Facing hard deadlines in water and in climate, too

The International Panel on Climate Change last week issued its latest report, warning of a dangerous temperature threshold that we’ll breach during the next decade if we fail to dramatically reduce emissions. A Colorado legislative committee on the same day addressed water withdrawals in the Republican River Basin that must be curbed by decade’s end.

In both, problems largely created in the 20th century must now be addressed quickly to avoid the scowls of future generations.

The river basin, which lies east of Denver, sandwiched by Interstates 70 and 76, differs from nearly all others in Colorado in that it gets no annual snowmelt from the state’s mountain peaks. Even so, by tapping the Ogallala and other aquifers, farmers have made it one of the state’s most agriculturally productive areas. They grow potatoes and watermelons, but especially corn and other plants fed to cattle and hogs. This is Colorado without mountains, an ocean of big skies and rolling sandhills.

Republican River farmers face two overlapping problems. One is of declining wells. Given current pumping rates, they will go dry. The only question is when. Some already have.

More immediate is how these wells have depleted flows of the Republican River and its tributaries into Nebraska and Kansas. Those states cried foul, citing a 1943 interstate compact. Colorado in 2016 agreed to pare 25,000 of its 450,000 to 500,000 irrigated acres within the basin.

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