With water privatization, maybe the waste in places like Las Vegas can be curtailed?
2007-10-22:

N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the hydrological fantasy project of a certain class of US water engineers. In fact, Reisner talles us, N.A.W.A.P.A. would “solve at one stroke all the West’s problems with water” – but it would also take “a $6-trillion economy” to pay for it, and “it might require taking Canada by force.” He quips that British Columbia “is to water what Russia is to land,” and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam.

The coming water war in the US is drawing closer.
2007-11-12:

Perdue isn’t the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as “Days of Prayer for Rain” to “humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.”

Tools. If they had raised water prices sufficiently to stop people washing their SUVs, they would not have to humiliate themselves now.
2008-04-23:

Pretty good, but why don’t they come out and say that the southwest of the US is fucked? I guess that would not go down well with their sophomoric “gadget guy” audience.
2008-06-06:

In California, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

It begins.
2008-07-19: Price water properly, and the scourge of Las Vegas will get swallowed by the desert, as it should be. Instead, the failed policies of the oil shock era are being repeated.

Nixon made the OPEC oil shocks worse by capping prices and using coercive government tools to reduce demand. This is exactly what California is doing with water. Demand exceeds supply. The price to users is too low.

It would be simpler to let water prices rise to a market-clearing price. This would quickly reduce aquifer overdrafts, while leaving sufficient water to support ecosystems and the species they support. It would also mean that most Californians would see prices increase a lot.

2010-09-26:

There’s no black magic going on here, just basic math. Part of the problem is an ongoing 12-year drought that’s limiting inflow from snow melt in the Rockies. But, as seen throughout Lake Mead’s history, droughts come and go. The really worrying issue here is on the demand side. Decades of population growth have led to increased water demand in the Southwest. Take, for instance, Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from Lake Mead.

2011-12-14: Las Vegas and similar places have always been an abomination. With the water gone, this will become clear even to the dullest defender of sprawl.

Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens – tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes – people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you’re in one, you’ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us.

2012-07-31: All that constantly washing your car / sprinkling your pointless lawn / fountains in Vegas shit is coming down hard. I wonder if the massive relocation and water rationing can happen without a civil war.

The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years. Those conditions will become the “new normal” for most of the coming century.

2012-09-15:

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in 5 years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

2014-05-10:

Representatives from the US and Mexico agreed to a complex, multi-part water deal that will give them desperately needed flexibility for weathering the drought. More surprisingly, the 2 nations will join the team of environmental organizations to release a flood of 130b liters of water into the Delta’s ancient floodplain, and chase it with a smaller, permanent annual flow to sustain the ecosystem.

2015-01-07: What happens when the water table disappears. California hasn’t seen anything yet.

Only this isn’t the way the water went dry in Fairmead. No disrespect to the reverend, but the way it went dry is that 1 day last June, Annie Cooper was looking outside her kitchen window at another orchard of nuts going into the ground. This one was being planted right across the street. Before the trees even arrived, the big grower — no one from around here seems to know his name — turned on the pump to test his new deep well, and it was at that precise moment, when the water in his plowed field gushed like flood time, that the Coopers’ house went dry.

The kitchen faucet, the fancy bathtub, the washing machine, the toilet — all drew back into themselves. A last burble. Their old domestic well, sitting 85m deep, could no longer reach the plummeting aquifer, could no longer compete with the new farm wells sunk 100s of m deeper.

2015-02-12:

between 2050 and 2100, droughts in the Southwest and Great Plains will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries that wiped out the Pueblo Indians

2015-03-14: Let’s see whether California gets real, and innovates itself out of this situation. The alternatives are terrible.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

2017-05-07:

Bangalore has a problem: It is running out of water, fast. Cities all over the world, from those in the American West to nearly every major Indian metropolis, have been struggling with drought and water deficits in recent years. But Bangalore is an extreme case. Last summer, a professor from the Indian Institute of Science declared that the city will be unlivable by 2020. “The projections are relatively correct. Our groundwater levels are approaching 0.”

2015-05-11: Agriculture are water criminals

While California Is Dying Of Thirst so it’s good to see a summary that’s a lot better researched: if we wanted to buy out all alfalfa growers by paying them their usual yearly income to just sit around and not grow any alfalfa, that would cost $860m per year and free up 5.3t liter, ie pretty much our entire shortfall of 6t liter, thus solving the drought

2018-08-23:

Besides California, the other American place in water jeopardy is the High Plains, which sits on top of an aquifer called the Ogallala. The Ogallala is sometimes described as an ocean of groundwater. One of the largest known aquifers in the world, it runs from South Dakota to Texas, more or less in the shape of a monkey wrench. Near the top, in places, it is 300m deep, and at the lower end, in places, there are areas where it is as shallow as 1m. The Dust Bowl, which played out above the Ogallala, was, in a way, a period phenomenon. All the water necessary to sustain the crops that now cover the plains was always there, but 1m deeper than Depression-era farmers could reach with windmill pumps. Electric pumps, which only became widespread by the end of the thirties, made it accessible. For decades farmers thought the Ogallala was inexhaustible. By 1975 the amount of water taken each year from the aquifer equaled the flow of the Colorado River, and now the annual draw is ~18x that amount. Farmers have been pumping out 1-2m a year in places where 1cm is being added. As far as continuing to be useful, the Ogallala might be exhausted by 2070. A reasonable estimate is that it would take 6 ka for rain to replenish it.

2019-06-18:

During the summer, the Midwest will see drought conditions similar to what California, Greece, or Italy have. A mediterranean climate seems nice, as a concept: temperate winters and warm, dry summers, guaranteed to get you an even tan. If you’re a farmer trying to grow corn it means something very different: You need more water. Because the warmer the air is, the more water plants require.