On the Wednesday, March 18, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast:A critically important source of water for seven western states,the Colorado River is now running out of water. What's the solution?USA TODAY National Reporter Trevor Hughes joins The Excerpt to break down the issues and what's at stake.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Antelope Point Marina once sat near the shore of Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest reservoir. Instead, the sparkling Colorado River now sits more than 180 feet below, completely invisible from a dock that once floated on top of the water. A critically important source of water for seven Western states, the Colorado River is running out of water. The solution, a public lands access group has proposed an ambitious plan to build eight massive desalination plants off the California coastline, turning ocean water into freshwater for farming and reducing demand on the ailing Colorado River. Will it work?
Hello, and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, March 18th, 2026. Joining me now to break down the issues and what's at stake is USA TODAY National Reporter Trevor Hughes. It's great to have you here, Trevor.
Trevor Hughes:
Yeah, good to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Trevor, let's start by laying out, if you could, the issue for us. The Colorado River has been a plentiful source of water for the Western U.S. for over a century. Why is this happening, and why now?
Trevor Hughes:
So the Colorado River supports the economies of seven Western states as it flows downstream, with Lake Mead and Lake Powell providing hydropower but then also water for irrigation, for farming, for growing alfalfa, for growing all the food that we eat, and for drinking water. And the river is what powers, in part, the Western economy. But as climate change makes the area warmer, it's making the area drier, and that means less and less water falling out of the sky as snow, which means less water in the Colorado River all year long. And that means Lake Powell and Lake Mead have been dropping for quite a long time at this point.
Dana Taylor:
So which seven states are dependent on the river now, and what do they primarily use the water for?
Trevor Hughes:
I'm going to have to count this on my fingers, because I always forget one of them. We've got Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and California. This is a hugely important source of water. I mean, in Denver where I live, the Colorado River water isn't as important because it's on the other side of the Continental Divide. But for those people in the West, in the western half of the United States, it's a hugely important part of what makes their economy work. In California, it's used to grow everything from alfalfa to feed cows to the cows themselves, to almonds. Arizona's Central Valley has huge croplands where they grow lots of fruit. Same kind of thing. This also is an important part of the drinking water supply for millions and millions and millions of Americans. And so when there's less water in the Colorado River, it starts to raise questions about how our economy works and how people can live in the West.
Dana Taylor:
So I know that water issues are complicated in the West because of an agreement between all the states that access the water. Tell me about that.
Trevor Hughes:
So there was an agreement in 1922 between those seven basin states, and they basically divided up the water in the Colorado River and said, "This is the water that exists, and this is how we'll all use it." The problem was those estimates were optimistic, to say the least, back then, and so there has never been as much water in the Colorado River as that agreement thought there was going to be. And so as a result, you have this need for conservation, this need for using less water than people are legally entitled to, because there just isn't that much water.
Dana Taylor:
Let's pivot to the proposed solution here. What is it?
Trevor Hughes:
When I first heard about this, it's one of those things where you think, "Wow, that is just audacious," and the idea is to build eight desalinization plants. These are huge facilities that use technology to take salt out of ocean water and make it freshwater. It's widely used as a technology, used all over the world. In fact, Israel depends very, very heavily on it. It uses a ton of energy. And so in order to power these desalinization plants, you would have to add a massive amount of solar, a massive amount of wind, or maybe a bunch of new nuclear power plants, which has been a push by the Trump administration.
Dana Taylor:
And then how much will these desalinization plants cost, and who's going to pay for them?
Trevor Hughes:
The one estimate that I've heard is $40 billion, which is a lot of money. That may not necessarily be grounded in reality, because it takes a very long time to build these things. But you also have to remember, because there's not enough water in the Colorado River, federal taxpayers, we, have been paying farmers, particularly in California and Arizona, to not farm. We have been paying them to just not. And so the backers of this plan, who are a public lands advocacy group that's called the Blue Ribbon Coalition, their idea is, what if we take this money that we're paying farmers to not farm and make it so that they can farm? And so the idea would be create massive amounts of freshwater, use that water in California, maybe in Arizona, and then that would sort of free up the rest of the Colorado River for the other states.
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Dana Taylor:
Let's talk about their location, the location of these desalinization plants. Where do they want to put them, and what are the issues there?
Trevor Hughes:
You need salt water to make freshwater with a desalinization plant, which means off the Pacific Coast. Now, that could mean California. That could also mean Baja California and Mexico. When I was reporting out this story, the first question I had was there's no way that California would ever allow a nuclear-powered desalinization plant to sit off their coastline, and there's a couple things that are interesting about that. First, they could be off the coast of Mexico. Second, they could be off federal enclaves, which would be exempt from California's environmental regulations. But what's really interesting is that Governor Gavin Newsom of California recently sent a letter to the other governors of the basin states saying desalinization was something that needed to be considered as part of a greater look at how to have more water in the system.
Dana Taylor:
Trevor, I mean, this is an interesting potential solution, but are these desalinization plants even realistic?
Trevor Hughes:
I mean, it all comes down to money and will. And what's been really interesting is thatPresident Trumphas repeatedly talked about how we used to be a country that built things. This story is based out of Page, Arizona, where I went. That's what Lake Powell is. There's a lake in the middle of the desert. That lake shouldn't be there. There's a giant dam that impounds the Colorado River. It's the same thing with the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. Those were vastly expensive, vastly complicated projects, but we as a nation decided that we would build those things. We would assume those costs because we felt that it would make our economy stronger, make our country better.
And so it's an interesting conversation about the cost and the time and the magnitude of this, because the Colorado River isn't getting more water. And so conservation advocates would say, "We need to be better at conserving. We need to think about how we're farming. We need to think about how we're using this water that does exist." But advocates like Blue Ribbon Coalition would say, "Why don't we just make some more?"
Dana Taylor:
Well, have any alternative solutions been proposed here?
Trevor Hughes:
This is an issue that there is no easy answer. There is no cheap answer. As the climate warms, there will be less water in the Colorado River. We've seen that trend. It is accelerating. This year has been unusually dry, and we're expecting to see Lake Powell in particular drop to very, very low levels this year. Conservation has often been the first thing that people come to. We've been paying farmers not to farm. We've been telling people to, out here in the West, don't plant turf. Instead, maybe use gravel, maybe use xeriscaping, which is the term for using native plants and grasses instead of that turf. And so you see these very strong conservation measures come in, but when the crisis passes each year or every couple of years, they sort of ease back off again. But at the end of the day, this is a problem we have known has been coming for decades, and the states just can't agree on a solution.
Dana Taylor:
How much time do these seven states have, though? What's the timeline here?
Trevor Hughes:
I mean, depending on predictions, very, very little. The federal water scientists last week just predicted that Lake Powell may see one of its lowest inflow years in history, which mean the level will just drop and drop and drop. There comes a point in which the water level drops so low, the dam can no longer generate hydroelectricity, which is critically important for all the people who live there, and that's how they get their power. If it drops even further, it will actually drop below the level at which the water can flow through the dam and down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. That's called deadpool. We're not expecting deadpool this year, but there are fears it is coming.
Dana Taylor:
So what happens if the timeline isn't met? Is it deadpool?
Trevor Hughes:
The federal government has some levers it can still pull. There are reservoirs scattered all over the Western United States upstream of the Colorado River, upstream of Lake Powell in particular, and so the federal government can pull water from those reservoirs. It did this a couple of years ago and those reservoirs have been slowly refilling ever since, but that's more like going to the bank, taking money out from the ATM. At some point the bank account will be empty, and we'll be left with a crisis in which there isn't enough to go around. There have actually been books written about this idea that eventually in the West we will start having wars over water, because it is so important. And there's a famous quote attributed to Mark Twain, which is, "Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting."
Dana Taylor:
Trevor Hughes is a national reporter for USA TODAY. Trevor, it's always good to speak with you.
Trevor Hughes:
Good to be here.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:The audacious western water solution to fix the Colorado River | The Excerpt