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In a special session last week, our legislature did its best to make sure more people die of drug overdoses, and the General Assembly also made it a crime, rather than just a traffic offense, to toss a cigarette butt out the car window.
But the representatives and senators didn't really address the drought, and that may be because it's difficult to define a drought.
For instance, is it a drought when Colorado has enough water to serve a million residents but not enough water to serve the current 4.3 million residents? Will it be a drought if, even in a wet year, there isn't enough water to serve 15 or 20 million Coloradans?
That's why one has to wonder whether various drought mitigation schemes -- ranging from a statewide water plan to a reservoir at the Utah Line with a pipe back to Denver -- are really just ways to keep the real-estate developers in business.
When I moved to Salida in 1978, there were no watering restrictions. You paid something like $35 every three months, and you got all the clear mountain water that you could run through a 3/4-inch tap on any day at any time.
Thanks to various conservation
schemes, such as
the meters that the state forced the city to require, we've
had even-odd day restrictions, time-of-day restrictions,
passersby-giving-you-a-hard-time-if-anything-in-your-yard-is
-green restrictions, plus bills that are something like
$180 for three months.
As nearly as I can tell, all these restrictions have cost time and money without improving the quality of local life by one iota. Indeed, because the town has water to serve new developments, all of whose residents seem to be driving down D Street when I want to cross it on my daily walk to the post office, I could argue that my quality of life has been seriously impaired by water conservation.
So, whenever you get urged to conserve water,
you
might ask Why? What for? Who benefits? Is there any
sensible reason that I should give up my garden to protect
the cash flow of a real-estate developer? Is he willing to
share the profits with those who made the
sacrifices?
Wasting water might be the only way that we peons can have any say about Colorado's growth.
(To avoid charges of plagiarism, I must point out that
the person who first brought this sensible attitude to my
attention is my brother Kurt, who has served as president
of a ditch company in Longmont. Every gallon I
waste,
he once told me when his yard looked like a rice
paddy, is a gallon that can't go to another shopping
mall.
)
But if you think Colorado needs more water, here's one way to make it -- drive more. Gasoline is essentially a compound of carbon and hydrogen. Mix it with oxygen, which is what happens inside your engine, and you get carbon dioxide and water.
According to such chemistry as I can recall from 10th grade, burning a gallon of gasoline produces approximately a gallon of water. We Coloradans already burn about 2.5 billion gallons of gasoline a year, which means about 7,500 acre-feet of water -- an annual supply for about 45,000 people.
Since hydrogen is a component of many other substances, ranging from hemp to forests, then if you get busted for the wrong kind of fire, you might be able to beat the rap. You are not some loser pothead who got the wrong message when Great Britain made its cannabis law more sane recently, nor are you a malicious arsonist when you flicked that biodegradable Lucky butt out the car window.
Instead, you are engaged in the noble Colorado pursuit of water development. Sure, there might have been some environmental degradation from that forest fire, but name a form of water development that doesn't cause some form of environmental degradation somewhere -- one valley gets flooded, another suffers desertification, a metropolis sprawls, etc.
Before this fire season, Colorado had 34,798 square miles of mountain forest, where precipitation averages 23 inches a year. Some studies have indicated that trees use at least a third of that water, and research by Colorado State University at the Fraser Experimental Forest in Middle Park has demonstrated that clear-cutting causes a substantial increase in run-off.
Work the numbers, and it turns out that those useless trees in the mountains are wasting something like 14 million acre-feet a year.
How much water is that? The entire state's current annual water consumption is about 6.25 million acre feet, so removing the trees would more than triple the available supply. Domestic, municipal and industrial use accounts for only 15 percent of the current consumption, and if all the new flow went to that, we'd have water for about 60 million people.
In a normal year, that is. As for this year, well, we can take consolation in the fact that the fires will increase future flows, and we can keep burning that water-producing gasoline.
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