Yet more scientists agree — Las Vegas doomed to become uninhabitable wasteland

Lake Mead will soon be as dry and barren as the moral and intellectual underpinnings of Bush-McCain foreign policy, scientists said this week.

There's a fifty-fifty chance that the lake will be dry by 2021, reports the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

If Las Vegas doesn't have, you know, any water, that's actually a problem, "not a scientific abstraction," scientists wrote in the report.

The Las Vegas growth and development industry, through its Southern Nevada Water Authority subsidiary, has been pushing proposals that industry officials contend will let them get theirs, er, provide the community with long-term sustainable solutions.

Specifically, they want to poke holes in the ground up north, suck all the water out of the ground and pipe it down to Las Vegas at roughly the same cost as that of sending a man to the moon. In the process, the areas above those mined-out aquifers will be left every bit as ecologically doomed and unfit for habitation by either humans or critters as Las Vegas promises to be when Lake Mead dries up, but it's hard to see why that would matter to the Las Vegas growth and construction industry and so really why should anyone else care?

Or, as growth industry spokeswoman Pat Mulroy (pictured above en route to meeting with people who dare question her), who moonlights as SNWA's general manager, told the NYTimes, "We have to protect our communities against the worst possibility" — the "worst possibility" being that the forces of logic prevail and that Las Vegas faces the harsh reality of its grisly and nightmarish future before Mulroy retires from SNWA amid a shower of sparking accolades and golden parachutes.

Meantime, the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada used the Scripps study to remind everyone about the prestigious Pacific Institute's report last November, which estimated up to 40 percent of water use in the Las Vegas valley could be saved through more aggressive conservation measures.

"We have developments all over the area that have acres and acres of water-hungry turf that serve no purpose other than decoration," said PLAN's Launce Rake. "And we have growth and water-use policies that seemed designed by developers for the profit of developers."

PLAN contends that mining aquifers up yonder amounts to "exporting environmental damage to rural Nevada while encouraging unabated population growth," a policy combination that is "a recipe for catastrophe."

The Gleaner agrees and always has — even before PLAN showed astoundingly good taste and judgment by becoming an advertiser earlier this year.

Having said, that on the bright side (where the Gleaner is always looking), okay, the lake might dry up in 2021. But that's also the year Jeb will be leaving the White House and it will be Chelsea's turn to be president. And she will save us all.

Comments

[Rich Stafetas]

Try calling the SNWA...you can't get an answer out of them. When we're dried up the desert will reclaim all of southern Nevada. I've been asking this question till I'm blue in the face. No one seems to care but, anyway with global warming we'll be a savannah long before we die of thirst. The billions spent in Iraq could have done so much good for the USA but we're last on the list. I wish Bush and Cheney a miserable end to their miserable lives. There now, I feel better. Someone tell Mike Z I caucused yesterday.

RS, What was your question to SNWA?

[Rich Stafetas]

What are the future plan for providing water to So. Nevada? The only answer I got was the one about pumping water down here. That's an expensive bandaid fix at best. I then asked them what about when the pumped water runs out, they're clueless and couldn't answer. So, my next question is what are our elected officials doing...seems like the answer is nada. Shelley, Harry any answers?

[texexnv@gmail.com]

Look at the bright side. With all that water gone out of Lake Mead there will be more land to develop there. More casinos, more tourist traps. All byob, of course.

[Launce]

Darn it - I forgot all about Lake Las Vegas! Plenty o' water in there to tap!