There’s an actual water crisis coming to the American Southwest. It’s not caused by climate change or data centers. It was caused by a mistake. Government officials assumed an average annual flow of 16.4 million acre ft per year in the Colorado River. They allocated 7.5 million acre ft to both the upper and lower basins as a result. The actual natural annual average is in the ballpark of 12 to 14.6 million acre ft. For decades, we’ve been allocating more water than is naturally repleted. We’ve known this. We’ve done nothing. Blaming climate change won’t solve the problem. It didn’t cause it. We should be talking about a national energy infrastructure project to power desalinization plants or to build pipelines from regions with excess water. But instead we march on toward crisis blaming everything but the cause and never discussing solutions.