LAKE MEAD — “No Fishing From Harbor,” a roadside sign warns, but the harbor is long gone.
Below, a dusty desert landscape dotted with mesquite and creosote bush stretches toward the horizon. There is water in the distance — the retreating edge of the largest man-made reservoir in the United States.
Six drought years have reshaped the lake that supplies water to cities in Nevada, Arizona, Southern California and Mexico. There are fishing piers hanging over the desert, fish-cleaning houses nowhere near a lake, boat ramps extended until they resemble roads. The surface of Lake Mead has dropped 100 feet in six years. If it drops 50 feet lower, Las Vegas could lose an intake that supplies 40 percent of its water.
Simultaneously, “Hoover Dam stops generating electricity,” said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “At the same level where we lose our upper intake, there is no more power out of Hoover.”
Mulroy hopes the next president will create a team of all federal agencies attached to water resources to develop a survival plan for the driest and fastest-growing region of the United States. The rapid decline of Lake Mead “begs the question for a comprehensive look at climate change,” she said. “Our world is going to change dramatically.”
Nevada officials hoped that its early primary this year, just after Iowa and New Hampshire, would put the West and issues of special importance to the region on center stage.
They claimed partial success: Some candidates did address Nevada’s high foreclosure rate and immigration reform. But with the exception of Yucca Mountain, which the Democratic candidates all opposed as a repository for the nation’s nuclear waste, two Las Vegas debates failed to yield a discussion of the federal government’s immense role in the West as a landowner and resource manager.
The early primary “certainly put Nevada on the political map,” said Jill Derby, the state Democratic chairwoman. Yet “land and water — there hasn’t been much talk about those Western issues.”
In this presidential election year, Western states are grappling with a multitude of land and water issues.
In Nevada and Arizona, the nation’s two fastest-growing states, water managers worry about their dependence on the Colorado River, a water source for nearly 30 million people from Colorado to Mexico. A recent study published in the journal Science, based on climate-change models, predicted a 15 percent drop in moisture in the river’s watershed and permanent drought throughout the Southwest by 2050.
In Colorado and Wyoming, record numbers of natural-gas wells are being drilled on federal land, and energy companies are again eyeing shale oil as the potential fossil fuel of the future. Across the Rocky Mountain states, public-land battles are brewing over wolf-reintroduction programs, snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park and the federal ban on guns in national parks.
In response to water and land-use questions from The Denver Post, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama said that if elected president, he would work with state governments and water providers in the West “to prepare for ways in which a changed climate may affect the region’s water supplies. . . . This will be one of the highest priorities I will assign to my secretary of the interior and other key officials.”
He also pledged to clean up abandoned mines, develop renewable-energy resources and follow a more “balanced approach” to energy development than the Bush administration, which “has chosen to lease and drill our public lands, regardless of what that does to our communities and natural resources.”
U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton similarly promised “a much more balanced approach” to energy development on public lands, a greater emphasis on renewable energy, reforming the Mining Law of 1872 and an administration that protects national parks and honors wilderness areas. She favors “conservation and underground storage” as means to extend the West’s scarce water supply.
“Building new reservoirs should not be the first response to our water needs,” she said.
The John Edwards campaign and leading Republicans did not respond to a Post questionnaire.
In a Las Vegas debate, Edwards called for a drastic reduction in emissions but said he — unlike Obama and Clinton — would rule out nuclear-power plants as an energy option.
Republican candidates have been addressing public-lands questions through their energy proposals. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee call for achieving energy independence with domestic fossil-fuel production, nuclear energy and renewable energy.
Romney advocates more offshore wells and oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to help achieve that goal. Huckabee promises energy independence by the end of his second term: “We have to explore, we have to conserve, and we have to pursue all avenues of alternative energy: nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, clean coal, biodiesel and biomass.”
U.S. Sen. John McCain sounds more like the Democrats.
“I believe climate change is real. I think it’s devastating. I think we have to act,” he said. He also calls it “a patriotic duty” to maintain “our natural treasures,” including the national park system.
