by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
“Crocodile tears” is an expression describing an insincere, hypocritical display of emotion, like when a murderer pretends to mourn his victim. It is an ancient metaphor — Plutarch attributed it to “antiquity” during Nero’s reign. It has been around so long because, believe it or not, there is truth in it. Crocodiles do have tear ducts, to keep their eyes moist on dry land, and they are sometimes activated by eating. In humans, that’s a rare condition called Bogorad’s syndrome, more commonly, “Crocodile tears syndrome.”
The hypocritical kind of crocodile tears are on display all over the Southwest as political figures mourn the seven Colorado River Basin states’ failure to reach a river management agreement. The Bureau of Reclamation had imposed a Nov. 11 “deadline” for the states to agree on a plan to reduce their use of the river or face the dire threat of a federal takeover. The “deadline” was artificial, not based on any statute, and sure enough, as soon as it came and went without any agreement, the Bureau decided it could wait until February, a new “deadline.” Colorado and the other Upper Basin states (Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming) were not persuaded by federal threats, and insist that they are not the problem.
California, occupying 840 miles of coastline on the world’s largest ocean, nevertheless refuses to invest in desalination projects that could easily solve the problem. It is difficult for other states to be sympathetic when California pleads that desalination is too expensive, while bragging about having the world’s fourth largest economy, a $4 trillion GDP. There is no water shortage in California that modern technology cannot solve. There are 14 miniscule desalination plants in California, all of which combined produce less than a tenth of the water in Blue Mesa Reservoir. But there are over 18,000 desalination plants around the world, providing water for 300 million people, all of them in countries with far fewer economic resources than California.
Yet the Lower Basin states of California, Nevada, and Arizona are heaping scorn on the Upper Basin for refusing to agree to reductions that are not required by the interstate compacts, nor justifiable in light of California’s abuse of its entitled share of the river that dates back decades. Yet in recent years the Bureau has responded to drought flows by cutting back water to Arizona and Mexico while protecting California. One might expect Arizona to take offense, but instead it accuses Upper Basin states of “running out the clock” by proposing nothing before the Nov. 11 date. “The fact is that we’ve put real water sacrifices on the table for Arizona’s Colorado River users and the upper basin hasn’t put any,” said Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs.
