Water Scarcity - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 104

As water use shifts from mostly rural use to urban use, and drought is on the rise,
farmers in the American West have begun to cut down nut trees, fallow land, and sell
off their water rights to expanding cities. To some longtime irrigators, water has become
more valuable than crops.
In California, a drought in 2008 prompted farmers such as Bruce Rolen , a Sacra-
mento Valley rice farmer, to fallow his fields. Instead of planting in April, he sold his
irrigation water on the open market, where prices jumped from about $50 per acre-foot
to as much as $200 an acre-foot. “It just makes dollars and sense right now,” Rolen said.
“There's more economic advantage to fallowing than to raising a crop.”
As dry regions become even drier, and populations continue to grow, unprecedented
ecological disasters could follow. One foreshadowing of this harrowing scenario is un-
folding in Perth, Australia . In recent decades the metropolitan area around Perth has
seen its population surge past 1.5 million at the same time that precipitation has tapered
off. Water planners fear that unless drastic action is taken, Perth could become the
world's first “ghost city”—a large, modern metropolis that will have to be abandoned
due to a lack of water. This apocalyptic vision was unthinkable just a few years ago. A
similar situation could be facing such cities as Las Vegas or Phoenix, in the American
Southwest, which is already the hottest and driest part of the country, where cities are
continuing to expand into the increasingly arid desert.
MODERN WATER USE
In the last half century, America's total water use has risen steadily: from 150.7 billion
gallons per day (Bgal/d) in 1950 to 410 Bgal/d in 2005, according to the USGS. (Water
use peaked in 2000 at 413 Bgal/d and has since leveled off, thanks to greater efficiency.)
Eighty percent of this water was taken from surface supplies and 20 percent from
groundwater supplies. Just four states—Florida, Idaho, Texas, and Califor-
nia—accounted for more than a quarter of all water withdrawals in the United States.
While urban demand for water is growing, the biggest users of water in the United
States, and worldwide, are irrigated agriculture and power plants that run tons of water
through giant cooling towers to dissipate the heat built up in electrical generation. In
2005, irrigation in the United States accounted for 201 Bgal/d, equivalent to 62 percent
of the nation's total freshwater withdrawals. Thermoelectric power generation used 201
Bgal/d, or 48 percent of fresh and saline water, which was mostly used by steam-driv-
en turbine generators and cooling towers and then returned to the environment. Com-
bined withdrawals for domestic use, livestock, aquaculture, and mining represented just
3 percent of US water withdrawals, or less than 13 Bgal/d in 2000, the USGS reported.