Oil and Water: Grandfather’s Legacy

By Joshua Ellis

I’ve got a blue satin baseball jacket in my closet. It’s got a blue fleece lining. On the back, embroidered in gold thread, it has a moose and a map of central Alaska, showing the Yukon River and the Gulf of Alaska; the Arctic Circle is represented by a dotted line.

The map is bisected by a jagged line that runs from Prudhoe Bay in the north down to the gulf in the south, and along this line are twelve dots, each with a legend: Pump Station 1, Pump Station 2, etc. Above and below the map, in big block letters, are the words TRANS ALASKA PIPELINE 76.

The jacket belonged to my grandfather. He received it from his employer, the Fluor Corporation, where he was one of the electrical engineers — maybe the engineer — who designed the power and control systems for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, years before I was born in 1978. 

When he died, in 2005 of a heart attack, I inherited not only his jacket, but the climate crisis he spent his entire life and career helping to create.

* * *

It’s not lost on me that my strange upbringing was paid for by oil. My mother ran away from home and gave birth to me as a teenager, another starry-eyed 70s hippie kid with a guitar and dreams of being the next Joni Mitchell, or at least the next Dan Fogelberg. But I was identified very young as an almost preternaturally intellectually gifted child… and so my mom allowed my grandparents, affluent from oil industry money, to pay for me to go to private schools built along the Harrow/Eton model, and to travel. I would leave our tiny shotgun house in the slums of East Dallas and go to brick-and-ivy schools filled with other children whose privilege came from oil in one way or another; my grandmother took me on a sort of 1980s version of the Grand Tour of Europe when I was six. 

And then the school day or vacation would end, and I’d return to the poor side of town, where I saw my first murder victim when I was about four, and where we lived off of Kraft macaroni and cheese and hot dogs while my mom worked her waitressing or catering jobs and pursued musical stardom.

It was a strange, schizophrenic childhood, but it gave me a rare gift: the ability to see and understand life through vastly different filters — to be simultaneously the privileged scion of petroleum industry wealth and a white trash hood rat, while truly belonging to neither world.

My grandparents spent their entire lives globetrotting between various projects: Alaska. China. Saudi Arabia. Venezuela. Turkey, where I lived with them for a year while my grandfather finished working on the Afşin-Elbistan coal power plants, which the Right To Clean Air Platform estimates has killed 17,000 people since it was completed in 1987. Korea. Kuwait, where my grandfather went to help rebuild the oil infrastructure that was destroyed during the Gulf War and where my grandmother, like many other military and contractors and their families who lived there during that time, contracted the multiple myeloma that killed her a few years later.

I didn’t think about oil much, as a kid. I knew the reek of crude oil and hexane from going with my grandfather to his office in Elbistan, where I would play video games on his computer as he looked over blueprints and condescendingly ordered around the local construction workers. But for me it was an abstract thing, just the reason they were gone most of the time and would appear at DFW airport shortly before Christmas with exotic toys and gifts from far-flung places. And the reason why wealthy Arabs my grandfather had befriended — amongst them Salaam bin Laden, Osama’s brother, who handled much of the family’s construction business and whom my grandfather had worked with in Riyadh in the 1970s — would occasionally appear at our house for visits.

It was a weird way to grow up, but as a kid you don’t know any different, right? This is just how things are. You live in a shitty house in a shitty neighborhood but you go to school with kids whose parents take them to Vail or Zurich for winter vacation, and sometimes your grandparents show up, buy you a bunch of expensive toys and clothes, and then vanish again. Sometimes they take you to the Virgin Islands, where your grandfather owns a plot of land he plans to build a house on and retire to, and you catch hermit crabs on the beach and eat conch fritters with lime.

It wasn’t until I moved to Las Vegas as a 21 year old journalist and coder that I really began to understand the damage my grandfather’s work had done.

* * *

The Southern Nevada Water Authority is one of the most powerful non-federal government agencies in America, because it has the job of actually managing the distribution of water from the Colorado River to the Lower Colorado Basin states: Arizona, Nevada and California. Not long after I moved to Vegas, they needed web designers, and I was already a fairly skilled designer, so I got a job designing their public information websites.

I didn’t last there very long. I’m not really a shirt-and-tie office kind of cat; nor am I Mormon, which is definitely a plus if you work anywhere in Nevada’s state civil service. But I did work there long enough to understand what they actually did, beyond just making sure the manicured lawns and water features of Las Vegas villas and casinos were properly irrigated. More to the point, I went out to Lake Mead to tour and take photos of the water treatment and pumping facility there.

Lake Mead, like Lake Powell to the northeast of it, is an artificial reservoir, created when the Hoover Dam was completed in 1936 to dam the Colorado River. The first European to travel down the length of the Colorado, from its headwaters in the Rockies in the state that bears its name, past the future site of the Hoover Dam and down to the Gulf of California, was a man named John Wesley Powell, in 1869. He was the head of the United States Geological Survey, and it was part of his job to map and understand the terrain of this newly colonized land. 

Lake Mead, United States

A decade later, Powell published A Report On The Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. In it, he laid out a simple fact: there was nowhere west of the 100th meridian, roughly the middle of the United States, that received 22 inches of rain each year save for the Pacific Northwest rain coast. 22 inches of rain is the minimum you need to support agriculture without constant need for irrigation from rivers or underground water tables that take millennia to replenish. 

In other words, Powell was saying, the American West was not capable of sustaining a large population.

A few years later, when Congress was carving up the Western territories to be turned into states, Powell was called to testify and explain himself. Did he really believe, the politicians demanded, that Americans could not exercise their God-given right to live wherever they pleased and etch out a living from the arid landscape?

Powell’s response, entered into the Congressional record, was unambiguous: “It would be almost a criminal act to go on as we are doing now, and allow thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to establish homes where they cannot maintain themselves.”

In 2024, the Colorado River provides water and power to forty million people. And despite the efforts of countless engineers, hydrologists, civil servants and politicians, it is now running out of water. Why? Because of the efforts of countless diggers, drillers, oil industry executives and investors, and other hydrologists and engineers.

Engineers like my grandfather.

* * *

If you go to Lake Mead now, you’ll be confronted with the same sight I was a quarter of a century ago: the entire lake is surrounded by huge white cliffs, hundreds of feet tall, that look like bones bleached out by the desert sun.

In fact that metaphor is not actually very far from the truth. The cliffs are where Lake Mead’s waterline used to be. At its highest peak in 1983, the lake was 1225 feet deep; now it’s just about 1062 feet; a couple of years ago it reached 1040 feet. That represents 33% of its “full pool”.

So what happened? It’s never just one thing, of course. But you can pretty much lay it all at the feet of two perpetrators: climate collapse and resource overuse.

The Colorado begins as snow in the skies above the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The snow falls for half the year or so, accumulates, and then melts in the spring and summer. The snowmelt water goes downhill, and feeds the river.

Except when it doesn’t, because there’s less snowmelt because there’s less snow because it doesn’t get cold enough, or because polar vortices have pushed the precipitation further south or east into the Great Plains. What we think of as steady, reliable weather is just patterns the climate forms due to a particular set of variables; change those variables, like when you raise the average global temperature, and those patterns change as well.

Nor does the rapidly and frighteningly increasing temperature in lower elevations help matters; as it winds through the badlands and deserts, the river is depleted by simple evaporation, which increases in the artificial reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell — up to 11% of the water is simply blown elsewhere, and the problem is increasing.

But the much larger problem is the one Powell identified over a century and a half ago: the region simply cannot sustain civilization at scale. It never could. The populations of indigenous tribes like the Paiute and Diné at their pre-colonization height probably measured in the tens of thousands, not tens of millions. Civilizations like the Hohokam, who attempted to build more complex civilizations with aqueducts and reservoirs, simply vanished, likely after only a handful of years of drought.

And they certainly never attempted to do industrial scale agriculture in the desert, the way ranchers and alfalfa and other grass farmers have in Nevada, Arizona and inland southeastern California. It’s a batshit insane idea by any metric you like, unless you assume that the water supply is not only infinite but can be infinitely divided and diverted. Either that, or you simply don’t care about anything but your farm in your lifetime.

Like a sunburnt horizontal version of the dwarves of Moria in The Lord Of The Rings, the engineers of the Southwest delved too deep into the desert, spread the water too thin and the cities too wide. Every single new farm and new ranch and planned community just kicked the can of consequences a little further down the road: the next generation, or the one after that, would be the ones paying for the sins of the fathers. 

Except that generation is us. Not our kids or grandkids. It’s happening now.

Long before the Colorado River truly runs dry, the cost of water and obtaining it will simply be too high for farmers and ranchers — and their investors, and the banks who hold their mortgages and the notes for their expansion loans — to make their desired profitability goals, even with state and federal subsidies. The farms will cease to produce the alfalfa they sell to Arabian horse breeders; the ranches will sell their breeding stock to other ranchers further East on the other side of the mountains.

The smarter ones will sell their land cheap and early to idiots who don’t read the fine print; the rest will simply declare bankruptcy and abandon it. And the banks who foreclose on them will discover that, unlike the houses they repossessed during the financial crisis of 2008, you can’t simply slap a new coat of paint on a farm that doesn’t have a regular affordable water supply and never will again. A thousand acres of arid hot desert isn’t an investment. It’s a corpse that you’re handcuffed to, like the dentist at the end of Frank Norris’s classic American novel McTeague. All you can do is cut it loose and cut your losses, which will be in the trillions, and which will hit every single bank that has investments in American real estate, which is another way of saying “almost every single bank on Earth”.

And all of those millions of farmers and ranchers and all of their employees will be out of work… as will the millions of everyday people in every town in the region whose economies rely upon selling them fertilizer and fenceposts and groceries and hot dogs and cowboy boots and Ford pickup trucks and everything else, long before the actual commercial and residential water supplies are threatened. As all those farmers and ranchers and small town Walmart checkers and truck dealers and Chipotle burrito artists and baristas leave town and head east looking for a new home and a new life, the utility companies that provide their towns with water and power and Internet will start to spiral due to lack of customers… and the municipal governments will begin to declare bankruptcy themselves due to lack of property taxes… and the Midwest and South, which will be facing their own climate crises, will be faced with millions of unemployed climate refugees looking for housing and jobs….

And unlike the aftermath of hurricanes like Katrina, Helené and Milton, or the fires in towns like Paradise, California or Lytton, British Columbia, there will be no rebuilding, no moving back home after a season in a FEMA trailer, or greedy wannabe property moguls buying up property to gentrify it… because if you cannot get blood from a stone, you sure as hell can’t get it from a dried-up river running through a desert where it now regularly reaches 120ºF (49ºC) for half the year. 

(Nor are solutionist notions like mass desalination an answer; it would cost a trillion dollars and require the entirety of the West Coast of America to be turned into desalination plants, and you would need to essentially reverse the hydrology of an entire region roughly the size of Europe and make trillions of acre-feet of water flow uphill twenty-four hours a day forever. And do all of it in the next, oh, call it twenty years or so, in a country where a large percentage of people think all taxation is theft and that hurricanes are caused by George Soros And His Amazing Weather Control Machines. Nah.)

The American Southwest is not facing a crisis or a disaster. It’s facing an apocalypse with no solution. John Wesley Powell saw it in the 1870s; I began to see it on the day in 1999 when I first went to Lake Mead and looked at that high water mark and realized that the city I had moved to — the city I would call home, on and off, for the next 22 years — had its own expiration date.

This apocalypse is not the punishment of a vengeful God or even the stupid caprice of an uncaring cosmos. This apocalypse is entirely created by humanity; by our hubris, by our lack of foresight, but most of all by our greed and desire to put our mark and our fences on every square inch of this world, even the ones that nature has marked with a sign saying DANGER: KEEP OUT half the size of a continent. We burned the skies and disrupted the weather and hung our collective asses a mile too far off a cliff… and now we’re going to pay the price whether we want to or not.

But at least, y’know, I got to collect hermit crabs on that beach in St. Croix.

* * *

It is very easy to say “Well, nobody ever should have established farms and cities of millions in the Mojave and Chihuahua and Sonoran deserts anyway,” with a big existential Gallic shrug and a wave of your cigarette, the same way you can say “Well, your grandfather shouldn’t have built oil pipelines and coal refineries.” And plenty of people do… as though that is actually an answer or solution to anything. As the comedian Bill Hicks used to say: “I have four questions: Yes? And? So? What?”

On the day Benjamin Siegal opened the Flamingo casino and hotel in Las Vegas on the night after Christmas of 1946, the population of the entire Las Vegas Valley was less than ten thousand people. If you’d told Bugsy that, less than a century later, Vegas would be the same size that Los Angeles was on that winter night, he would have laughed in your face and called you a lunatic. If you’d gone to my teenage grandfather  — the son of a diabetic mother who died while her alcoholic husband was off on a bender, leaving her children to sit with her corpse for days until he returned — in the late 1950s and told him that going to Texas A&M and getting a degree in engineering would mean he was helping contribute to the deaths of billions over the next century — thousands of them directly, in a country halfway around the world — he would have done the same.

I certainly didn’t move to Las Vegas to spit in the face of entropy. I moved there because I was broke living in LA and trying to make it as a writer, and my parents had moved there a couple of years earlier. Why? Because my stepdad — a piano player with a high school degree who’d married my mom after he joined her band and who’d held day jobs as a lumberjack, sawmill worker and carpenter — found a union job building booths for one of the expo companies who handled logistics for the hundreds of conventions held in the city each year. Vegas was still dirt cheap in the 1990s, and after a couple of years of living in a Winnebago in a trailer park, my parents could afford to buy a nice house in the suburbs with a pool and a hot tub on a corner lot… and a spare bedroom for their son.

Very few of us contribute to the climate crisis out of a nihilistic lack of fucks to give. The ones that do tend to be at the higher levels of the problem: fossil fuel executives and corrupt politicians who know they’ll be comfortably retired or dead and safely out of office long before they’re called to explain the consequences of their choices. The rest of us just do our best to try and make a decent life for ourselves, and society is very good at putting the blinders on us so we don’t see how billions of people making reasonable choices can lead to gut-wrenching horror.

My grandfather wasn’t stupid enough to convince himself that the CO2 his work produced wouldn’t be a problem down the road… but he was able to tell himself, and me, that we would solve the problem of CO2 production before it got too serious. And wasn’t he helping to bring lights and heat to people who wouldn’t have those things otherwise? Didn’t every citizen of Alaska get an annual paycheck for free because of what he did? And I’d lay you money that every single person he ever worked with thought the same way, if they bothered to think about it at all. The same way that the European Jewish scientists who largely made up the Manhattan Project believed that the dangers of the gadget they were building were worth dealing with if it meant an end to Hitler’s monstrous campaign to turn the world into a slaughterhouse.

Even after I saw those white cliffs around Lake Mead in 1999, it took years of reading and discussion and simply looking at the city and the desert around it for me to really understand the danger that Las Vegas was in, and the danger its mere existence represented. In those years, the city I’d planned to make a quick stop for a few months — just long enough to make some quick money working at a casino or a slot machine company before moving back to Los Angeles — became my home. I made friends, who became my best friends; I fell in and out of love; I discovered favorite cafés, favorite bars, favorite restaurants and parks and used record shops. I adopted pets. And I fell in love with the Mojave itself, spending countless hours and days driving my pickup truck deep into the desert, watching giant desert tortoises lumbering around dry river beds and listening to wild burros braying outside my camper shell; staring up at the endless stars surrounded by endless silence in the evening heat.

So why did I leave? I wish I could tell you it was out of a sense of responsibility, a desire not to be part of the problem. The truth is I did it for love and for survival. I fell in love with a British woman I met on Facebook; she came to visit me several times in Vegas for months at a time and planned to move there and marry me. As a longtime sufferer from fibromyalgia, she found that the desert did wonders for her joints and pain, and she appreciated the legal marijuana and the ability to go down the street and buy CBD in pill form for pain relief.

But in March of 2020, I suffered a massive heart attack and required triple bypass surgery, which was done on the day Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic emergency in America. Because I had no medical insurance, I was discharged just a couple of days after the open heart surgery and had no aftercare aside from expensive prescriptions and a rented oxygen machine; because of the travel ban, my partner was not able to get to Vegas from London, and so I spent the first part of the pandemic sitting in my darkened bedroom in Vegas with my chest stitched and wired together, eating food delivered by Uber Eats or my kind and generous friends, and forcing myself to walk around my empty, silent neighborhood on a Zimmer frame with a mask on as a form of solitary, quarantined physical therapy.

I was able with the help of my boss to move Heaven and Earth and boarded a flight for London in July of 2020, and when I arrived here we decided that it would be best if I simply stayed in Britain, where I would have not only her but the NHS to take care of me. Luckily the immigration laws were relaxed during the pandemic and, after a lot of expense and bureaucratic torture, we were able to be married, and I was able to get my leave to remain.

It’s a big change from Las Vegas to Watford, where we live now. I’m not used to shops closing at 4pm on Sundays and I’ve gone from no rain to all of it, all of the time. Truth be told and all else being equal, I think we’d both rather live in Las Vegas and have the life we had there. We’d be able to go get great tacos at 3am and it wouldn’t play as much hell on our damaged bodies.

But Vegas’s future, and the future of the American Southwest as a whole, can be measured in decades if not years. It’s certainly not the only place facing the ravages of climate collapse; merely the one whose story I know the best and whose future I can see the clearest. 

England faces its own problems, of course. If the Atlantic Mid-Ocean current (or AMOC) does not collapse, leaving it nothing more than a frozen archipelago on the edge of the Arctic Circle, then Britain will twitch and spasm in the throes of unprecedented heat it is completely unprepared for. The roads will literally melt and the railways buckle, and the houses will become tombs for the elderly and infirm, because the architecture here is not designed to dissipate heat but to trap it.

But better the Devil I don’t know, in this case, than the one I do. I’ve thought over the scenario I’ve laid out for you here a hundred times; done back of the napkin calculations on the costs and timetable for building massive desalination plant construction and the costs of building massive canals from the Great Lakes or Puget Sound in Washington State down to the Colorado Basin; pored through Powell’s 1879 report and modern reports from various American government agencies on the current state of the Colorado basin and the Ogallala Aquifer, unknown in Powell’s time, that runs beneath much of the central Great Plains of the US; read Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner’s excellent 1986 overview of the history of water in the American West, and the chapters of Mike Davis’s City Of Quartz: Excavating The Future In Los Angeles that deal with the theft of water from the Owens Valley that inspired the film Chinatown a half-century later, and chased down their footnotes like wild hares. 

And, time and time again, I’ve gone out to Lake Mead and to the Colorado as it winds through the desert, and seen that high water mark, where the future that my grandfather and all the other engineers imagined for the 20th century diverged from the chaotic future we actually face in the 21st century.

I understand their dream and, though I am constantly filled with sorrow and rage at how it’s all turning out in reality, I understand why they had it; why they would commemorate building a pipeline with a custom embroidered jacket to be worn with pride, rather than hanging their heads in shame at the outflow of despoil and poison they were ushering into the world. I get it.

But that dream, the dream of infinite growth, of More and Better and Faster Forever, is over. It’s time for us to wake up, as a civilization, and a species, to face the harsh reality that our dreams have brought into being.

I refuse to toss that jacket aside, but nor do I ever wear it, though it fits me like a glove. Let it sit in the closet forever, as a reminder that the sleep of reason breeds monsters, if you let it.

Joshua Ellis is an American writer, coder and musician who lives on the unfashionable edge of London with a wife who’s far too beautiful for him and two ungrateful cats. He is the author of *An American Vampire In Juarez* and *Everyone I Know Is Brokenhearted* and is currently finishing Kowloon, an open source social network app. He can be found on Twitter/X at @jzellis and on the Web at http://zenarchery.com.