26 December 22
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The January 6 committee’s damning final report makes clear that the former president sought to steal the 2020 election by force. Will Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice take the baton?
The January 6 report still shares copious evidence of serious crimes, including Trump assisting sedition. The committee found he “provoked” the violence of that day, “purposely” lied about a rigged election that fed it, “knowingly” and “corruptly” pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count lawful electoral votes, “unlawfully” pressured state officials to change election results, and refused for hours to ask the violent insurrectionists to stop and go home. The report’s words are legal and designed to build the case for their criminal referral, and they put Trump in the middle of the action, not just the sidelines. Now, Trump must be called to account, along with his henchmen. But the reasons for doing so go beyond personal accountability, even if he isn’t charged with seditious conspiracy. As Raskin said at the final hearing, “authoritarian parties … do not accept the results of democratic elections when they lose; and they embrace political violence as legitimate. And the problem of incitement to political violence has only grown more serious in the Internet Age…” This is why prosecution matters.
Trump’s corrupt effort to stop the certification of the election and defraud the country—which is to say, steal the election—is serious enough. These charges connect Trump and others to what is undeniably sedition, and that matters to hold Trump accountable and to chill powerful public leaders’ denial of the dangerous hate that Trumpism has fomented. He knew he lost the election, directly participated in recruiting lawmakers to a fake elector scheme and to recruit Pence to his and his co-conspirators’ plan.During the first presidential debate of the 2020 campaign, Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” despite his apparent knowledge that they were white supremacists, and he demanded armed people be allowed to his rally, encouraged them to go to the Capitol, and refused to denounce the violence and ask seditionists to go home. He even tweeted an incitement against Pence for refusing to do his bidding.
Two foot soldiers have already been tried and convicted of seditious conspiracy: Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, of the Oath Keepers. Members of the Proud Boys—which formed in 2016, inspired by Trump’s racist and misogynist—are on trial now for seditious conspiracy. Their conviction, which is a high likelihood given the documentary evidence of their highly designed plan for January 6th and the fact that one of their members has already become a witness for the prosecution, will continue to be a violent, intimidating, racist, sexist, homophobic local presence around the country. But it will be so much harder for politicians and pundits to embrace them or deny their violent behavior and hate-filled views.
Trump henchman Roger Stone has a history of relationships with both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. He sought a relationship with them as early as 2018, calling himself a member. He was caught on video with two defendants on trial for seditious conspiracy in December 2020. He was also with Oath Keepers on the morning of January 6. Stone was one of the subpoenaed witnesses who asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in the face of questions about his communications with Trump, Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys related to the events of January 6. The committee has evidence Stone was in direct communication with the White House during the lead up to the insurrection. A December 27, 2020 message from Rep. Scott Perry, whom the committee referred for ethics investigation, alerted Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Stone had messaged Meadows on Signal, the encrypted chat app.
The more aggressive the investigation, the more likely that, just like the indictments against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, more people with knowledge of the planning of the attack on the Capitol, or who need to make a deal to save themselves, will cooperate. That is a power the January 6th committee did not have.
Again, this isn’t only about personal accountability. It is also about the public square. Too many leaders, political, pundits, and CEOs of social media platforms have outright supported, protected, or platformed violent, criminal people and their organizations. Republican National Committee Chair Rona McDaniel, in censuring the two Republicans who participated in the January 6th committee (Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger), dismissed the violence on January 6 as “free speech.” Rep. Matt Gaetz and conservative pundit Anne Coulter have hired the Proud Boys as personal “security,” further normalizing their vigilantism. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene headlined an event hosted by Nick Fuentes, the notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier whom Trump dined with in November. She also participated in the New York Young Republicans gala after its leader called for “total war” on Republican enemies, and pronounced that if she and Trump ally Steve Bannon had brought weapons on January 6, they would have “won.”
To be clear, none of the acts in the above paragraph are illegal and our Constitution allows people to non-violently express their violent, hate-filled views, if they are not inciting violence or other crimes. The problem is that it has become cloaked in the lie that the RNC’s McDaniel propagated as well: that these racist, sexists, homophobic, and violence-prone groups are noneof those things, and thatTrump didn’t use them to incite violence on January 6 and beyond. It’s like being told the pigeon overhead isn’t a pigeon and it isn’t flying. Prosecutions, including of powerful people, have a way of laying bare the truth.
The most recent poll shows half of Americans—including over 80 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of independents—want Trump prosecuted thanks to the evidence presented at the committee’s hearings. Only 12 percent of Republicans agree. But that split may justify prosecution even more. If Trump and his co-conspirators are held accountable, other powerful people will think twice before aligning with them. It will also help many Americans, whether or not they agree with prosecuting a former president, to understand why such behavior shouldn’t be normalized even if our elected leaders couldn’t stop it.
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Two busloads of migrants were also sent to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris's home in September. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
A total of three busloads of migrants arrived at the Naval Observatory, where Harris lives, on Saturday evening, WTOP reported. The Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, a local grassroots organization, met the migrants, who were inadequately dressed for the freezing temperature, according to the station.
Earlier this year, some state governors began sending buses of migrants to the nation's capital, after the Biden administration attempted to lift a pandemic-era policy that let the U.S. deny entry to immigrants.
At least one governor from these states, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, said his state is purposefully busing migrants to sanctuary cities, where law enforcement are discouraged from deporting immigrants.
Amy Fischer, an organizer with the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, told NPR's All Things Considered on Sunday that Abbott's actions were "rooted in racism and xenophobia."
"At the end of the day, everybody who arrived here last night was able to get free transportation, on a charter bus, that got them closer to their final destination," she said.
In a statement in April, U.S. Customs & Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus criticized Abbott's decision to "move migrants without adequately coordinating with the federal government and local border communities."
Two previous busloads of migrants arrived at Harris' residence in September, following an interview in which Harris said the border was secure.
"The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, particularly over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed," Harris told NBC's Meet the Press in a Sept. 11 interview.
As of Dec. 22, more than 8,700 migrants have been bused to Washington, D.C., from the Texas border, and another combined have been sent to 6,520 to New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, according to the Texas Governor's office.
"This terrible crisis for border communities in Texas is a catastrophe of your own making," Abbott wrote in a letter to the president on Dec. 20. "These communities and the state are ill-equipped to do the job assigned to the federal government – house the thousands of migrants flooding into the country every day. With perilous temperatures moving into the area, many of these migrants are at risk of freezing to death on city streets."
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(L-R) Diana Burkot, Taso Pletner, Maria Alyokhina and Olga Borisova of Pussy Riot performing in Edinburgh in November. (photo: Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns)
The collective said Mama, Don’t Watch TV – a reference to the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier – rails against the Russian leader’s ‘bloodthirsty puppets’ and ‘war criminals’
In a statement, they described Putin’s government as a “terrorist regime” and call him, his officials, generals and propagandists “war criminals”.
They called Мама, не смотри телевизор (Mama, Don’t Watch TV), which comes 10 months after Russia invaded Ukraine: “The music of our anger, indignation, disagreement, a reproachful desperate cry against Putin’s bloodthirsty puppets, led by a real cannibal monster, whose place is in the infinity of fierce hellish flames on the bones of the victims of this terrible war.”
The collective, in this instance represented by Maria Alyokhina, Olga Borisova, Diana Burkot and Taso Pletner, said the chorus is based on the words of a captured Russian conscript soldier who told his mother: “Mum, there are no Nazis here, don’t watch TV.”
“Russian propaganda daily poisons the hearts of people with hatred,” they wrote. “The law on foreign agents is used to silence opposition activists and journalists, to stop the activities of the last independent human rights organisations.”
They outlined the consequences for anyone who defies the regime. “Those who oppose Putin are imprisoned, poisoned with military poisons and killed,” they said, drawing attention to the “tradition of political poisoning” represented by Russia’s Lab X, a poison factory that helped silence the Soviets’ critics and that is believed to play a similar function today.
“Opposition figures of anti-government movements became victims of the ‘experiments’. Putin and the FSB are proud of this “tradition” and continue it: Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Pyotr Verzilov, Alexei Navalny.”
The group said that the money the Kremlin receives from the international community conducting business with Russia is converted “into Ukrainian blood”.
They issued a three-point demand, calling for an embargo on the purchase of Russian oil and gas and the sale of weapons and police ammunition to Russia; the seizure of western bank accounts and property of Russian officials and oligarchs and personal sanctions against them; and an international tribunal to try Putin, employees of Russian state propaganda, army officers and everyone responsible for the genocide of the Ukrainian nation.
They asked the Russian people to ignore propaganda and not to participate in the war, take mobilisation notices or go to the military commissariat.
“Every action against this war is important,” they said.
Alyokhina is one of the three members of Pussy Riot who was sentenced to two years in jail for staging a performance inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February 2012. She and Nadya Tolokonnikova were released in December 2013.
In July, Alyokhina told the Guardian: “We have a new Hitler in Russia.” She outlined how she had left the country in April disguised as a food courier, after repeated arrests. She went to Iceland, where she has been raising money for Ukrainian charities and Russian political prisoners, and staged an exhibition about Pussy Riot’s history, Velvet Revolution, at the Kling & Bang gallery.
She recently toured a Pussy Riot musical, Riot Days. In August, Tolokonnikova released an album as Pussy Riot called Matriarchy Now.
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Paratroopers from the 82nd airborne march to board a civilian aircraft bound from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2020. (photo: Hubert Delaney Iii/US Department of Defense/AFP/Getty Images)
Analysis of Pentagon report reveals that soldiers exposed to PFAS pollution at much higher rate than military claims
A Pentagon report that aims to assess the scope of PFAS chemical exposure on its bases, as well as health threats posed to service members, estimated about 175,000 troops across 24 facilities had drunk contaminated water.
But an analysis of the military’s report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit that tracks PFAS pollution, found the numbers are probably much higher and could top more than 640,000 people across 116 bases, and potentially even millions of people when past service members are factored in.
Moreover, the report seemed to omit health issues linked to PFAS exposure, such as kidney disease, testicular cancer and fetal effects. The overall report is “frustrating”, said Scott Faber, senior vice-president of government affairs with EWG.
“The Department of Defense is trying to downplay these risks rather than aggressively seeking to notify service members and clean up its legacy pollution,” he said. “It has long history of looking the other way when it comes to PFAS pollution.”
The DoD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
PFAS are a class of about 12,000 chemicals often used to make products resist water, stain and heat. They are called forever chemicals because they do not naturally break down and persist in the environment. The chemicals are linked to cancer, liver disease, high cholesterol, thyroid disorders, birth defects and autoimmune dysfunction.
PFAS are thought to be contaminating drinking water for more than 200 million people nationally, and contamination has been found in and around hundreds of DoD bases at high levels because the chemicals are the main ingredient in firefighting foam the military uses.
Congress mandated the DoD report in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, but the military has not published it on the department’s PFAS website, so it is unavailable to the public or service members except upon request.
“That’s the part that ought to bother every American,” Faber said. “It’s not just that they purposefully underestimated how many service members were exposed … it’s that they didn’t tell anyone.”
The DoD’s analysis, dated April 2022, seemed designed to reduce the exposure estimates in several key ways, EWG noted.
It only included bases where levels for two types of PFAS – PFOS and PFOA – exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s previous health advisory limit of 70 parts per trillion (ppt). But the EPA lowered that level in June to less than 1 ppt for each compound.
Though the report came out about two months before the change, the military often lobbies the EPA on environmental rules, the pending change was publicly known, and the military likely rushed to get its report out ahead of the EPA’s formal announcement, Faber said.
“This is clearly what it appears to be,” he said.
The numbers also did not include four large bases – Fort Bragg, Yakima Training Center, Fort Leavenworth and Picatinny Arsenal – where levels ranged from 98 ppt to 647 ppt.
The levels peaked at over 21,000 ppt at Horsham air national guard base in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.
The report also only considered military members who were on bases at the time of the analysis, meaning it is a “snapshot in time”. The military began using firefighting foam with PFAS over 50 years ago.
“The real question is how many millions of service members drank the contaminated water over the last half century?” Faber asked.
The numbers would probably be higher if the military also included other kinds of PFAS. PFOA and PFOS are two of the most common, but thousands more are in commercial use, and the EPA also has health advisory limits for two other compounds.
Though Congress required the DoD to include an assessment of health risks to troops, the military excluded risks for fetal and maternal health because it “focused on military members and veterans”, the department wrote. EWG noted that about 13,000 service members give birth every year, and many live on DoD facilities. The military also made no mention of increased testicular and kidney cancer risks.
“It’s shocking and there was no explanation,” Faber said.
It is unclear what’s next for the report. Congress has ordered the DoD to phase out firefighting foam that uses PFAS by October 2023, and develop a cleanup plan. The military already missed a deadline to submit a cleanup plan to Congress, but Faber noted it has new political leadership in place, and the Biden administration has been more serious about addressing PFAS contamination than Trump.
“The next few years will be critical to resetting when it comes to the DoD addressing toxic chemicals, like PFAS,” Faber said.
Ben Wikler: ‘It’s not just that we stopped a total disaster scenario, it’s also that we’ve opened the door to the possibility of dramatic change for the better.’ (photo: Reuters)
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Gerrymandered Redistricting Map
Ben Wikler, Wisconsin’s Democratic party chair, on midterm success that means ‘democracy is going to survive in our state’
“I was throwing up with anxiety,” Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic party, confessed to the Guardian.
It wasn’t merely out of concern, common to Democrats nationwide in the run-up to the early November vote, that voters were set to give their candidates the traditional drubbing of the party in power, powered by Joe Biden’s unpopularity or the wobbly state of the economy.
Rather, Wikler feared that in Wisconsin his party was on the brink of something worse: permanent minority status in a state that is crucial to any presidential candidate’s path to the White House.
Had Democrat Tony Evers lost re-election as governor, or had the GOP achieved supermajority control of both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature, Republicans could have exercised total control over the swing state’s levers of power – and ensured that its electoral college votes never again helped Biden or any other Democrat win the White House.
“It’s a state where Republicans have tried to engineer things to make it voter-proof,” Wikler told the Guardian in an interview conducted this month. “All of that meant that, this election cycle, the stakes were explosively high.”
Wisconsin has the most gerrymandered legislative map in the country, designed to ensure the GOP has as easy a path as possible to capture majorities in the legislature, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
Meanwhile, the Cost of Voting Index ranks Wisconsin as the fourth most difficult state in the country for people to exercise their right to cast a ballot, thanks to its strict voter identification requirements and laws that make it practically impossible to conduct voter registration drives.
But Wisconsin’s Republicans are looking to tighten access to polling places further, and passed a host of measures to do so, all of which fell to Evers’s veto pen. With a supermajority in the legislature, they would have been able to override his vetoes. In a speech to supporters, Tim Michels, the Republican candidate for governor, made it plain that if he was elected, the GOP “will never lose another election” in the state.
“When the state has election after election that comes down to tiny margins, even a relatively small shift in the rules can have an enormous impact on statewide races and presidential races,” Wikler said.
“In that context, if Republicans got unified control of the state government or got supermajorities in the state legislature, it is very easy to imagine a scenario where they essentially rig things to shut out President Biden’s re-election.”
Yet, it didn’t happen. As the predicted midterms “red wave” collapsed, Evers won re-election, while Wisconsin Democrats narrowly managed to keep Republicans from a supermajority in both houses of the legislature.
“Because of all that, democracy is going to survive in our state,” Wikler said.
Democrats’ success at standing their ground in Wisconsin was one of many pleasant surprises the party experienced in the midterms.
Biden’s allies performed historically well nationwide, but in Wisconsin, Wikler cast their success as something of a turning point: not only will the state remain competitive in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats can now go on the offensive.
“It’s not just that we stopped a total disaster scenario, it’s also that we’ve opened the door to the possibility of dramatic change for the better. And that is almost more than we could have hoped for,” Wikler said.
But the party has a complicated path back to being competitive statewide, and much of the reason why can be traced to another midterm election held 12 years ago.
In 2010, Republicans won control of the governor’s mansion, the state senate and the assembly. They have held the legislature ever since, enacting district maps that have been credited with controversially allowing them to maintain control of the statehouse even if they lose the popular vote, as well as laws that tightened voter ID requirements and curbed the power of public sector unions, a major Democratic voting bloc. The low point for the party came in the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump won Wisconsin, the first Republican to do so since 1984.
A year after Wikler took over as the state’s Democratic chair, Biden won Wisconsin in the 2020 election. However, the party’s rebound hasn’t been without setbacks: in the most recent midterms, the Democratic lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, failed in his bid to unseat the Republican senator Ron Johnson.
Nonetheless, Wikler now sees an opportunity for the party to undo the state’s gerrymandered maps, and take back control of the legislature, starting with an election for the state supreme court in April. A Republican-backed judge is stepping down from the non-partisan bench, and if a left-leaning justice can replace her, Wikler says the stage could be set for a successful challenge to the state’s legislative maps and a return by Democrats to the majority in the state assembly and senate.
“That’s the north star of the party,” Wikler said. “It’s to have a Democratic governor … a non-Republican majority on the state supreme court, Democratic majorities in the state assembly and state senate, and pass the agenda that Wisconsinites have been yearning for for the last decade into law in one legislative session.”
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The collapse of the economy and the freezing of Afghan and donor funds after the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021 created a humanitarian crisis. Most art, culture and pastimes have been banned. The female population have also had to quit jobs and young girls after the age of 12 can no longer go to school or complete further education. (photo: Nava Jamshidi/Getty Images)
Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE International said in a joint release that they are demanding both men and women be allowed to continue participating in their “lifesaving assistance” in Afghanistan. They said they will suspend their programs there while they gain “clarity” on the announcement.
“We cannot effectively reach children, women and men in desperate need in Afghanistan without our female staff,” they said. “Without women driving our response, we would not have jointly reached millions of Afghans in need since August 2021.”
The NGOs said the Taliban’s decision will also affect thousands of jobs as the county is in the midst of an economic crisis.
The Taliban’s decision came as it also announced women will not be allowed to attend universities in the country nor religious classes in mosques in the capital of Kabul.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that the Taliban’s prohibition on women working for NGOs could be “devastating” and disrupt “vital and life-saving assistance” to millions of people.
The Taliban has said that it established the ban in response to “serious complaints” about women who worked for NGOs wearing their hijab, the Islamic headscarf, improperly.
The Taliban has instituted numerous rules restricting women’s rights in the country following their strict interpretation of Sharia Law since they regained control of the county last August. Women are largely restricted from working outside their homes, must cover their faces in public and be accompanied by a male chaperone when they travel, according to the United Nations.
The country has also suffered severe economic hardship as international aid halted almost immediately after the Taliban retook the country.
Afghan women have gathered to protest the recent ban on attending universities in cities across the country. Taliban security forces have responded harshly, using a water cannon in one city to disperse a group of women protesters.
Multiple Muslim-majority countries from the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, have also condemned the prohibition on women attending higher education.
The Taliban’s higher education minister said he believed the ban was necessary to prevent the mixing of genders at universities and because he believed some subjects being taught violated Islamic principles.
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The Glen Canyon Dam sits above Lake Powell and the Colorado River in Page, Ariz. Federal officials have projected that, as soon as July, water levels in the lake could fall to the point where the hydroelectric plant inside the dam could no longer produce power. (photo: Joshua Lott/WP)
opener At Colorado River conference in Las Vegas, water managers debate how to make historic cuts
State and federal authorities say that years of overconsumption are colliding with the stark realities of climate change, pushing Colorado River reservoirs to such dangerously low levels that the major dams on the river could soon become obstacles to delivering water to millions in the Southwest.
The federal government has called on the seven Western states that rely on Colorado River water to cut usage by 2 to 4 million acre-feet — up to a third of the river’s annual average flow — to try to avoid such dire outcomes. But the states have so far failed to reach a voluntary agreement on how to make that happen, and the Interior Department may impose unilateral cuts in coming months.
“Without immediate and decisive actions, elevations at Lake Powell and Mead could force the system to stop functioning,” Tommy Beaudreau, the Interior Department’s deputy secretary, told a conference of Colorado River officials here Friday. “That’s an intolerable condition that we won’t allow to happen.”
Many state water officials fear they are already running out of time.
Ted Cooke, general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to central Arizona, said that “there’s a real possibility of an effective dead pool” within the next two years. That means water levels could fall so far that the Glen Canyon and Hoover dams — which created the reservoirs at Lake Powell and Lake Mead — would become an obstacle to delivering water to cities and farms in Arizona, California and Mexico.
“We may not be able to get water past either of the two dams in the major reservoirs for certain parts of the year,” Cooke said. “This is on our doorstep.”
The looming crisis has energized this annual gathering of water bureaucrats, the occasional cowboy hat visible among the standing-room-only crowd inside Caesars Palace. It’s the first time the conference has sold out, organizers said, and the specter of mass shortages looms as state water managers, tribes and the federal government meet to hash out how to cut usage on an unprecedented scale.
“I can feel the anxiety and the uncertainty in this room and in the basin,” said Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation.
The negotiations will ultimately have to weigh cuts in rapidly growing urban areas against those in farming communities that produce much of the country’s supply of winter vegetables. In the complex world of water rights, farms often have priority over cities because they’ve been using river water longer. Unlike in past negotiations, water managers now expect that cuts will affect even the most senior water users.
The states of the Upper Colorado River Basin — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — say it is difficult to specify how much they can cut because they are less dependent on allocations from reservoirs and more on variable flows of the river. The lower basin states — California, Arizona and Nevada — also consume far more water.
“In the Upper Basin, we can say we’ll take 80 percent, and Mother Nature gives us 30,” said Gene Shawcroft, chair of the Colorado River Authority of Utah. “Those are some of the challenges we’re wrestling with.”
The federal government set an August deadline for the states to reach a voluntary agreement on cuts, but that deadline passed with no deal. Some state officials here blame the Biden administration. When it became clear this summer that the federal government wasn’t ready to impose unilateral cuts, the urgency for a deal evaporated, they said.
Now the Biden administration has launched a new environmental review for distributing Colorado River supplies in low-water scenarios. Water managers hope to have more clarity on what states can offer by the end of January. By summer, the federal government is expected to define its authority to impose unilateral cuts.
“Unfortunately, it’s a year later than we need it,” Cooke said in an interview.
Across the West, drought has already led to a record number of wells running dry in California, forced huge swaths of farmland to lie fallow and required homeowners to limit how much they water their lawns. This week, a major water provider in Southern California declared a regional drought emergency and called on those areas that rely on Colorado River water to reduce their imported supplies.
The problems on the river have been building for years. Over the past two decades, during the most severe drought for the region in centuries, Colorado River basin states have taken more water out of the river than it has produced, draining the reservoirs that act as a buffer during hard times. The average annual flow of the river during that period has been 13.4 million acre-feet — while users are pulling out an average of 15 million acre-feet per year, said James Prairie, research and modeling group chief at the Bureau of Reclamation.
In 1999, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the country, held 47.6 million acre-feet of water. That has fallen to about 13.1 million acre-feet, or 26 percent of their capacity. An acre-foot equals 326,000 gallons, or enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water.
Federal officials have projected that, as soon as July, the level in Lake Powell could fall to the point where the hydroelectric plant inside the Glen Canyon Dam could no longer produce power, and then keep falling so that it would become impossible to deliver the quantities of water that Southwest states rely on. Water managers say such a “dead pool” is also possible on Lake Mead within two years.
“These reservoirs have served us for 23 years, but we’re now pushing them to their limits,” Prairie said.
David Palumbo, the Bureau of Reclamation’s deputy commissioner of operations, stressed that the effects of climate change — a hotter and drier West, where the ground absorbs more runoff from mountain snow before it reaches the reservoirs — means the past is no longer a useful guide to the future of the river. Even high snow years are now seeing low runoff, he said.
“That runoff efficiency is critical to be aware of and, frankly, to be afraid of,” he said.
Water managers say cuts are likely to hit hard in Arizona and California, where major farming regions consume big portions of the available supply. These states, which get water after it passes through Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam, also face the greatest risk if the reservoirs fall to dangerous levels, said John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
“If you can’t get water through Hoover Dam, that’s the water supply for 25 million Americans,” he said.
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