Reservoir Drawdown in 2024: Are We on Track to Recover Storage?

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By Jack Schmidt

Unfortunately, water use between now and next April is on track to exceed the inflows of the snowmelt season, resulting in a net loss of reservoir storage. The persistent decrease in runoff is severely challenging the quest to rebuild reservoir storage.

 

Summary

Reservoir storage in the Colorado River basin is now approximately equal to two year’s average annual consumptive use. In the three months since reservoir storage peaked in July 2024, drawdown of those reservoirs lost more than 80% of the increase accomplished by the 2024 snowmelt inflow season, which had increased basin reservoir storage by only 2.5 million acre feet despite the Upper Basin snowpack having peaked at a snow water equivalent that was 13.5% greater than the long-term average1. If this rate-of-use continues for the next six months, there will be a net loss in basin reservoir storage. Water supply reliability and security for Colorado River water users can only be accomplished if we replenish the amount of water stored in reservoirs and not further deplete the declining supply.

 

Details

On 15 October 2024, total contents of the reservoirs of the Colorado River Basin upstream from the Gila River were 27.8 million af (acre feet). This amount of reservoir storage would support two years of consumptive use of the Colorado River2, assuming that basin consumptive uses remain approximately 13 million af/yr, the average between 2021 and 2023. Reservoir storage today is comparable to conditions in mid-June 2021 (Fig. 1) when there was increasing concern among the basin’s water managers about the security and reliability of water supplies provided by the Colorado River. Today, we should be just as concerned as we were in 2021.

Figure 1. Graph showing total basin reservoir storage (blue line), and storage in different parts of the Colorado River watershed between 1 January 2021 and 15 October 2024. CRSP reservoirs are those authorized by the Colorado River Storage Project Act.

Figure 1

The only way to increase the security and reliability of the water supply is to increase reservoir storage, and we are not doing a very good job of achieving that goal. There is no doubt that the large reservoir inflows of 2023 benefitted the basin water supply, allowing us to take a step back from the edge of the cliff of crisis. Basin reservoirs in mid-March 2023 were the lowest they had been (21.3 million af) since late May 1965, when the Colorado River Storage Project’s reservoirs were just beginning to fill and other reservoirs had yet to be built. Snowmelt runoff in 2023 recovered 8.4 million af of reservoir storage, nearly a 40% increase from the March 2023 low point (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage between 1 January 2023 and 15 October 2024, highlighting the amount of reservoir recovery during each snowmelt season and the amount of reservoir drawdown during intervening periods.

However, little additional progress in reservoir recovery was made in 2024.  We were encouraged that reservoir drawdown during the nine months immediately following the 2023 inflow season was remarkably small, only 2.15 million af and only 26% of the preceding gain in storage. However, snowmelt inflow only resulted in 2.5 million af of gain in reservoir storage in 2024 (Fig. 2).

In contrast to last year, basin uses and losses are much greater this year. In the first three months following the 2024 inflow season that ended in mid-July, reservoir drawdown has been 2.14 million af, more than 80% of the gain of the preceding inflow season (Table 1). Slightly more than half of the drawdown during the last three months has been from the 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell. Those releases supported the needs of mid- and late summer irrigated agriculture, were exported out of the basin, or flowed into Lake Powell. It is likely that the drawdown from these reservoirs will decrease during winter. Slightly more than 30% of the drawdown has been from the combined contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Recent agreements to decrease diversions in the Lower Basin hopefully will reduce drawdown from Mead-Powell combined storage during the next six months. The continued drawdown from Mead-Powell storage will be a robust test of the effectiveness of recent drought management measures.

Table 1. Reservoir drawdown during the first three months following the 2024 snowmelt compared to the total drawdown during the nine months following the 2023 snowmelt season.

Table 1

Basin water use between now and April 2025 is on track to exceed the inflows of the 2024 snowmelt season, resulting in a net loss of reservoir storage since the bounty of 2023. The persistent decrease in runoff in the 21st century is severely challenging the quest to rebuild reservoir storage.  We desperately need to accomplish that goal to avoid another water supply crisis such as occurred between 2020 and 2022.

The only way to replenish the amount of water stored in reservoirs is to decrease reservoir drawdown to match or exceed each year’s gains that occur during the inflow season. For the next six months, that is our goal.

 

  1. Based on data from the Natural Resources Conservation Service snow water equivalent for the Upper Colorado Region for 2024 and for 1991-2020. https://nwcc-apps.sc.egov.usda.gov/awdb/basin-plots/POR/WTEQ/assocHUC2/14_Upper_Colorado_Region.html
  2. Also including losses from reservoir evaporation.
  3. Between 6 July and 15 October 2024
  4. Between 13 July 2023 and 17 April 2024.
  5. Includes drawdown of Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.

Federal Judge Cites Upper Colorado River Basin’s Compact Call Risk

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A federal judge this week criticized the federal government for failing to consider the risk of a Colorado River Compact call in its environmental review of the planning for Denver Water’s expansion of Gross Reservoir in Boulder County.

Wrangling over the risk of a compact call – which the judge said could force water use reductions in the Upper Basin if the Upper Basin states fail to deliver enough water past Lee Ferry to the Lower Basin – has been a key point in current negotiations between the two basins over future Colorado River operations.

The ruling, in a lawsuit against Gross Reservoir expansion by Save the Colorado River and others, allows construction to proceed, but criticizes the project’s planners for not considering the fact that the risk of a compact call means there might not be enough water to fill it. (Here’s Michael Booth’s Colorado Sun story on the decision.)

In the decision, federal judge Christine Arguello noted that the Army Corps of Engineers environmental review of the project “rests on the assumption that there will be no compact call…. However, considering the American West’s last few decades of severe aridity, such an assumption warrants considerable scrutiny.”

Here’s the full language from Arguello’s ruling. I’ve bolded the key bits:

The American West’s viability rests in large part on the Colorado River, which is an undeniably overutilized water source. The Colorado River’s over-allocation is due to a fatal flaw baked into the 1922 Colorado River Compact—the bedrock-level agreement that forms the basis of the various overlapping management systems dictating the River’s death by a thousand cuts. The Colorado River Compact rests on a politically unpalatable truth—the Compact promised the basin states water that simply does not exist. According to water experts, the Compact’s apportionment scheme draws from deliberately misleading hydrological modeling of the Colorado River’s flow rates. See generally Eric Kuhn & John Fleck, Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River 1 (Univ. Ariz. Press 2019). That fatal error now sits enshrined within the Compact, and all of the basin states’ various agreements with each other (and with the Department of the Interior) are forced to overcorrect for the Compact’s flawed hydrology because revisiting the agreement would require a virtually unthinkable amount of time, energy, money, and political will. However, should Colorado River diversions exceed the river’s available water supply—which appears inevitable, at this rate—the 1922 Compact provides a “compact call” mechanism whereby the upper basin states are bound to curtail their water users’ diversions to ensure enough water reaches the lower basin states and Mexico to satisfy the artificially inflated water delivery obligations set forth in the Compact. This Court emphasizes this context for good reason: the cracked foundation of the Colorado River’s management system all but demands skepticism over any proposal that will affect the hydrology of the Colorado River basin. In the instant case, the Corps noted in its FEIS that its reasoning rests on the assumption that there will be no compact call. AR 159092; but see AR 0014667. However, considering the American West’s last few decades of severe aridity, such an assumption warrants considerable scrutiny. See, e.g., Anne Castle & John Fleck, The Risk of Curtailment under the Colorado River Compact 5, 34–35, 40 (2019) (emphasis added) (“Even if the risk of curtailment of Colorado River rights were assumed to be low, the consequences are not. Cities, and farmers and ranchers on the West Slope, would lose economic activity, jobs, income, and community benefits.”); Cherokee Water Dist. v. City of Colo. Springs, 519 P.2d 339, 340–41 (1974) (“Water is essential to the existence of a community.” (emphasis added)). In light of this context, it is perplexing to this Court that the Corps dismissed the possibility of a compact call in its analysis of a proposed water management project.

Further reading of the judge’s sources:

 

MRGCD Board Approves Abiquiu Storage Deal

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The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District Board this afternoon (Monday Oct. 14, 2024) approved an agreement among the District, the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, and the Bureau of Reclamation for temporary storage of District water in Abiquiu Reservoir on the Rio Chama while El Vado Reservoir is out of comission.

This is a huge deal. Without it, we could expect low river flows and lousy irrigation supplies through New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley in late summer for years to come. Even with it, there are still obstacles to good late summer flows – most notably New Mexico’s current Rio Grande Compact debt to Texas. But it’s a huge step.

All of this is necessary because El Vado Dam, where the 1930s relic built to store water during high spring flows for late summer use, is sorta broken. “Temporary” here seems to be as much as ten years.

It’s a hairball of an agreement. (You can read it here, it starts on page 44 of the pdf of today’s MRGCD board packet.)

Abiquiu, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, began its life as a flood control dam. But its role as a water storage facility has been expanding ever since, with Congress in the early 1980s approving the storage of San Juan-Chama Project water imported from the Colorado River Basin. It is that San Juan-Chama space, under the control of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, that can be used under the new agreement to store native Rio Grande water for MRGCD.

Cheesy '60s TV graphic that says "But Wait, There's More!"

You also get – Heron storage waivers!

The accounting will be tricky. The first water stored will be the top-priority water for the Six Middle Rio Grande Pueblos – a priority granted in the 1920s as part of a deal that provided the necessary up-front funding, via the federal Indian Irrigation Service, to kick-start the creation of the MRGCD. (Bob Berrens and I tell that story in our new book Ribbons of Green, which you’ll be able to read at some point once we finish the revisions currently underway.) The Pueblo water goes by the name “prior and paramount”. Once the P&P water is in, the next layer of stored water has to be equivalent to our New Mexico’s total Rio Grande Compact debt to southern New Mexico and Texas, currently 121,500 acre feet. (But maybe shrinking this year, based on early numbers?)

But wait, there’s more!

After those two accounts are filled, MRGCD will be able to begin storing water for farmers and environmental flows. But there’s a neat twist here to the agreement. Once this last account rises above 10,000 acre feet (it’s called “MRGCD usable water”), the District agrees to keep river flows high enough through the Middle Rio Grande Valley for ABCWUA to operate its drinking water plant.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to all the above, if you act now (the ABCWUA board will take this up in a couple of weeks), you also get, at no additional charge, storage waivers in Heron (I’m sorry, this is already too complicated for more background, Heron’s another reservoir, it’s on Willow Creek, JFGI, it’s late and I’m tired.) for San Juan-Chama water that would have otherwise been parked in Abiquiu!

 

Some data on alfalfa production

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Update: Data here is from USDA, the “USGS” in the graphs is a typo in the code I used to generate them, which I’m too lazy to fix.

Line graph showing the trend of alfalfa acres harvested in New Mexico from 2000 to 2024. The x-axis represents the years, while the y-axis shows the number of acres harvested, starting from 0. The line is black with circular markers at each data point. A slight fluctuation in acres is observed, with values generally between 120,000 and 160,000 acres over the years. The bottom label reads: 'Data: USGS, Graph: John Fleck, Utton Center, University of New Mexico School of Law.'"

New Mexico alfalfa acreage is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2024 estimate of alfalfa acreage in New Mexico, 130,000 acres, is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s. Acreage is down 55 percent since the peak at the turn of the century.

Here’s Arizona:

Graph showing rising alfalfa acreage in Arizona from 1919 to the present

Different story for Arizona.

California:

Line graph showing declining alfalfa production in California

California, growing less alfalfa

Colorado

Assigned Water on the Colorado River: Arizona Department of Water Resources response

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The Arizona Department of Water Resources has published a thoughtful and also delightfully testy response to Enduring Solutions on the Colorado River, the white paper Kathryn Sorensen et al. (I’m one of the et alias) published in August.

First a reminder of our core premise:

As we work to reduce water use on the post-2026 Colorado River, two paths lie open before us.

One is to incentivize conservation by giving water users the chance to bank saved water for later use. Known most commonly as Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS), and more broadly in a series of increasingly creative implementations as “Assigned Water,” this creates short term savings. But in the long run, the approach entitles the users to take the water back out of the bank.

The other involves permanent reductions – “System Water.” Water use is reduced for the benefit of the Colorado River as a whole.

Investment in Assigned Water, attractive to water managers because of the allure that they can get their water back, has crowded out investment in the more durable System Water reductions that will be needed to bring the Colorado River into balance.

ADWR agrees with a lot of what we said (yay!):

ADWR agrees wholeheartedly with the general premise that System Water is preferable to any category of Assigned Water. Increased volumes of System Water will improve outcomes for water users across the entire Basin, as well as the environment. ADWR also agrees with the need to divorce decisions regarding system operations from any Assigned Water stored in the system.

ADWR takes issue with a lot of what we said (also yay!), and also was kinda mean – “Baseless Accusations and Little Substance” (also yay! because we need to be having these frank discussions – I worry being too polite isn’t helping right now).

I’m delighted this discussion is underway in a public forum. Go read the whole thing.

“institutional artisanship”

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Water resources must be governed before they can be managed, and the crafting of governance institutions is an ongoing challenge of the human condition. Institutional artisanship requires the availability of tools for institutional design and creation, and a reflective understanding of the use of those tools. Yet neither the tools nor the understanding exist in their entirety before institutional artisans attempt their craft: the tools at hand must be adapted to new purposes, and skill in their use must be learned along the way. Errors are inevitable, but successes are possible.

Blomquist, William. “Crafting water constitutions in California.” The practice of constitutional development: Vincent Ostrom’s quest to understand human affairs (2006): 99-134.

 

Happy New Water Year, New Mexico!

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"Line graph titled 'Storage in New Mexico's Rio Grande system' showing water storage over time, from around 1975 to 2023. The y-axis represents storage in acre-feet, ranging from 0 to 2,500,000. The x-axis represents the date. The graph compares two groups of reservoirs: Northern Reservoirs (Heron, El Vado, Abiquiu, Cochiti) depicted in red, and Southern Reservoirs (Elephant Butte, Caballo) depicted in blue. The blue line shows higher variability, peaking around 1990 and sharply declining after 2000, remaining low through the present. The red line shows less variation, staying generally consistent over time, with both lines converging toward lower storage levels in recent years.

Bouncing along the bottom.

Sept. 30 marks the end of the “water year,” an accounting milestone that gives us an opportunity to take stock.

The change in total water storage year-over-year is one way to do this, to help understand if we took more water out of the reservoirs than the climate put in. The graph above is actually based on Sept. 20 year-over-year (the Reclamation data updates lag a bit), but it’s enough to give us a feel for two things.

First, we’ve seen no real reversal of the long term pattern – a huge reduction in storage in the early 21st century, and then basically dragged the bottom of the reservoirs ever since.

Second, on a shorter one- or two-year time scale, total storage is down ~350,000 acre feet at the end of water year 2024 compared to the end of 2023. Over a two-year time scale, we basically burned through the bonus water from a wet 2023 and are back where we were at the end of 2022.

Rio Grande flow this year at Otowi in north-central New Mexico has been 63 percent of the period of record mean, going back to the late 1800s.

John Oliver on fact-checking

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When John Oliver used some of my work in a piece about water a couple of years ago, I spent a long time with one of the show’s producers as they developed it. Then, right before it aired, I spent more time in an intense round of fact-checking.

It was marvelous. They were fact-checking the jokes.

In a recent interview, Oliver explained the process:

But in terms of the responsibility of journalism, we do have intense fact-checking because we want it to be right. Those big stories are aggregations of incredible journalism. So it cannot function without journalism. Now, we recheck it to make sure it’s accurate or that it hasn’t changed, but we’re building this to make jokes. It’s just we want the foundations to be solid or those jokes fall apart. Those jokes have no structural integrity if the facts underneath them are bullshit.

h/t Simon Willison

Rubber Soul, the path to elevation 1,040, and the game of chicken on the Colorado River

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Two small ceramic plates, set on a background of rocks. Each plate includes fired pieces of cracked mud.

Cracked mud – memories of Lake Mead’s low stand. Art and photo by L. Heineman.

Two years ago, when the level of Lake Mead was hovering near elevation 1,040, my artist wife Lissa Heineman and I drove out over UNM’s fall break to see it for ourselves.

Out beyond the old Boulder Harbor, we walked a half mile across mud flats to get to the water. I could look out across the water to see the elbow of the old Southern Nevada Water Authority intake, above the water line. I was gut-punched by the visceral reality.

An apron of cracked mud in the foreground leads the eye to a distant Lake Mead.

Lake Mead in the 1,040s, October 2022.

On the walk back to the car, Lissa carefully picked up some pieces of cracked mud. Her art has always been wrapped up in the conceptual properties of her materials. So she carefully packed up the cracked mud in a box and took it home. It’s been sitting in her studio ever since, and last month she tried firing some of it atop some small ceramic plates in her kiln.

It worked, and she gave me the results to give to my Lower Basin/Lake Mead friends. The texture of the mud, with ripples across the sandy and muddy reservoir bottom, captures a moment in history I hope we never repeat.

So last week, with the Colorado River brain trust in Santa Fe for the Water Education Foundation’s always-fascinating Colorado River symposium, I drove up to see folks and stuck a couple of Lissa’s pieces in my backpack.

I shared them with a message: That was scary. Let’s not go back there again. Please don’t fuck this up.

I’ve got a lot going on – revisions to the new book, teaching my fall semester graduate-level water resources class, nervously eyeing the levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and the gridlock in Colorado River negotiations. So when my brain suggested listening to Rubber Soul Friday night, I was resistant. But we’ve been together for a long time, and I trust my brain’s judgment. So Rubber Soul it was.

What a great album.

This post is lengthy and rambly, so for those who are annoyed by my discursive side trips and just here for the Colorado River stuff, I’ve added anchors to the key material:

Rubber Soul and my fascination with innovation

When Eric Kuhn and I set out to write Science Be Dammed, the project arose in part out of a mutual fascination with E.C. LaRue, the early 20th century hydrologist who first tried to map out the supply of water, and possible uses of it, across the entire Colorado River Basin. The thing that first drew me to LaRue, long before I knew Eric, was the fundamental innovation of what LaRue and the others working at the time on similar projects were doing. No one had ever tried to envision managing a continental-sized river at the full basin scale.

photo of the Beatles – George, John, Ringo, and Paul. The image is diagonally warped. On the top left in a very curvy font reads the text "Rubber Soul"

Rubber Soul

In an entirely different context and framework, it’s a theme Bob Berrens and I take up in our new book Ribbons of Green, about the making of a city.

The first time I remember thinking hard about this was when Lissa, my sister Lisa, and I saw the Hermitage exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986. It was a magnificent sweep of early modern painting that had been collected by rich Russians before the revolution. I remember rounding a corner and being gobsmacked by a big Picasso canvas, Three Women, one of the first few cubist paintings that he and George Braque had been making in Paris in 1907-08. Lissa, who understood the history, took me back through the rest of the exhibit to see the roots – the impressionists breaking one way, Matisse another, and Cezanne sweeping them all away with the beginnings of the deconstruction of the picture plane that led to Braque and Picasso.

My own father had been deeply influence by the reverberations of that work, and I had always seen it in Dad’s work, but it wasn’t until Lissa held my hand and walked me through the history that I began thinking about pathways. How does this happen? Once I saw, read, and learned about it once, I became hungry for examples. My intellectual life is now littered with them. I have long since soured on Picasso himself (what an asshole!), but the genre of intellectual journey continues to fascinate.

The most interesting books I’ve read in recent years all document this – Patti Smith’s Just Kids, about the birth of punk and her invention of Patti Smith; Amartya Sen’s memoir Home in the World; Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip Into Another World (I still can’t grasp the music, but his story of innovation is a joy); Stanley Crouch’s biography of early Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning. In each case (three memoirs, one not), the innovation is rooted in a deep understanding of the past and foundations, and then the ability to see, out of that, something entirely new. And all four books are ripping good reads.

I love playing this game with the Beatles, because thanks to streaming services it is possible to dive in and listen to them learning on the fly, to watch the way the bar band Beatles learned how audiences responded to the old things and began envisioning something new.

This is metaphor.

The path to elevation 1,040

As we near the Sept. 30 end of the water year, Lake Mead is at elevation 1,064 feet above sea level, twenty feet above where it was when Lissa picked up the cracked mud two years ago.

In 2021-22, it took one year to drop from the 1,060s to the 1,040s. Could this happen again?

The short answer is probably not in a single year, because of a couple of things that have changed since then. But in two years? Yup. Lissa and I could have a chance to collect more 1,040s cracked mud.

The first thing that has changed since 2022 is the release from Lake Powell. In 2022 the Basin was in the midst of its hair-on-fire crisis management because of fears of Powell dropping dangerously low, so the Powell release that year was just 7 million acre feet. This year, it’s 7.48 million acre feet. So more water coming into Mead.

Things are also better on the outflow side. In 2022, the three Lower Basin States used 6.66 million acre feet. This year, the latest forecast number is 6.09 million acre feet.

Between the higher inflows and lower use, the latest midpoint forecast has Mead ending next year at 1,059 feet above sea level, with Reclamation’s most pessimistic model runs (the “minimum probable”) at ~1,054. But the min probable clearly shows risk out at the edge of what our headlights can illuminate right now, of dropping back into the 1,040s again by the summer of 2026.

The game of chicken on the Colorado River

The “game of chicken” is a game theory classic. It involves a conflict which, in the classic storytelling version, involves two drivers headed toward one another on a collision course. We’ll call them “U” and “L”. Each has the option to swerve or stay on course. The best outcome for each driver is for the other to swerve and lose face (water), while the driver who stays the course demonstrates dominance (keeps its water). But if neither swerves, we end up with a catastrophic collision. In the game theory matrix, it looks like this, with the payoffs for each:

Driver U Swerves Driver U Stays
Driver L Swerves (0,0) (-1,1)
Driver L Stays (1,-1) (-10,-10)

 

I’m obviously talking about the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin here, which are at impasse over the Lower Basin’s proposal to cut deeply up to a point (1.5-ish million acre feet total) and, if any deeper cuts are needed, to share them among the two basins.

The Upper Basin’s counter is basically “no.” If deeper cuts are needed, the Lower Basin should make them.

The payoff matrix, though, is a lot more complicated than my toy example above. First, both sides can gamble on good hydrology, which could avert the crash. So even if the impasse remains, the collision is not a sure thing. (In this regard, it’ll be interesting to see how the players’ strategies shift if we have a really bad winter.)

The second is the nature of the collision itself. No one knows quite what it will look like.

In the classic chicken game, both drivers know about the crash that happens if neither swerves. But part of the risk calculation we all have to live with right now is the uncertainty about what happens if the Upper and Lower Basin states can’t come to an agreement. We also have a situation where the nature of the game is changing over time.

Walking down a Santa Fe sidewalk Wednesday evening after dinner, one of my Colorado River friends observed that both sides seem to think that, if the collision comes, they have a winning legal argument.

If you think that, your understanding of what happens in the bottom right quadrant of the matrix, the crash scenario, is very different.

The Upper Basin seems to have convinced itself, at least based on public pronouncements, that it has a winning legal argument in terms of its obligation, or lack thereof, to send water downstream past Lee Ferry. This seems dangerous to me given my understanding of the history and the law, but it doesn’t matter what I think. The Upper Basin seems happy to keep hammering down the road.

Once deliveries past Lee Ferry drop below one of the “tripwire” triggers (82.5maf / ten years or 75/10), the Lower Basin states have nothing to lose by suing. And when that happens, my community’s water supply is at risk if my basin’s lawyers aren’t right.

Crash!

A few years back Kaveh Madhani and Bora Ristic wrote a paper working out the details of a game theory example that seems to fit what we’re currently seeing in the Lower Basin’s proposal to “own” the 1.5 million acre feet of structure deficit, and to try to negotiate some sort of sharing arrangement if the cuts need to go deeper. This would appear to be what Ristic and Madhani describe as “strategic loss.”

Without foresight into game changes over time, players are blind to the fact that they are in a game of chicken. We model agents with foresight by interconnecting games across time and show how this creates opportunities for “strategic loss” early on, allowing players with foresight to reduce total costs. High future costs can thus be avoided with foresight if the rising costs of inaction are made apparent.

Which seems to model what the Lower Basin has done.

I would prefer to live in the upper left quadrant of the chicken game matrix, where both sides compromise. My values: mindful shared reductions across the basin can leave us all with healthy, thriving communities. I wrote a whole book about this path. But one of my smart friends pointed out something that is a reasonable hypothesis: The model I laid out in that book, written a decade ago, was sufficient on a river that shrinks some, but seems to be failing on a river that has shrunk a lot.

Risti? and Madhani seem to be suggesting a game theoretic path that could get us back on track.

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