Old Style Thinking in a New World

Lake Mead via Wikipedia

 Actually, that's a little misleading. Really, it's about American hubris and Las Vegas. The world hasn't changed, it's just that capitalist/technocratic thinking hasn't been in the real world for a century or more.
Tara Lohan writes about the water wars of Nevada, with Los Vegas slowly and deliberately destroying the rest of the state with its water demands. As she puts it:

The future that Las Vegas and the rest of Nevada face is one where climate change is likely to make life harder, water scarcer, and decisions about the future tougher. And it’s a future that will be shared across the Southwest. K. Kaufmann writes for the Desert Sun about the National Climate Assessment Advisory Committee’s findings on climate change will affect the country. In the Southwest, Kaufmann writes: 

Snowpack and streamflow amounts are projected to decline, decreasing water supply for cities, agriculture and ecosystems.

The Southwest produces more than half the nation’s high-value specialty crops, which are irrigation-dependent and particularly vulnerable to extremes of moisture, cold and heat. Reduced yields from increased temperatures and increasing competition for scarce water supplies will displace jobs in some rural communities.

Increasingly, wherever you live in the U.S. this will be a shared problem as water resources and potentially energy resources become strapped, if we continue unchanged on our current trajectory.