How to Protect Water for 40M People on the Colorado River | WSJ Pro Perfected

When the federal government released its plan to save the shrinking Colorado River, it unleashed a firestorm. About 40 million people rely on the river for water. But a 26-year drought has pushed the system to a breaking point. Now, three states could lose up to 40% of their allocation over the next decade, or potentially more. Nevada has already sued with one lawmaker calling the plan a death sentence and other states and tribes are weighing how to join the fight. >> When I tell people I'm a water lawyer, they grab me by the lapels and they're like, "Are we all going to die? Do I have to sell my house?" My name is Brett Larson. I'm the Richard Morrison Professor of Water Law at Arizona State University and I have been working on water law and conflict and particularly within the Colorado River Basin for close to 25 years. We had him break down where the government's new water plan falls short and how to actually fix a shrinking river. Based on a 1922 deal, the upper basin, a region spanning Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, and the Lower Basin, which spans Arizona, California, and Nevada, are each entitled to 7.5 million acre feet of water. >> What is an acref foot? An acre foot is 1 acre flooded to 1 ft deep or around 326,000 gallons. Why? Because we are Americans and we tend to find the most ridiculous possible way to measure things. >> In addition to these 15 million acret, a 1944 deal entitled Mexico to 1.5 million acret. But most years, the river doesn't actually have that much water. >> Now, why did we bankrupt the river? It's because we relied on data during high flow years, during flood years. Whoopsy daisies. This particular graph can give you a good visualization of why we're in the mess that we're in. Because right here, this is 1922 and this is the Colorado River Compact. Note how much water's in the river at the time. A historic amount of water until now. We're at this moment where we're realizing that the 1,000year average amount of water is actually closer to 13 1.5 million acre feet per year. And because of the challenges of climate change andification going forward, we might have to deal with something that's closer to 10 million acre feet per year. >> But no one can agree on how to absorb those cuts. Lower basin states rely heavily on their allocation to support massive populations and critical industries while the upper basin has never used its full legal share but refuses to take cuts. >> We've not been able to come up with a deal but somebody has to do something and that's where these documents come in. The federal government has stepped in and said since there is no consensus deal amongst the states we will impose a regime. We will have a 10-year framework. And that framework could mean no cuts to the lower basin all the way up to 3 million acre feet of cuts to the lower basin. 3 million acre feet is catastrophic. The other important point is nothing that the federal government has proposed here requires anything of the upper basin. So one group has no particular reason to settle and another group has every reason to fight. Which means these documents have basically guaranteed conflict and have guaranteed perpetual negotiation and fighting for the next 10 years. >> Within days of the federal government releasing its plan, Nevada filed a lawsuit arguing that the cuts unfairly target the lower basin. More suits are likely to follow and the future of this water supply that supports 40 million people could get bogged down in years of litigation. If we run into another below average winter this year, the entire system could come collapsing down on us. We can run into power pool where our dams aren't generating electricity anymore. Deadpool is this level. Deadpool is when the water's so low that it's not moving past the dam at all and you effectively have lost all storage in the dam. Now, I'm a dad. I've got four kids. I know when you hear kids arguing about how they're going to share uh cookies, there's a temptation to just go, you know what, let's just make another batch of cookies. So, a lot of people are talking about, well, what about water augmentation? And desalination has a bright future as part of the solution in the Colorado River Basin. But even though it's much more efficient now than it used to be, it's still really expensive. There's promising results from cloud seeding. However, there are very understandable concerns about us spraying a bunch of silver iodide into the sky and then having all of that falling back down to Earth. There's also a bunch of real complicated questions about causation. If I invest a bunch of money in cloud seeding, do I own the water that I made it rain? What about water recycling? Advanced water purification. Some people will call it toilet to tap. Just like it costs a lot of money to turn ocean water into drinking water, it costs a lot of money to turn waste water into drinking water. And so your water rates will go up, there are also understandable gross out effects, right? Some people are going to need convincing. There's also the option of pulling groundwater from aquifers, natural geological formations that store and transmit water to wells and springs. Many cities are already using aquifers to supplement shortfalls from the Colorado River, but they're being used much faster than they're being replenished. >> Now, this map gives you an idea of where you're seeing these overdraft problems. Groundwater tables dropping precipitously, so people are going to have to drill their wells deeper and deeper and deeper to access it. As there's less Colorado river water, more and more people are going to sink wells and count on the groundwater to make up the difference. So when we talk about water scarcity, we don't mean physical water scarcity. What we mean is economic scarcity. How much money is it going to take to go get the water from where it is, bring it all the way to where the people are, and clean it to be usable enough. We are not running out of water. We are running out of cheap water. And I don't just mean higher water rates, though that's definitely going to happen in the lower basin of the Colorado River. Water is scarce and this is just basic economics. A lot of people want something and there's not a lot of it. It's going to get valuable and you're going to have to pay for it. >> So, what will it take to actually fix the Colorado River basin? Inevitably, cuts will hit the main users first. >> If you were to draw a pie chart and say, "Where does all the Colorado River water go?" Let's for the time being exclude what mother nature is making fly away. So that's evapo transpiration which is a big chunk of water. Basically 75% is irrigated agriculture farming. Now with the rest of that 25% where's it all going? About half of it's going to municipal industrial users. These are going to be people who are getting water from their taps. And then you might just have other industrial users. While public backlash often focuses on data centers, experts say moving the needle means confronting the sector using the most water. We can free up a lot of water for municipal uses and industrial uses just by retiring agriculture. But if you do that, you will pay more for food in the grocery store. >> Retiring thirsty crops like alalfa and hay would save massive amounts of water, but it would also gut a multi-billion dollar agricultural economy. to replace those industries without triggering severe economic fallout from lost jobs and tax revenues. Many experts argue the federal government has to foot some of the costs. >> More federal funds are absolutely essential. More investment by the federal government in water augmentation, more opportunities for rebates, for loans, for grants for water conservation. They're going to be central to the future of this country because we are talking about the vast majority of the copper production in this country. Almost all of your winter vegetables, massive companies that create jobs, that build airplanes, that build technologies essential for national defense, they all need this water. And if this water benefits everyone in the country, then everyone in the country needs to make the investment. And when it comes to dividing up whatever water remains, experts point to a structural model built on the other side of the world. >> Now, during the Millennium Drought and around 2000 in the Murray Darling Basin, which is shared between multiple states in Australia as a major river basin in an aid region, the Australian government made a dramatic shift in the way that it was managing that river. It moved away from a regime that looked more like what we have in the Colorado River and shifted it more to something that looks like a share of the available water supplies. And that share was tradable and sellable uh and it created a market. Australia and the United States have enough cultural and legal differences that it might be harder to achieve those same reforms in the Colorado River Basin than were achieved in the Murray Darling. But thinking about how we might reform and facilitate a water market is worth thinking about. But again, every choice that we make has costs, risks, and benefits. If water just goes to the highest bidder, there are risks that you will get water speculators that people will come in and they'll buy up a bunch of water and then sit on it and hoard the water. So, we'll have to regulate the water market in a way so that that doesn't happen. While state leaders fight over allocations, operators on the ground are fighting to keep the water flowing. The Central Arizona project or CAP is a 336m canal supplying water to over 6 million people, but its junior priority status means deep federal cuts are a significant threat. This canal has been the lifeblood of the state of Arizona. It is built a trillion dollar industry. We have been watching every drop of water that comes out of the snowpack, what goes into the reservoir and what comes into the system which is why we have taken a lot of painful reductions not only mandatory but also voluntary. So we have been taking a lot of action. >> How worried are you and how worried are the people of these communities that rely on it about the supply that runs through this canal and the risk that this may be a dry canal someday? >> It is on the top of everybody's minds within the state of Arizona. There is a potential for the CAP supplies to be cut drastically and that could mean crisis for all of us in the state of Arizona. Even if we have a diverse portfolio, it's not going to be felt right away, but on a long-term basis that is not sustainable for the state. It is an existential crisis. We are definitely going to fight very hard for it. Nobody's running away.