What a difference a year makes in the water outlook for Nevada. In July 2022, Lake Mead dropped to its lowest level since it was being filled in the 1930s. Northwestern Nevada rivers, the Carson and Truckee and other watersheds in the state were experiencing major droughts, as was all of the Southwest. In November 2021, scientists, public officials and media in Colorado had suggested continuation of a 20-year western drought could soon threaten the viability of the Law of the River, the 1922 pact allocating Colorado River waters among seven states and Mexico.
However, between February and May of this year, not only did the upper-river snowpack and flow swell, but the lower-river demand also eased – something helpful but not expected by anyone. Nonetheless, even as the good news began to accumulate in February 2023, the Los Angeles Times ran a story that lakes Mead and Powell may not refill “in our lifetimes”.
In October, however, with flooding in Clark County and on the Carson and Truckee rivers, and following renegotiation of allocations by the lower Colorado states (Nevada, Arizona and California), a Nevada Current read: “Feds say water cuts to three states are enough to protect Colorado River – for now.” Finally, weather forecasters announced in October that the El Nino Oscillation had settled in strongly across the Pacific Ocean, and the Southwest U.S. will see heavy precipitation in December 2023 through March 2024.
So far, this sounds like a story of general public misfortune, with valiant scientists and public officials planning and managing as best possible and a public-spirited press digging diligently into deep and important matters. Closer inspection reveals something less rosy.
Back on Nov. 5, 2021, Gizmodo ran “It’s Time to Drain Lake Powell” by Peter Deneen – a lengthy environmentalist fantasy. The very one-sided hype about possible negative developments had a purpose. For scientists and public officials, the warnings of grim scenarios are a matter of institutional necessity: if everything is going well, it’s hard to make a case for more tax funding of them. If there’s a crisis, they get interviews, hearings, demonstrations, op-eds, etc. – all causing politicians to send them more money. For environmentalists and most journalists, the scaremongering both brings them income and serves their ideological agendas.
None of this is new. This stratagem has been a standard for for decades. In the 1960s, many academics and environmentalists forecasted oil production would inevitably decline within 10 years, with dire consequences if government officials did not intervene extensively in markets with scientists’ proposed remedies. In the 1970s, we were facing another ice age in a decade. The 1980s brought predictions acid rain would kill many crops within 10 years. In the 1990s, we feared loss of the ozone layer within a decade. The 2000s brought a revival of peak oil horrors that were overcome by fracking and slant drilling. And the last dozen years have seen too many threats, especially of the global warming genre, to catalog here.
The first problem has been poor and corrupt science, which gets the funding ball rolling for scientists and other analysts. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” (1962) was perhaps the first major book in this line. But it really came into its own with Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), which erred completely in its dire predictions, as was evident a very short time. Others, like Ralph Nader, Al Gore and John Kerry, got their mileage. And the Obama and Biden administrations have brought much global warming and other radicalism to actual policy.
The forecasted 20th century disasters did not come to fruition, because time made differences in the facts on the ground and undermined claims of future disaster. Fortunately, most proposed remedies for those problems were not adopted as the manufactured crises evaporated. So, as the southwestern water crisis drumbeat continues, watch how time erodes the case for most proposed countermeasures.
Ron Knecth is Senior Policy Fellow at Nevada Policy Research Institute.
