科罗拉多河干旱致美西部限水，农业用水占比超人类生活

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You're listening to Bloomberg [music] Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenc on Bloomberg Radio. Christine, I have a [music] simple question for you. Do you eat steak?

I do, but I'm trying to do less of it.

It's for environmental reasons.

Yeah. Yeah, for environmental reasons and just for, you know, uh, humanitarian Well, no, not really humanitarian, but whatever the humanitarian equivalent is for animals.

Well, you might stop might stop eating it after reading Mark Gong'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 uh and then I read your column today, so not so great, but I'm sorry.

Nothing. Go ahead. [laughter] Feel bad. But I'm joking. Don't feel bad. Here's the problem. Here's the 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 alalfa. What's the problem here? 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, uh the Colorado River itself is 20% less of its usual of its historic flow like me, like pal, record low water levels, all that stuff is happening.

Meanwhile, a third of the water used by human beings in that basin up lower and upper is devoted to cow food. Period. Uh 25% goes to other human food. The other 23% or so goes to every other human use. And that's cities, that's uh golf courses, that's uh data farms, all all this stuff. Cow food makes up the bulk of of what we're spending this water on. And this water is a dwindling resource. And in fact, the federal government is now calling for massive cuts uh in in the amount of water that that basin you is allowed to use, especially the lower basin, California, Arizona, where a lot of this alpha actually gets grown.

Um and so they're going to have to make a decision, you know, do we keep, you know, giving water to people or do we keep feeding cows? 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?

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. Uh and you know, they have growing appetites for not just beef. We're not just talking about beef here. We're talking about dairy. We're talking about, you know, even vegetarian. She eats yogurt. you know, he eats cheese. Uh, you know, that's also a massive component of this. But some of that that that alpha alpha we're sending overseas goes to Saudi Arabia, which actually outlawed the growth of alalfa in its own country to save water.

Uh, and so what we're doing is they're they're saving their water. We're exporting our water to them in the form of cow food.

Yeah. Well, Mark, very interesting because you mentioned in your story, right, this is a result of a 25- year drought. Uh but is there something now that's happening that's making it more front and center for policy makers for uh the people who watch this stuff? Uh you know 25 years not a short amount of time but what makes it more urgent now?

Well you know 25 years you're right is not a short amount of time and we all kind of 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 me and Powell are at levels below which at a certain point they're not going to be able to uh run hydroelectric power from their dams uh and like the Hoover Dam for example uh and massive amounts of water is going to get cut off for 40 million people.

So the the droughts have finally culminated in the fact that we just don't have as much water. But we're we've also hit this these deadlines that the federal government has set for the states. There are a bunch of states up and down the river and and and native tribes and Mexico also has a little piece of this that they're 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 you swap them and stuff. But so there are people there are farms that are already not growing alpha alpha or anything else because they have lower water rights than somebody else. Uh, so it's it's all a mess and and they're trying to work it out. And recently the Interior Department just came in with a sledgehammer and said you're just going to cut 3 million acre feet of water, which is a huge amount of water um in like the lower basin states by 2028 because you can't come to an agreement on anything else.

So that it's a political thing as much as anything else.

You you may have uh I don't know felt this when you were writing this column, but when you're talking about acre feet, people's eyes might glaze over.

Yeah. Yeah. But you do a good job of explaining what an acre foot is and it actually is pretty logical. I didn't realize that until reading your column. Can you just explain like an acre foot when you're talking in these big numbers and and contextualize it for us with like okay how much water is that for like an American home? Yeah. So sorry you know acre feet, liters, gallons, all these numbers get thrown around.

An acre foot is literally what it takes to flood an acre of land or roughly an American football field under a foot of water. And that is should be enough theoretically to supply one US household for 3 years. That acre foot of water supplies, one household for three years. So if you're talking about cutting off 3 million acre feet, you're talking about cutting off per year. By the way, that's per year. Uh you're talking about cutting off millions of households and also many many acres of these alpha alpha farms.

So again, that's one re big reason. you know, the the the amount that's being taken away from Arizona in just the next two years is enough to supply 2.3 million households for a year. Um, so, you know, it's a significant amount of water and they're going to have to make some really hard choices. You know, again, cows versus people is being the big one.

Yeah. Well, yeah. And you mentioned Arizona. I mean, one of the states that is probably uh set to be affected by this the most. What sort of action are we seeing uh from there? And I I mean, we know that for instance, Nevada's uh suing the the federal government. And Arizona's thinking of joining the frey. Are we seeing other measures to kind of mitigate the impact of all this?

Yeah, Arizona's thinking about joining the lawsuit, but Arizona has actually been sort of uh progressive about it managing water. I mean, they live in a desert after all, for God's sake. And so, you know, uh they use about the same amount of water as they used decades ago, but their population has boomed, you know, from six million to like seven seven and a half million people. uh and so they're doing a good job of of managing their municipal water.

They've got all kinds of restrictions. The agricultural water doesn't have as many restrictions. Now, some of that is, as I said, already being cut off. And in some places where it's being cut off, where the farmers are having to do more with less or just survive, they are actually taking it their own initiative to stop growing alpha alpha. They've turned to barley or something else that uses less water. So, you know, in a hope on a hopeful note, uh, some of this stuff is just going to take care of itself.

But ultimately, what we need to do is a have a big agreement, have a have a big water, uh, zar for the west