For a Thirsty West, It’s Either Cows or Humans

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:15)
Kristine, I have a simple question for you. Do you eat steak?

**Kristine Aquino** (0:20)
I do, but I'm trying to do less of it.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:24)
Is this for environmental reasons?

**Kristine Aquino** (0:25)
Yeah, for environmental reasons and just for humanitarian, well, no, not really humanitarian, but whatever the humanitarian equivalent is for animals.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:35)
Well, you might stop eating it after reading Mark Gongloff's latest column. He's a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He covers climate change. He joins us from New Jersey. Mark, I know that that's not the point of the column by any chance. And by the way, I should note, I cooked two steaks last night and then I read your column today. So not so great, but I'm sorry.

**Mark Gongloff** (0:56)
No, go ahead. But I'm joking.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:00)
Well, here's the problem.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:03)
Here's the problem. This is not about cow farts. Okay. This is not about cow farts. As you point out in your column, it's about water and it's about alfalfa. What's the problem here?

**Mark Gongloff** (1:14)
The problem here is that of the water that human beings use in the Colorado River basin, which as we know is very dry, has been in drought for 25 years. The Colorado River itself is 20 percent less of its historic flow. Like me, like Powell, record low water levels, all that stuff is happening. Meanwhile, a third of the water used by human beings in that basin, lower and upper, is devoted to cow food, period. Twenty-five percent goes to other human food. The other 23 percent or so goes to every other human use, and that's cities, that's golf courses, that's data farms, all this stuff.
Cow food makes up the bulk of what we're spending this water on. This water is a dwindling resource, and in fact, the federal government is now calling for massive cuts in the amount of water that basin is allowed to use, especially the lower basin, California, Arizona, where a lot of the South Alpha actually gets grown.
And so, they're gonna have to make a decision, do we keep giving water to people, or do we keep feeding cows?

**Tim Stenovec** (2:26)
And the cow food all stays in the US and is fed to American cows that are then sold to Americans as sources of protein, right?

**Mark Gongloff** (2:34)
Oh, we wish, but in fact, 26% of the cow food that is grown in California and Arizona goes overseas. Ironic to China and Japan, mainly, they're the biggest customers.
And they have growing appetites. We're not just beef, we're not just talking about beef here, we're talking about dairy, we're talking about, even I'm married to a vegetarian, she eats yogurt, he eats cheese. That's also a massive component of this. But some of that, the alfalfa we're sending overseas goes to Saudi Arabia, which actually outlawed the growth of alfalfa in its own country to save water. And so what we're doing is they're saving their water, we're exporting our water to them in the form of cow food.

**Kristine Aquino** (3:15)
Yeah. Well, Mark, very interesting because you mentioned in your story, right? This is a result of a 25-year drought. But is there something now that's happening that's making it more front and center for policymakers, for the people who watch this stuff?
25 years, not a short amount of time, but what makes it more urgent now?

**Mark Gongloff** (3:36)
Well, 25 years, you're right, is not a short amount of time and we all could have seen this coming. A lot of people did see this coming, but we've kicked the can and kicked the can down the road. And now we are actually in the crisis. Lake Mead and Powell are at levels below which, at a certain point, they're not going to be able to run hydroelectric power from their dams and like the Hoover Dam, for example, and massive amounts of water is going to get cut off for 40 million people. So the droughts have finally culminated in the fact that we just don't have as much water, we've also hit these deadlines that the federal government has set for the states. There are a bunch of states up and down the river and native tribes and Mexico also has a little piece of this that are supposed to work out a deal to split the water and they can't agree, nobody wants to agree. The upper basin states aren't taking any cuts, lower basin states taking all the cuts, there are all these ancient water rights that are, you know, Byzantine and you swap them and stuff, but so there are people, there are farms that are already not growing alfalfa or anything else because they have lower water rights than somebody else.