The Summer a Global Water Crisis Arrived

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Luke Vargas (0:34)

Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, August 30th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news. And this week, summer is drawing to a close across the Northern Hemisphere, and for a number of Americans and Europeans, water scarcity has never been a more pressing or visible issue.

Much of the West is experiencing drought. The same goes for most of Europe, where major rivers are running dangerously low, and even typically rainy England has seen its green and pleasant land muted to yellow. So what can be done to keep the taps running, fields productive, and industry humming if things carry on like they have been? Let's get right to it.

Well, without further ado, let me introduce reporter Ed Ballard, who covers Climate Change and Energy for the Journal, and he's also the author of our Climate and Energy newsletter, which comes out every Thursday. We've left a link to subscribe to that in our show notes. Ed, has this summer in fact been different in terms of the conditions we've seen on either side of the Atlantic, or I suppose in how readers are responding to our coverage about what's going on?

Ed Ballard (1:40)

I definitely think in Europe this summer has been different, both in the sheer number of heat records that have been broken, the successive heat waves we've seen, and also I think people are starting to see this as climate change having an impact on their own lives in perhaps a way they weren't a few years ago. People's lives are being disrupted in new and startling ways. Everybody is getting an air condition if they didn't already have one. We're just figuring out all the different ways in which our homes, our infrastructure are just not equipped for the conditions that we're seeing now.

Just in general, it feels like the future has arrived, and we were expecting it to arrive at a more convenient moment.

Luke Vargas (2:16)

We'll talk more about that, we'll talk about Europe, but let's shift to the US West, where the Colorado River water crisis is really coming into focus. We saw federal officials this month in the US announce sharp water cuts for the next two years that will cover California, Nevada, Arizona, and in the process, sparked a lawsuit by Nevada, where officials described this issue as a matter of survival.

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The Bureau of Reclamation's plan forces big cuts on the lower basin states of Nevada, Arizona, and California.

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It's an attempt to prop up the nation's two largest reservoirs, which both hit record low levels earlier this month.

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The plan does not require restrictions for the upper basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

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Nevada's suing the federal government over its Colorado River plan.

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In their decision to take such action, Nevada says it's doing so to protect its citizens.

Luke Vargas (3:09)

Ed, this is no longer a future risk for the West. The very process meant to sort of see these states share their resources, you know, deal with the disputes seems to be breaking down here. And now even the emergency measures brought in to kind of rectify things are being fought over.

Ed Ballard (3:23)

Yeah, that's right. This problem was sort of there right from the start on the Colorado River. Even at the beginning, there was more water accounted for in the plan than the Colorado regularly supplied. And that situation has become more and more acute basically because snowfall over the Rockies has diminished. And of course, water consumption has gone up, especially in these fast growing cities of the Southwest.

And now we're coming to the all at once part, where the two huge reservoirs that three lower basin states depend on, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, they're not so far above the level where they won't be able to generate hydropower, and below that level where they won't be able to actually discharge water on demand at all.

And that's why it's these lower basin states, which are Arizona, California, and Nevada. They're the states that can have cuts imposed on them by a federal authority in a way that doesn't apply to the upper basin states. And now we're seeing all of these long-term structural challenges are reaching an acute point where it's quite possible that we'll get to a point where those dams won't be able to discharge water on demand, and this whole intricate system that's been run for decades for apportioning this priceless reserve of water from the Colorado Rockies just won't exist anymore. You won't be able to have water on demand, and then the scary prospect is there'll be some sort of chaotic process for deciding who gets water.