By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
The Colorado River doesn't send an invoice, but Friday's announcement out of Washington was one all the same. Federal officials ordered steep water cuts for the next two years across California, Nevada and Arizona, three states whose farms, faucets and power grids depend on a river system that has been shrinking for years, according to CBS News and ABC News.
The cuts are real, but they could have been worse. ABC News reports the reductions are less severe than the worst-case scenario federal officials had floated back in July — a small mercy for water managers who had been bracing for deeper losses.
Neither report published the precise acre-foot figures or a state-by-state breakdown of the cuts, nor did they detail which sectors — agriculture, municipal supply, or hydropower — will absorb the brunt of it. Those specifics matter enormously to the businesses that will feel this first: farmers deciding what to plant next season, utilities pricing power, and cities calculating what conservation mandates will cost residents and ratepayers.
What's clear is the direction of travel. The Colorado River has supported roughly 40 million people and a vast swath of Western agriculture for decades, and the federal government has now signaled, for a second consecutive year, that the supply can no longer meet the demand as originally allocated. The economic reckoning — who fallows fields, who pays more for water, who absorbs the cost of scarcity — is still being written.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News and ABC News.
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