What if we started putting more water into the Colorado River basin instead of ratcheting down ever further how much is taken out of it? Increase supply, in other words, instead of futilely trying to curb demand.

As news reports continue to remind us, the Colorado River has been drawn down over the decades by exponential growth in lower-basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada. But rather than brainstorming only how we can limit use of the West’s most precious commodity, how about finding new sources of water to augment rivers like the Colorado?

Generations of conditioning by the environmental movement’s most ardent hand-wringers has left society thinking the only way to sustain scarce resources is to use less – no matter the cost to other human endeavors.

It’s a narrow view that ignores the scientific and technological breakthroughs, engineering innovations and economic developments that have either reversed scarcity or bypassed it over the ages, moving civilization ever upward and onward.

The naysayers are oblivious to it all – and have the upper hand on Western water policy.

As reported by our news affiliate Colorado Politics, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Wednesday announced it will pay farmers in Arizona, Nevada and California to scale back their water use.

The newly created Lower Colorado River Basin System Conservation and Efficiency Program will pay farmers in those lower-basin states up to $400 for each acre-foot of water they don’t use. The program will be funded with part of the $4 billion allocated for Western drought relief by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Sounds like an inefficient way to save water – essentially, paying farmers not to irrigate and thus, to produce less. Granted, that approach isn’t new; it has been used by Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for years to limit production and thus support higher prices for farmers. But paying them to produce even less with the roundabout aim of reducing water use seems like it at best will just spread the pain around.

Fortunately, some are rethinking all this.

In a published commentary for The Gazette, water and energy consultant Carmine Iadarola points to advancing technologies that allow the effective large-scale reuse of water.

“As a result of their own water crisis, Israel recycles and reuses nearly 90% of its water; Spain over 30%,” Iadarola writes. “By comparison, the U.S. reuses less than 10%. The technology to use and reuse water in a decentralized system already exists as proven by countries all over the world and is now being adopted by various cities in the U.S.”

Meanwhile, Arizona’s state government is laying plans with Mexico for a jointly developed desalination plant that would turn seawater into fresh water along the Arizona-Mexico border, where the Colorado River empties into the Sea of Cortez. This year, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announced he would work with his state’s Legislature to provide $1 billion to “secure Arizona’s water future for the next 100 years” through the desalination project.

That new freshwater source could help replace water that rapidly growing Arizona is drawing from the lower Colorado basin. Which would leave more water back upstream in Colorado.

It’s nowhere near fruition, of course, but it and other innovations – much more so than backward-thinking, ever-more-stringent-and-costly conservation measures – will assure the sustainability of the West’s water supply into the future.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board