Hoover Dam reservoir hits record low, in sign of extreme western U.S. drought

[hunter]

12. Using fossil water merely postpones the problem...

... and safely disposing of the brine isn't a trivial problem.

On the Colorado River it looks like upstream users will be buying expensive desalinated ocean water for Californian, Mexican, and Native American downstream users in exchange for any Colorado River water these downstream users are now entitled to. This is already happening to some extent.

New nuclear power plants in Arizona might end up supplying electricity to desalinization plants in Southern California and towns across the Mexican Border.

Burning natural gas to desalinate water is insane. Fossil fuels caused this problem. Burning more fossil fuels will make the problem worse.

Desalinization takes a lot of energy, currently about 3 kilowatt hours per cubic meter for seawater and is most economically accomplished as a continuous process. The water produced is inexpensive enough for interior household use, and household sewage can be recycled back into fresh water, but it's not inexpensive enough for most agriculture.

At some point desalinated sea water from the Gulf of California might even make its way to the lower elevations of Arizona, especially if Lake Mead goes stagnant.

We ought to be planning for this expensive future now.

It's not true we can't relocate cities. Cities are people. When a place become uninhabitable people leave. That's happened throughout human history. What kind of welcome these people get elsewhere is another matter.