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At a June 14 Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee meeting, environmentalists warned that the Colorado Rivers reservoir level drop might bring dramatic cuts to water deliveries provided to the seven states dependent on the river. Those states are California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Alarmingly, given its importance, the American Rivers conservation group ranked the Colorado as No. 1 on its list of the nations most endangered rivers.

Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told the committee that maintaining critical levels at the largest reservoirs in the United States Lake Mead and Lake Powell will require large reductions in water deliveries.

Touton advised that, in the next two months, her agency is negotiating with the seven states that count on the Colorado River to develop a plan for apportioning the water supply reductions.

The Bureau of Reclamation is the federal agency charged with assisting the Western states, Native American tribes and others to meet water needs. An estimated 40 million residents throughout the region rely on the Colorado for water.

The committees witnesses were unanimous in their predictions that acute water shortages are in the near-term future.

John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said the slow-motion train wreck thats been accelerating for 20 years has created the moment of reckoning.

We are 150 feet from 25 million Americans losing access to the Colorado River, and the rate of decline is accelerating, he said.

Because the West is suffering through a relentless drought, analysts predict that next year the affected states will cope with a decrease of between 2 million and 4 million acre-feet of water.

Scientific American reported that 2021s exceptionally dry year created a record-breaking drought, or mega-drought. The last 20 years have been the driest two decades in the last 1,200 years.

To date, 2022 is the driest year on record in California. Researchers predict with a 94% degree of certainty that Californias drought will continue for at least one more year.

University of Colorado Boulder climate scientist Imtiaz Rangwala has observed drought conditions increasingly worsen in the western and central United States.

The last two years have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) warmer than normal in these regions, he said. Large swaths of the Southwest have been even hotter, with temperatures more than 3 F (1.7 C) higher.

But neither during the hearing nor in the news media writeups was population growth in the seven Western states mentioned.

The 2000 populations were 33.9 million in California, 5.1 million in Arizona, 4.3 million in Colorado, 2.2 million in Utah, 2 million in Nevada, 1.8 million in New Mexico and 494,000, in Wyoming.

In 2022, however, they had grown to 39.5 million in California, 7.6 million in Arizona, 5.8 million in Colorado, 3.3 million in Utah, 3.2 million in Nevada, 2.1 million in New Mexico and 579,000 in Wyoming.

In slightly more than two decades, about 12 million more people have become dependent on the Colorado River for water.

The link between more people and more water consumption is undeniable. Yet Congress, the White House, the news media and academia refuse to have a rational discussion about reducing the flow of 1 million-plus legal immigrants which, with their offspring, drive population increases.

Knowing that the nations Western states are in a water crisis, opening the border to millions of people, as President Joe Bidens administration is doing, is ecological suicide.

Nevertheless, the status quo on adding population continues on autopilot, consequences be damned.

Joe Guzzardi is an analyst and researcher with Progressives for Immigration Reform who now lives in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [emailprotected] and joeguzzardi.substack.com, or follow him on Twitter: @joeguzzardi19. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Joe Guzzardi: Immigrations Impact on Endangered Colorado River Has Far-Reaching Consequences - Noozhawk