directions — disappearing ground water as well as the shrinking Colorado River.

And the water shortage could be more severe than the state’s analysis shows because it assumes that Arizona’s supply from the Colorado would remain constant over the next 100 years — something that is uncertain.

Arizona’s water problems have begun to percolate through the state’s politics. In January, the new governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, pledged in her first major address to tighten controls on groundwater use around the state.

As evidence of that commitment, Ms. Hobbs released a report that she said had been suppressed by the previous Republican administration. It showed that an area west of Phoenix, called the Hassayampa sub-basin, doesn’t have enough water for new wells. As a result, the Arizona Department of Water Resources said it would no longer issue new permits in that region for home construction that relied on groundwater.

Despite the increasingly dire warnings from the state and water experts, some developers are confident that construction will not stop anytime soon. The Arizona water agency has given permission for construction on about 80,000 housing lots that have yet to be built, a state official said.

Cynthia Campbell, Phoenix’s water-resources management adviser, said the city largely relies on river water, and groundwater represents only about 2 percent of its water supply. But that could change dramatically if Arizona is hit with drastic cuts in its Colorado River allotments, forcing the city to pump more groundwater.

Many outlying developments and towns in Maricopa County’s sprawl have been able to build by enrolling in a state-authorized program that lets subdivisions suck up groundwater in one place if they pump it back into the ground elsewhere in the basin.

Ms. Campbell said the idea that you could balance water supplies like that had always been a “legal fiction” — one that now appears to be unraveling, as the state takes a harder look at where the groundwater supplies are coming up short.

“This is the hydrologic disconnect coming home to roost,” Ms. Campbell said.

In outlying areas “a lot of the developers are really worried, they’re freaked,” Ms. Campbell said. “The reality is, it all came back to catch us.”



Waiting for Las Vegas to do the same....
 

Forum List

Back
Top