The Bureau of Reclamation’s study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin is due out tomorrow, and already it’s been getting a lot of attention. Bruce Finley at the Denver Post and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times have both highlighted the study’s consideration of the “pipeline to the Missouri” option, one of a host of water augmentation possibilities submitted by stakeholders and the public which has gotten some analysis over the course of the two year study.

The PTM option has some legs, because people in the non-water world can grasp it. But it’s an unfortunate framing for the release of this very important study, a piece of the puzzle that rightly ought to be confined to fine print along with towing icebergs down from the north (another idea that gets its due).

Most of the study’s findings are already public – the Bureau’s been releasing them steadily in a series of data dumps over the last year. What they show is a growing gap between supply and demand in the basin (with some legitimate argument over whether the Bureau let the states use pre-housing crash trajectories to high-ball their growth projections, making the gap look larger than it should). At whatever size it is, though, the study also shows that various types of “magic water” (icebergs! PTM!) can’t fix this problem. If you read carefully, it’s there in Barringer’s story:

It is unclear how much such a pipeline project would cost, though estimates run into the billions of dollars. That does not include the cost of the new electric power that would be needed (along with the construction of new generating capacity) to pump the water uphill from Leavenworth, Kan., to the front range reservoirs serving Denver, about a mile above sea level, according to Sharlene Leurig, an expert on water-project financing at Ceres, a nonprofit group based in Boston that works with investors to promote sustainability….

Ms. Leurig noted that local taxpayers and utility customers would be shouldering most of the expense of such a venture through their tax and water bills, which would make conservation a more palatable alternative.

What it shows, if I may be so humble as to generalize, is that the basin’s water users need to learn to live within their means. I’m confident they can, even if they’d rather just have the feds build them another pipe.

The All-American Canal, which grabs water from Imperial Dam and runs it along the north side of the California-Baja border before delivering it to Imperial Valley farmers, was built at some great expense to replace the original wandering route that took the water south into Mexico before curving back north to US farms. The folks behind the project pushed it because they tired of letting Mexican farmers have a cut of the water before it got to US lettuce crops.

But maybe it’s about more than an unwillingness to share? Maybe it’s who the sharing was with? From the LA Times last month, a fun piece by Tony Perry at the reaction to the fact that the new US-Mexico Colorado River water deal calls for some of Mexico’s share of the river’s water to be delivered by the canal with that very specific name:

The idea does not sit well with farmers and officials in the Imperial Valley who believe that powerful outsiders are again ignoring the valley’s hard-fought water rights, this time in an effort to improve relations with the Mexican government.

“There’s a reason it’s called the All-American Canal,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District, raising his voice for emphasis.

Hannah Holm of Colorado Mesa University had a good piece earlier this month in the Grand Junction Free Press outlining the future risks facing Colorado River water users and managers:

A heavy train is moving at 5 miles per hour toward… a cliff? A collision? And how far away might this unknown calamity be?

These were the images and questions I was left with at the Upper Colorado River Basin Water Conference hosted by the Water Center at Colorado Mesa University Nov. 8-9. I deeply appreciate the fact that our presenters used such colorful language!

The heavy train is our collective use of Colorado River water, and the calamity we are facing is our potential inability to balance supply and demand in an orderly way. According to a nearly complete study on Colorado River Basin water supply and demand coordinated by the US Bureau of Reclamation, we’ve passed the point where use of the basin’s water resources exceeds the quantity provided by Mother Nature. The fact that the train wreck isn’t here yet is because of big reservoirs that store water from year to year. Climate change shows no sign of helping: The mean of all the models used in the bureau study indicates higher variability from year to year and a decline in average natural flows at Lee Ferry of 9% by 2060.

Holm’s summary of the issues is spot on. But the train wreck/cliff metaphor seems wrong to me, in ways that I fear are skewing the basin water policy and politics discussion. The train wreck or cliff metaphor suggests that the problem manifests itself as an abrupt calamity – from her lumbering 5 miles per hour to full stop crash (or over the cliff). But the nature of the problem, and therefore the needed discussion about potential solutions, is not like that.

We will not go from full water supplies, which everyone largely receives now, to zero in an instant. We will go from full water supplies to less-than-full water supplies. The policy approach to avoiding a crash is different from the policy approach to preparing for the allocation of growing shortage/shrinking supply.