The Colorado River Authority is the one of the most enduring legacies of the "Green New Deal." Created in 2029 as part of the broader Renewal program, the CRA was tasked with providing free solar power and new agriculture opportunities across the Great Basin, but grew to encompass many responsibilities of the larger effort to counter the effects of climate change.







Along with building solar farms, the CRA undertook a massive engineering project to develop and preserve the freshwater sources of the Colorado river system. The most ambitious of these projects came in the Salt Lake Desalination Project. The CRA built solar farms and huge networks of desalination plants to turn the Great Salt Lake from one of the most uninhabitable bodies of water on the planet, into the diverse ecosystem we know today. The greatest challenge for the CRA was that the Great Salt Lake was a drainage basin, and had no way to remove its salt-water to the Sea. This would ultimately be resolved in the dredging of the Sevier River to connect the lake to Lake Mead and the rest of the Colorado.

Tens of thousands of people were employed across Utah, Arizona, and Nevada blasting and digging what would become a water rout from Salt Lake City to the Baja Gulf. The project sought to create a trade corridor along the new river where river-borne shipping and cheap energy would foster an economic boom, the first in the world based on the use of renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels. The Sevier River would be extended and widened to allow for commercial shipping from the Great Salt Lake all the way to the Pacific, but the network would only allow watercraft that did not contribute to CO2 emissions, fostering the adoption of next generation electrically powered container ships. Dams along the Colorado River were removed to make way for new whirlpool turbines that could be positioned along the river without restricting its flow, while providing more local sources of power. Those dams that survived had their water-sources partially diverted or had locks installed to allow for continuous riverborne shipping.

The CRA's work extended as far as California's Salton Sea, where a project to expand the toxic saltwater lake that started years earlier by the state government was consolidated into the CRA.

Lake Cahuilla would be completed as a CRA project, and provide a source of sustainable fresh water to southern California, and an economic boom across the Inland Empire. Indio's status as a major trade port is entirely the result of the CRA.

When the project was completed in 2038, the CRA had removed almost half the salt from the Great Salt Lake, to the point where Fresh water had to be imported from Canada to fill what had been lost during desalination. Upon the opening of the Salt Lake Locks, the flow of the old Sevier River reversed, and salty water began flowing to the Pacific. After another decade of rain-cycle recharge, and deslaination, the Great Salt Lake is looking for a name change, with salinity down to normal levels, and the water home to a massive fishing industry. The fresh waters of the Colorado basin, now feed huge Greenhouse Complexes, modeled off of those in Almería, Spain, generating half the produce in North America. The fields of greenhouses form a sea of white, creating an Albedo effect so substantial, that the Southwest has seen local temperatures drop by as much as 1 degree Celsius in the last 20 years, and has contributed to the 0.25 degree C reduction in global temperatures reported by NOAA in their 2050 climate report.

Today the CRA is the largest Solar Energy provider in the United States, operating its own fields and installing photovoltaics across every roof in the Southwest. The Colorado's expanded network of riverborn shipping and near limitless sources of clean energy has turned the Southwest into America's manufacturing powerhouse, while its greenhouses provide jobs for 30,000 people who feed 500 million Americans and countless people around the world. A testament to the boundless ambition of the American people.