Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

December 12, 2025

New ‘book’ explores the evolving thoughts about an increasingly dire situation

To put that into perspective, the Colorado River Compact assumed an average 16.5 million acre-feet at that site, Lees Ferry. The river this century has produced far less. Since 2020, the river flows have declined even more, to an average of 10.8.

Might it get worse?

“Dancing With Deadpool,” a new product from the Colorado River Research Group, delivers the short answer.

“Another year or two of low inflows and we will completely blow through the cushions provided by reservoir storage,” says the document’s executive summary. The word “crisis” litters the 64-page production. It has eight chapters written by 22 authors from Colorado and three other Colorado River Basin states.

The Colorado River has fascinated journalists since at least the 1980s. Then, the river was still delivering water to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez but troubles were evident on the horizon. The river now, except for specially engineered releases from upstream dams, disappears entirely after crossing into Mexico.

Since 2022, the Colorado River had become a national story. Empty seats at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas have disappeared, press credentials harder to secure.

The tension even in the last year has grown. The river runoff this year was only 55% of long-term average. The seven basin states remain at an impasse about solutions proportionate to the problem.

“We have now entered a new era: Dancing with Deadpool,” says the report.

Deadpool is the point at which reservoirs can release no water. In 2022, that moment seemed imminent as sandstone walls of Glen Canyon were exposed directly to sunlight after being submerged since shortly after Lake Powell began filling. Then a miracle winter arrived, water levels in the two big reservoirs, Powell and Mead, rose once again, the emergency receded.

Now the crisis is back — and looming larger.

You can scare yourself to death with what-ifs, but we may need something akin to a miracle to avoid full-blown crisis. We cannot have another winter and then runoff like 2002-2003. Or, as several authors point out, runoff like we had in 2025.

As it is, we need another miracle winter, something akin to what diehard Denver Broncos fans remember as “the drive” in a 1987 playoff game. John Elway led his football team 98 yards down the field in Cleveland to tie the game with 37 seconds left. They won in OT.

Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck warn against too much optimism. Mother Nature can be stingy. She has been in the past, with one drought period as long as 80 years during the last 2,000 years. Now, the evidence grows that our monkeying with Mother Nature has produced this drought.

In 2017, Udall and Overpeck issued the results of their study that showed that warming alone was responsible for roughly half of the reduced natural flows of the Colorado River, at that point 17%. They delivered a new phrase: “hot drought” as distinguished from “dry drought.” The warmer temperatures were robbing the Colorado River Basin of water.

Precipitation in the basin has also declined 7% in the 21st century, as compared to the 20th century. In their chapter, Udall from Colorado State and Overpeck now at the University of Michigan (but with a summer cabin in San Miguel County), cite two new studies that together provide evidence “suggesting” complicity of humans. Greenhouse gases explain the declined precipitation, too.

As science is never 100%, Udall and Overpeck use cautious language. The studies, they say, “strongly suggest we are in for extended dry periods in the Colorado headwaters in the decades ahead.”

If there is less water, then isn’t the solution simple? Use less!

Easy to say. And for the last 20 years, efforts have been made to nibble away at uses. Cities have been working to make less water-intensive urban landscapes popular. But the far larger story lies in agriculture.

In Colorado and the three upper basin states, for example, about 70% of all the Colorado River water (after trans-basin diversions for irrigation are accounted for) goes to agriculture. How can ag use less water?

Two of the chapters work on this. A trio of academics from Wyoming and one from Colorado take aim specifically at the upper basin states. “The relevant questions are not whether or when cuts will happen, but how deep will they go, how will they be distributed, and how well can the consequences be mitigated?” they ask.

The four upper-basin researchers argue that evidence already exists for success. With creativity and collaboration, they say, farmers and ranchers can sustain crop and livestock production even as water becomes scarce. They get into the details, talking about adjustments of cow-calf operation, for example, to reduce water-dependent needs.  They call for more research into limited irrigation, crop switching and other practices.

Two other academics, both from Arizona State, take a somewhat broader view, acknowledging the challenge.

“In a landscape of poor choices, in a failing river system in which all solutions are deeply unpopular to some or other powerful constituency, potentially harmful to one community or another or inordinately expensive and founded on unreliable funding, it is at least worth considering another option,” write Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter.

They see cuts of up to 4 million acre-feet in the basin annually being necessary. Again, that’s about 25% of what those who created the Colorado River Compact expected would be annual flows for the seven basin states.

How to get there? They introduce a new concept, “economic water productivity,” a measure of the value of water. Instead of buy and dry programs, they see need for a federally financed effort to pivot uses through incentives to reduce water use on those agricultural lands.

Similar buy-down of high-volume irrigated agriculture is underway in two groundwater depletion areas in Colorado, the San Luis Valley and the Republican River Basin. Some federal money is providing help in the latter basin. They contend federal money will be needed, and lots of it, to pay for this big pivot in the Colorado River Basin. That, they say, would be fitting, because it was federal money that financed the infrastructure for this hydraulic empire.

As for groundwater, that part of the Colorado River story has been generally overlooked. A study released several months ago found that nearly two-thirds of storage — both surface and groundwater — lost from 2002 to 2024 in the Colorado River actually came from groundwater depletion, mostly in Arizona.

Whoa!

“Simply shifting unsustainable surface water uses to unsustainable groundwater uses does nothing to address the core mismatch of supplies and demands,” observes Doug Kenney, who directs the Western Water Policy Program at University of Colorado Law School.

Other contributors dissect the complexities of what would seem to be simple, common sense solutions. For example, Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the Colorado River District, works through the concept of water sharing among the states based on a percentage basis. The Colorado River Compact divides water between the upper and lower basins, a mistake in retrospect although even in 1922, when it was adopted, there had been an argument for using a percentage.

Later, when the upper-basin sates adopted a compact among themselves, they did use a percentage basis.

Kuhn goes deep into the history, as he has done with book-writing (“Science be Dammed,” 2019, with John Fleck) to sort through the thinking of this idea over the last century. It came up again earlier this year as the seven basin states tried to figure out how to share the river given the changed realities. The states, however, could not agree on what percentages should be used for sharing. It may have been just too much of a transformational change for some states to accept, he says.

However, the idea may come back if the stalemate between the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River ends up in the federal courts. Or failing that, what exactly would federal intervention look like? That’s an impolite question, but one of those what-ifs that must be wondered about. (For the record, the water people I know seem to have high regard for people in the Department of Interior in charge of looking after the Colorado River).

The large story here is that the states, with enormous aid from the federal treasury, created the infrastructure and expectations of water that no longer exists and, as per the studies of scientists, will almost certainly not return within the lifetimes of any of us. What, then, should be the federal role in defining the future balance? Once again, might the dismantling of Glen Canyon Dam be such a wild idea after all?

Thoughts in this book will likely be part of the conversations next week in Las Vegas when representatives of the seven basin states gather, as they always do, at the Colorado River Water Uses Association conference. Might a hallway conversation lead to a breakthrough?

Like huge snowstorms in the Rockies and then cool temperatures during runoff, there might be miracles, but I wouldn’t count on it. This deadpool dance might end sooner than anybody actually likes.

Click the link to read the article on the Deseret News website (Carter Williams). Here’s an excerpt:

November 12, 2025

Utah and the six other Colorado River states reached a tentative agreement to continue working together on a plan to share the river’s water, but failed to secure a consensus plan ahead of an important Tuesday deadline. Utah, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming, all of which rely on the river for water, agreed to continue to meet until they have a “framework solution” by mid-February 2026, said Gene Shawcroft, chairman of the Colorado River Authority of Utah.

“We were able to have enough of a framework put together that the federal government agrees with us that the framework can be continued to be refined in order for us to have a deal by the middle of February,” he told reporters in a negotiations update briefing on Wednesday…

The basin states have had agreements in place on how Colorado River water has been allocated for over a century, and the post-2026 plan seeks to be the largest operational update since a 2007 plan to address how water is stored and pulled from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. Its users agree that prolonged drought and low reservoir conditions remain persistent challenges facing the river, but there’s still division on how to handle the discrepancy between water needs and what’s available in the system within one of the fastest-growing regions of the country. Lower Basin states have called for mandatory reductions during dry years. In a public letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Tuesday, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and other Arizona leaders called it “alarming” that Upper Basin states, including Utah, “have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions.”

[…]

Upper Basin states don’t believe those types of cuts are necessary because they use less water than Lower Basin states, largely because of how water rights are allocated, favoring senior rights holders like California, Shawcroft said. These are the types of arguments still holding up a long-term deal.

“The major sticking point is there’s a whole lot less water in the system than we anticipated, or there’s historically been,” he said. “The question is, how do you divide a pie that’s significantly smaller than it has been, when everyone’s used to getting that big piece of the pie?”

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

November 12, 2025

Water managers from the seven states that share the Colorado River have blown a deadline given to them by the federal government to come up with a rough plan on how the drought-stricken river will be shared in the future.

The Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) still cannot find agreement with the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada) about how the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — will be operated and how cuts will be shared in dry years.

In June, Scott Cameron, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, said federal officials would need to know the broad outlines of a plan from the states by Nov. 11. Despite frequent meetings in recent months, negotiators were unable to hammer out a deal by Tuesday, leaving future management for the water supply for 40 million people in the Southwest cloaked in uncertainty. 

Instead, the states, the Interior Department and the federal Bureau of Reclamation released a short joint statement Tuesday afternoon, noting that serious and ongoing challenges face the Colorado River.

“While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” the statement reads. “Through continued cooperation and coordinated action, there is a shared commitment to ensuring the long-term sustainability and resilience of the Colorado River system.” 

Environmental groups disappointed

The failure to come up with a plan by the deadline has sparked criticism from the basin’s environmental groups. 

“I’m really disappointed with how yesterday played out; the states did not have anything to meet the Nov. 11 deadline,” said John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates. “The fact that they didn’t have a basic framework for how to manage the system after 2026 is really unfortunate, and I think they missed a good chance to put forward something that we can all consider and examine as a basin.” 

Representatives from the seven states have been in talks for two years about how to manage the river after the current guidelines expire. After a long standoff without much progress throughout 2024, state representatives in June offered a glimmer of hope for a way forward, floating a concept for sharing the river based on natural flows at Lee Ferry, the dividing line between the Upper and Lower basins, instead of water demand. But that hope evaporated like water off Lake Mead, with negotiators reportedly deadlocked again by the end of the summer.  

A statement from environmental groups Great Basin Water Network and Living Rivers called the Nov. 11 deadline arbitrary and ineffectual, and said the inaction symbolizes the overall dysfunction on the river and in government. They chastised the states and federal government for the lack of transparency and lack of public participation surrounding negotiations.

“The states don’t deserve the kid-glove treatment any longer,” Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, said in a prepared statement. “They have a behavioral problem as much as they do a hydrology problem. Any entity that wants to increase use is unfit to manage our most precious resource.”

A group of influential environmental organizations, including American Rivers, National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Trout Unlimited and Western Resource Advocates, released a joint statement Wednesday saying that they were deeply disappointed the states did not find consensus and that federal leadership will be essential. 

The statement called for solutions that ground management decisions in the best available science, expand conservation programs, modernize infrastructure and ensure that Native American tribes — which have underutilized rights to a large share of the river’s water — play a meaningful role in shaping the river’s future.

“We understand the extraordinary complexity of this challenge and the difficult tradeoffs the states are working hard to navigate — but the river isn’t going to wait for process or for politics,” the statement said. “Drought, intensified by increasingly extreme conditions, is reshaping the basin, and the window to secure the river’s future and move beyond crisis-driven policymaking is closing fast.”

Since the turn of the century, the Colorado River basin has been locked in the grip of a megadrought. Climate change has robbed Western rivers of their flows, with the basin seeing a 20% decline from the 20th century average, according to scientists. Those factors, as well as unrelenting water demands, have pushed Lake Powell and Lake Mead to record-low levels in recent years and thrown river management into crisis mode. 

The current negotiations between the seven states are aimed at replacing the 2007 Interim Guidelines, which lay out how the reservoirs will be operated and shortages shared, and which expire at the end of 2026. New guidelines would need to be in place by the beginning of the next water year, Oct. 1, 2026, leaving little time to complete the required National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process.

The 2007 guidelines set annual Powell and Mead releases based on reservoir levels and do not go far enough to prevent them from being drawn down during consecutive dry years. In 2022, Lake Powell flirted with falling below a critical elevation to make hydropower, and may be headed there again next year if conditions don’t improve.

Sticking points

Over the past few months, the positions of two of the states — Colorado and Arizona — have emerged as one of the main sources of disagreement. Water from the Colorado River has fueled the exponential growth in recent decades of Arizona’s cities, which are the economic and political powerhouse of the state, along with some of the most productive farmland in the basin. But Arizona’s reliance on the junior water rights of the Central Arizona Project means it is first on the chopping block for cuts. 

Arizona representatives have said that the deepest cuts should be shared basinwide, including by the Upper Basin. Gov. Katie Hobbs and other state lawmakers said in a Nov. 11 letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that Arizona’s Colorado River allocation is important to the nation’s growth and independence and that Colorado River reliability is a matter of national security. The letter highlighted how the state plays a critical role in manufacturing semiconductors and information-technology products. 

“With such high stakes for Arizona and the nation, we find it alarming that the Upper Basin states have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions,” the letter reads. “This extreme negotiating posture — four of the seven basin states refusing to participate in any sharing of water shortages — has led to a fundamental impasse that is preventing the successful development of a seven-state consensus plan for the management of the Colorado River.”

The Lower Basin has committed to a 1.5 million acre-foot reduction, which accounts for evaporation and transit losses.

Water managers from Colorado — which is the de facto leader of the Upper Basin with a 51.75% share of the water allocated to the four Upper Basin states — have pushed back on the notion that their states should contribute to cutbacks in water use since their water users already suffer shortages in dry years and the four states have never used their entire allocation of the river, while the Lower Basin overuses its share. Colorado representative Becky Mitchell has repeatedly said that any cuts the state makes must be voluntary, not mandatory.

However, the Upper Basin states have been experimenting for years with conservation programs that pay water users to cut back, most recently in 2023 and 2024 with the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Program. In a proposal submitted in March 2024, the Upper Basin states offered up a potential conservation pool in Lake Powell of up to 200,000 acre-feet a year, and most water users accept that some type of future conservation program for the Upper Basin is inevitable. 

What happens now?

Federal officials had previously set a second deadline of Feb. 14, 2026, for the states to present details of a plan. They have repeatedly said that if the seven states fail to come up with an agreement, Reclamation will exercise its authority to protect critical reservoir levels. That could include releases from upstream reservoirs to prop up Powell and Mead, including releasing water from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River. 

Reclamation is moving forward with its NEPA process and said in early October that it plans to have a draft environmental impact statement by the end of the year. Representatives from the bureau were not available for comment Wednesday due to the government shutdown. Cameron has said that the alternatives analyzed in the EIS will be broad enough that they would capture any seven-state agreement, which they could then plug in as the preferred alternative — assuming the states come up with something.

“The basin states remain committed to collaboration grounded in the best available science and respect for all Colorado River water users,” Mitchell said in a prepared statement. “We are taking a meaningful step toward long-term sustainability and demonstrating a shared determination to find supply-driven solutions.”

Click the link to read the article on the E&E News website (Jennifer Yachnin). Here’s an excerpt:

October 3, 2025

Scott Cameron will take over as acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, shifting titles at the Interior Department while he maintains his role as the Trump administration’s lead official in negotiations over the future of the Colorado River. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tapped Cameron for the role on Oct. 1, announcing the decision in a secretarial order that also updated other leadership roles recently confirmed by the Senate. The decision comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision on Sept. 30 to withdraw his nomination of Ted Cooke, a former top official at the Central Arizona Project, to be Reclamation commissioner.

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

September 28, 2025

Everyone knows about the Colorado River troubles. Even in the 1990s, the last time the river had enough water to reach the sea, problems were looming. Then came the 21st century with its mixture of severe drought, rising temperatures, and plunging reservoir levels.

You’ve likely read a few of the hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of stories that have been written about these diminishing flows and difficulty of the seven states and 30 tribes who share the river (along with Mexico) in reaching agreement about reduced uses. With a deadline of Nov. 11 looming to reach some basic agreement, the parties have not publicly retreated from their rigid talking points.

An ad hoc group of six Colorado River experts began assembling reports in 2025. They have been dubbed the Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River Basin. Although several have previously served in various government roles, they report to no specific constituencies now. All save one are affiliated with academic institutions. They have freedom to speak the truth as they see it. They have no direct authority but they do have credibility.

In these white papers, they have consistently argued for the need to recalibrate expectations, to align demands with the water delivered by the shrinking Colorado River. They have not necessarily defined exactly how that is to be done. They argue for a shared burden.

Their position conflicts, to an extent, with the position of the four upper-basin states, who have never fully developed the 7.5 million acre-feet allocated to them in the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and insist that this allocation must be honored. Similarly, lower-basin interests have also continued to assert their rights to river entitlements.

Is this group of six having impact? That is hard to gauge, but observers and participants in Colorado River matters point to at least some small evidence that their thoughts and observations are showing up in take-away messages from meetings.

Big Pivots convened a conversation with several of the report authors on Sept. 18, a week after their latest report had been issued. In that report, (“Analysis of Colorado River Basin Suggests Need for Immediate Action,” Sept. 11, 2025) they took stock of the 24-month report from the Bureau of Reclamation that was issued in late August. That report delivered the numbers that collectively showed dramatically increased risk during the upcoming two years of the dams on the Colorado River becoming dysfunctional.

For reasons of expedience, the conversation was limited to three of the six individuals:

Eric Kuhn, who in 2018 retired from the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District after 22 years as general manager.

• Eric Kuhn, who in 2018 retired from the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District after 22 years as general manager.
• Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School, who was the assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of Interior from 2009 to 2014 and the U.S. commissioner and chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission from 2022 to 2025. She had practiced water law for many years with Denver-based Holland & Hart.
• John Fleck, the writer in residence at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center in Albuquerque since 2002 and before that directed the University of New Mexico’s Water Resource Program for five years. He was a journalist in his younger life.

Also contributing to the reports have been:

• Jack Schmidt, director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, and former chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center of the U.S. Geological Survey;
• Katherine Sorensen, of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University and former director of Phoenix Water Services; and
• Katherine Tara, staff attorney for Utton Transboundary Resources Center at the University of New Mexico.

The conversation reported below has been tightened considerably and modified slightly to enhance clarity.

The three of you were among six authors of a report issued on September 11 that asked, “How close to the cliff’s edge we are in the Colorado River Basin?” How do you get six people in agreement to an answer for that question? What process do you use to produce these reports?

Eric Kuhn: When you focus on the data, coming to a similar conclusion about the future is actually quite easy. The (Bureau of Reclamation’s) 24-month study from August was out. It suggests that we’re closing in on the cliff. Jack Schmidt was very much involved in the numbers, the technical aspects. The message was easy. Getting agreement on the exact wording requires a little more patience.

John Fleck: Something that makes a process like this work with this group of people is that we all begin with a deeply shared understanding of how the system works and what those numbers mean. We don’t need to spend time learning about reservoir levels and the relationship between Powell and Mead. This is a group of people who already have a shared knowledge. [ed. emphasis mine]

Anne Castle: I think we also share an overall goal of seeing a sustainable river system. We think that changes need to be made in an equitable way to match supply and demand, and that’s not happening. We all bring slightly different skills to the table and different experiences, which has improved the end product (the reports).

Fleck: One of the challenges in Colorado River governance is that you have many people who have a great deal of expertise who operate as employees of and advocates for a particular geography, for a particular community, especially those representing community or state water supplies.

Our group acts as citizens of the basin as a whole. Other people also see their role that way, especially folks in the federal government. But we have some freedoms that other people might not have in terms of being able to speak out publicly.

This is a third report since April by the same set of six authors. How did you come together? 

Kuhn: Jack (Schmidt) is with the Center for Colorado River Studies. Jack and I co-authored white papers four and six among Jack’s series. That was now five years ago. Those papers are still very, very good. Because the supply-and-demand issue hasn’t been addressed, they’re still relevant. Jack and Anne go back a long way to when Jack was the head of the Grand Canyon research effort out of Flagstaff and Anne was assistant secretary of Interior. We’ve known each other for a long time. The new one is Katherine Tara, who just graduated a couple years ago from New Mexico law school and is now helping out John. So it was actually a pretty easy get together.

Fleck: We’ve all worked together in sort of twos and threes on books and papers.

Castle: John, Eric, Jack and I were having periodic meetings just to sort of talk through what was going on with the river and what the issues were. We were each doing our independent writing things. Jack and Eric and John had all worked with Katherine (Sorensen, of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University), and we wanted that lower basin expertise that Katherine has in spades.

We started to talk as a six-person group. In the spring, we decided the time was right for us to write something about the next set of guidelines. And that was the instigation for the report that we put out in April. See “Essential Pillars for the Post-2026 Colorado River Guidelines,” April 25, 2025.

All but one of the six of authors of these recent reports live in the upper basin states. I know you say that you do not have affiliations that tie you to a particular point of view. Still, does this tilt toward the upper basin dull some of your effectiveness?

Castle: I think, on the contrary, that the upper basin state principals would say that we tilt toward the lower basin because we haven’t adopted the positions that the upper basin principals have been taking.

Fleck: I have long been criticized here in New Mexico and by folks in the upper basin in general for always taking the side of the lower basin. I was born in California. One of my books was really lower basin focused. So I have a lot of connections and interest in the lower basin. It’s certainly the critique that we’ve received.

Kuhn: I agree. I think John and I wanted to take a basin perspective when we started writing our book (“Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River”), but I acknowledge that after working for the Colorado River District for almost 38 years, that I do have an upper basin perspective on many things. In the recent papers, not much. My focus has been the entire basin.

Your reports have been very action oriented, and that is particularly true of this last one, where you call for drastic and immediate action. Are you seeing evidence that your work is having impact?

Castle: It’s getting attention. I don’t know if it’s resulting in action.

Fleck: One of our goals is to move conversations into the public arena that should be held in the public arena rather than in the sort of cloistered spaces in which a lot of Colorado River decision making is conducted. Katherine Tara, the newest member or youngest member of our group, talks about the need for a Colorado River C-SPAN, the need for broader public forums. And I think our work has contributed to forcing some issues and discussions into public.

I want to go back to something that Eric said at the outset. You said that you are of like mind, because you’ve all studied the data, and the data take you to the same conclusions. If that is the case with you having studied the data, what does that say about the broader basin discussion? If everybody has studied the data, should that not take everybody to the same conclusion?

Kuhn: The problem is that all the principals work for a governor or a board or constituents. The six of us all have focused on the data, and I think many, many of the journalists and many of the experts in the basin acknowledge the data. There’s still a culture among the major agencies and the states that supports a system that is unsustainable. We must reduce our uses to match the supply. But they all have constituencies and probably lawyers that tell them this is why it’s everybody else’s responsibility, not mine or not ours. We have yet to crack that culture that the basin must reduce water use — but not me.

Fleck: One of the things important about the book Eric and I wrote is in the title, ignoring inconvenient science, because we have a history in this basin of doing things for political expediency. Looking away from the most unpleasant scientific conclusions about the available water supply makes it easier for political actors to deal with their local and state constituencies. Because it’s hard to go to a community and say, “I’m sorry, there really is less water.” So, the political incentives are not aligned with responding to the science the way we think they should be, which is why we have to say these things that are really hard for a governor or governor’s representative to say.

Castle: Because we’re independent and do not answer to political constituencies, we have the ability and, frankly, the luxury of pointing to wherever the data takes us. The political incentives are almost diametrically opposed to doing the hard things that need to be done to balance what nature is supplying with what we’re using. One of the goals we’re pursuing is to educate a broader community about what the data shows and what conclusions that leads us to. That enables people to advocate to their own representatives for sensible solutions.

Do you have a bigger game plan in mind? Are you being reactive to events or do you have a strategy that goes beyond into like what we do in 2026, for example.

Fleck: Speaking for myself, I believe it is possible for us to continue to have communities that not only survive but thrive with less water if we find reasonable and equitable ways of sharing the burden of the impact of climate change across the entire West. My personal concern is that sort of parochial advocacy creates a winner- loser situation. Some community might win and not have to cut at all; another community could have disastrous cuts. That violates my basic notions of the moral framework that I have for thinking about what I want the future to look like.

Kuhn: My goal in this goes back to what John said about our book, which is paying more attention to the data and the science. We no longer have the luxury of ignoring the data and the science. Doing so will lead to an outcome that our constituents won’t like. We have to get over that hurdle. That has been my goal all along. More reliance on good data-based decision making.

Are there lessons for the seven states in the Colorado River Basin from the recent Rio Grande settlement?

(For background, see the E&E News report on Sept. 2, 2025: “States reach new settlement over Rio Grande.”)

Kuhn: I think so. Going out on a limb, I think the lesson here is that even if there’s litigation in the Colorado River Basin, the negotiations are going to continue. The mediation is going to continue.

My view of this Rio Grande agreement from 30,000 feet and from a long way away was that the court-appointed special master pretty much forced them to reach an agreement. He kept pushing them to reach an agreement. They failed initially (and) at last succeeded.

So I think the lesson is, even if there’s litigation, there’s going to be continued discussions and negotiations. I question whether, without the litigation, New Mexico would have been willing to enter into the agreement that they have entered into. I think that the additional risk of the court case brought New Mexico to the table on several issues, but that’s just my view of it from a long way away.

Castle: A legal lesson learned from the Rio Grande experience is don’t ignore the objections of the feds.

Fleck: A related lesson I have taken is that we have a history of litigation in the Colorado River Basin that was very, very much conflict-based for more than a decade. But the Rio Grande experience shows that, while extremely unpleasant and extremely expensive, it was possible to manage this river. It’s my river, right? I’m in Albuquerque. On the Rio Grande, we’re able to manage this river during the time of litigation. It did force the parties into collaboration and compromise, however ugly and unpleasant the process may have been.

It makes me think litigation on the Colorado River would be a terrible idea. A collaborative solution is much preferred. But I also think that litigation might very well push us toward the collaborative solution anyway. My argument is let’s just do it now (without the expense and the heartache) because ultimately we will end up with the same thing. That is the lesson we might draw from the litigation on the Rio Grande.

What is the most hopeful thing that you’ve heard or seen in the last year or two in the Colorado River Basin?

Fleck: I have been really impressed with the continued push toward permanent, relatively deep reductions in the Lower Colorado River Basin. They’re consistently coming in well below their 7.5 million acre-feet. They’ve been learning important lessons about how to approach that since the early 2000s when California was using more than 5 (million acre-feet) and had to cut back to 4.4. There’s a lot of built-up experience about how to go about reducing your water use.

And the communities are still thriving. Las Vegas’s water use reductions are stunning. You’re seeing significant reductions in the water flowing down the Central Arizona Project canal and really successful adaptations in the Imperial Valley. Over and over again we are seeing that when people have less water, they use less water, and communities can still thrive.

One thing that bothers me — which I wrote about in my book (“Water is for Fighting Over: And Other Myths about Water in the West”) over a decade ago — is this sort of limbic fear that we get, that a reduction in our water supply means the death of our community. We can, in fact, get by with less water

The significant reductions you’ve seen in the lower basin are clearly not enough. The reservoirs are still dropping. But it shows what is possible.

Castle: The action that I found most surprising and hopeful or constructive was the lower basin’s willingness to own the structural deficit. The lower basin stepped up and said, “we’re not negotiating this. This is what we’re going to do.” I think that was huge and I think it shows that there can be movement that kind of goes against the political expediency.

Kuhn: Another example is that California basically accepted a portion of the shortages. This happened a while ago. This happened back in 2018 or 2019. Under the 1968 law (that authorized the Central Arizona Project), Arizona was to absorb the shortages and not California. They basically realized that that agreement that was made in the ’60s was tying up the lower basin from being able to move forward. California compromised on that, at least for the moment. And I think that this willingness of California to go along with what else has happened in the lower basin shows progress. Where we haven’t made any progress is what I would call the crossing of the Lee Ferry divide. That’s going to take more effort.

Editor’s note: The Colorado River Compact distinguished between the upper basin and the lower basin, creating an artificial dividing line at “Lee Ferry,” a point just below Glen Canyon Dam. George Sibley, a water writer from Gunnison, along with others. have maintained that this artifice creates unnecessary problems. See: “Why not create the Colorado River Compact they wanted in 1922?”Sept. 1, 2025.

Fleck: We’ve just contradicted ourselves here, or at least I’ve contradicted myself. We talked about the political incentives that make it difficult to accept the reality of what the numbers are showing us, but we have just described a situation where, in fact, the political leadership, especially in Arizona, but also in California, and for a long time in Nevada, has been willing to accept this reality.

Partly, it’s just through a lot of long, hard learning, the realization by these communities that we took these steps to use less water. And we’re still okay, you know, we still have water in the fountain at the Bellagio (hotel in Las Vegas). We still have hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of irrigated ag land in the Imperial Valley. There’s less than there used to be, but there’s still a lot. There’s still a robust agricultural economy there. So, in fact, this runs counter to the notion that political incentives always lead you to ignoring convenient science, because there’s clearly evidence to the contrary.

In your papers, you have consistently said that the water rights of the tribal nations must be honored. Can their claims on the river actually be resolved at this juncture? Or is there an irreconcilable conflict?

Castle: There are several reasons we’ve called attention to the Tribal rights. One is historically, Tribal rights and interests haven’t been front and center. The tribes have historically been left out of these kinds of high-level negotiations. But the fundamental reason, in my mind is the tribal water rights are part of the bargain that our federal government made with individual tribes in exchange for the relinquishment of some of their ancestral lands. They were promised a livable homeland. Part of a livable homeland is the amount of water necessary to fulfill the purposes of that land, and that’s a promise of the federal government.

Many tribes have quantified their water rights, so we know exactly how much that promise meant in terms of the amount of water that goes along with their reservation land. And it’s a different animal than all the other kinds of Western water rights. It’s important that we keep that in mind, that it is a different kind of promise. It’s a different kind of property right. And we can’t solve this supply and demand imbalance on the backs of the tribes.

Fleck: Anne talked about a promise made by the federal government. But that’s us. This is our promise. We are the people of this country, the people of the federal government, right? The federal government is a creature of us. This is our promise to those people. It’s not something that we as individuals in this particular state should get in a fight with the federal government over. We made this promise to those people and that’s important. I describe it as a legal and a moral obligation. Respecting the legal obligation is critical to making the books balance. It’s also this moral obligation.

Eric, I have a question for you. I know you have followed climate science very closely over the years. We’ve talked about it from time to time, the current state of the science. How would you describe that? I mean, there’s a lot of uncertainty. What we really don’t know, we can’t know until it happens. Nonetheless, if you were to summarize, what should that tell us about the Colorado River going forward?

Kuhn: There is a lot of uncertainty, but with time, we’re seeing a narrowing of that uncertainty. We’re in some would say the 25 years of a drought, others would say it started in the late 80s. We’re seeing a very distinct stepwise reduction in flows, natural flows at Lee Ferry, and we’re seeing temperatures increase. We have documented both.

I still think there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty when it comes to what happens in those rare, odd years where we have a real wet winter and you have atmospheric rivers that run into the San Juans or the central Rockies. We could end up with a big year, and that’s all a part of climate science.

But I think the message is pretty clear that it’s unlikely that river flows will return to what we thought there was historically, which was around 14 to 14.5 million acre-feet per year. That’s unlikely. And I know no one in the basin, including the current administration, based on comments from Mr. Cameron (Scott Cameron, acting assistant secretary for water and science, Department of the Interior), who thinks that it’s likely. We’re dealing with the river that we have today, and that means that the uncertainty around the climate science has narrowed, and we sort of understand the future of this river. As long as temperatures keep going up, we’re going to see aridification of the basin.

A final question, if you will abide it, and it’s kind of a big, sweeping question. It strikes me that it’s a really interesting journey that all three of you have been on during this shift in attitudes in the Colorado River Basin. I remember going to the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas maybe 15 years ago, and there were people from Los Angeles or wherever who were kind of dubious. This was drought. This wasn’t climate change. We don’t have to have fundamental change. That (attitude) has clearly dissipated. My question has to do with what has not changed. How have attitudes NOT changed?

Kuhn: People are still going to be very reluctant to give up what they believe was their entitlement. They’ll compromise; they’ll reach agreements. But Colorado, which is among the leaders when it comes to the public’s acknowledgement of the issues related with climate change, has yet to say we’re going to sacrifice any portion of our theoretical entitlement. But we all have to give up some of those theoretical claims. So the culture is still “protect our entitlement,” even though that entitlement was based on data and science that are no longer valid. Just the word entitlement is indicative of the problem.

Castle: A component of that problem is the failure to recognize that while I have a perfectly good legal argument about why I have this entitlement, there are other perfectly good legal arguments about why I don’t, and we haven’t made huge steps toward acknowledging that. There are lots of legal arguments and lots of good ones, but they can’t all carry the day. Like John says, there’s not enough water for all the lawyers to be right.