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Arizona’s Growth Machine Keeps Churning Even as Existing Communities Dry Up
April 17th, 2026
Via Land Desk, a look at the dire situation for water in Arizona: Rendering of the Halo Vista development and TSMC’s campus. Source: discoverhalovista.com Sometimes it feels like there are two parallel Southwestern United States out there. One is naturally arid, is getting hotter and hotter by the year and is gripped by the most […]
Read more »Abysmal Math on the Colorado River
April 14th, 2026
Via The Land Desk, commentary on how the U.S. government is looking to avoid de facto deadpool at Glen Canyon Dam: The Central Arizona Project canal, which carries Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, as it runs past fields in the desert (that are irrigated with groundwater, not CAP water). The CAP is not […]
Read more »The Colorado River Is Effectively Insolvent — And Corporate Water Users May Not Have Priced It
April 9th, 2026
Via Todd Cort’s informative Substack, commentary on the Colorado River, a climate-induced bankruptcy sitting on the balance sheet: Imagine that a company had a pension fund that promised $16.5 billion in future payouts but the value of that fund today sits at only $12.4 billion. Moreover, that pension fund has been drawing down the balance […]
Read more »‘The Precedent Is Flint’: How Oregon’s Data Center Boom Is Supercharging a Water Crisis
March 29th, 2026
Courtesy of Rolling Stone, an insightful report on how Amazon has come to Oregon’s eastern farmland, worsening a water pollution problem that’s been linked to cancer and miscarriages: In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain […]
Read more »The Audacious Plan to Refill Great Salt Lake
March 28th, 2026
Via NBC News, a report on how a “Herculean” goal to replenish the water in Utah’s Great Salt Lake by the 2034 Olympics is gaining momentum and attracting strange bedfellows: The Great Salt Lake has been shriveling up for decades. At its record low about four years ago, the exposed lake bed became a source of […]
Read more »The American West Is Drying Up. Can the Market Help?
March 18th, 2026
Via New Republic, a look at how – as hedge funds buy up land to obtain water rights – a libertarian state representative from Arizona has proposed a seemingly radical solution to the water crisis. Is he right? When members of the Colorado River Water Users Association, or CRWUA, descended on Caesars Palace for their annual […]
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