Environment & Energy

Dairy cows and hay fields are massive water users and much better suited to places farther north with more water and a less airid climate. Those ranches are not only sucking water out of the Colorado at a massive rate, they're also pumping the aquifer dry.

The big story for AZ isn't going to be so much the increasing heat and gradual drying out of the Colorado a little farther north every year, although those will happen. The big story will be subsidence, something that has already started, as the land between mountains cravcks open and starts to slide down into the void left by all the water Big Ag pumped out.