Lake Powell hits lowest summer level ever, raising risk of 'dead pool'

[hunter]

7. Agriculture is going to take the biggest hit.

People living in cities can afford expensive water, farms can't.

Cities like Phoenix will pay Southern California's coastal regions for desalination plants and toilet-to-tap water sewage recycling projects in exchange for Southern California's share of the Colorado River. That's already starting to happen.

If things continue to get worse it's feasible to directly transfer desalinated water for urban uses to cities in the Lower Colorado River Basin. Heat, not water, will be the biggest problem in those cities. If the power goes out people will die.

The people in the Upper Colorado Basin are out of luck if things get really, really bad. Once they've abandoned outdoor irrigated landscaping, agriculture, and water-intensive industries, urban water rationing could become severe.