A multistate agreement aimed at shoring up Lake Mead can’t be finished until California finds a way to solve two major, long-simmering environmental fights. That was the message from top water managers Thursday gathered in Las Vegas for the annual conference of the Colorado River Water Users Association. For the past 18 months, Nevada, California and Arizona have been negotiating a drought contingency plan to keep Lake Mead from shrinking enough to trigger a first-ever federal shortage declaration and force Nevada, which receives most of its water from the Colorado, and especially Arizona to slash their use of river water.

I have three topics today: 1. Discounted prices may be mythical. 2. Banks are changeable. 3. In California, “Whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting,” as the old adage goes. First, the mythical discounts: Last week, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office sued four major department stores for allegedly issuing misleading advertising. They are JCPenney, Sears, Kohl’s, and Macy’s.

Groundwater resources could be depleted in the next few decades in dry areas of the world where people use lots of water for drinking and irrigating crops, researchers said Thursday. The research was presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. “While many aquifers remain productive, economically exploitable groundwater is already unattainable or will become so in the near future, especially in intensively irrigated areas in the drier regions of the world,” said researcher Inge de Graaf, a hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.