Who Owns Your Drinking Water? The Answer May Surprise You
Water is important, but most of us take it for granted. We can live about 30 days without food, but can only survive about 3 days without water. About a year ago, the state of Arizona banned new home construction in Maricopa County — home to Phoenix and surrounding suburbs — if the home required a well for drinking water.
Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, has a population of 75,000 with plans to add 100,000 residents in the years to come. But Queen Creek has a problem. There simply isn’t enough potable water available to wash the dishes and flush the toilets and fill the pools of all the new homes that will be needed to house more people. The city has two potential sources — surface water from lakes and rivers, and groundwater. Those lakes and rivers, in turn, are fed by by the Colorado River, which is also under stress today.
Maricopa County gets about half its drinking water from groundwater. The problem is, groundwater may take a thousand years or more to accumulate. In less than half a century, the unrelenting pace of growth in the county has seriously depleted the available supply. The county uses 2.2 billion gallons a day — twice as much as New York City, which has double the population.
Water & Politics in Arizona
The issue was swept under the rug by former governor Doug Ducey. Now Governor Katie Hobbs has been left to clean up the mess left by her predecessor. Last year, her administration announced there would be no more building permits issued in Maricopa County for single family homes that rely on wells instead of municipal supplies. Existing permits will be allowed to proceed to completion, however. The ban also does not apply to commercial developments, which usually do not rely on wells for their water supply.
The decision is based on an analysis of expected groundwater levels over the next 100 years completed by state officials — information that Ducey chose to ignore, as is the norm in conservative circles in America today. Sweep it under the rug, hide it in your pantry with your cupcakes, but never, ever admit there is a problem that might inhibit the constant growth of the economy, come hell or high water. Or lack of high water, as the case may be.
4.86 Million Acre-Feet Shortfall
The state analysis projects a shortfall of 4.86 million acre-feet in the Phoenix area over the next 100 years. One acre-foot equal 325,851 gallons. You do the math; our Radio Shack calculator doesn’t go that high. A year ago, Governor Hobbs said Arizona was not immediately running dry and that new construction would continue in major cities like Phoenix. “We’re going to manage this situation,” she said. “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water. It is also incredibly important to note that the model relates only to groundwater and does not concern surface water supplies which are a significant source of renewable water for our state. What the model ultimately shows is that our water future is secure.”
Buying Other People’s Water
200 miles west of Phoenix, the tiny town of Cibola sits astride the Colorado River near the border with California and about an hour north of the border with Mexico. For the past ten years, farmers in Cibola grew alfalfa and cotton, using the town’s allotment of 2000 acre-feet of Colorado River water. In 2014, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land in Cibola and leased it back to local farmers. But it wasn’t interested in the land, it was interested in the water rights.
Greenstone paid almost $10 million for the land. Then in 2018, it sold those water rights to — wait for it — Queen Creek for $24 million, a profit of $14 million. As a result, the water that used to irrigate farmland in Cibola now flows to Queen Creek via the canals that crisscross Arizona. The fields that once flourished are now barren and many of the farmers in Cibola have lost their livelihood.
Experts tell The Guardian that such transfers will become more common as thirsty towns across the west seek increasingly scarce water. The climate crisis and chronic overuse have sapped the Colorado River watershed, leaving cities and farmers alike to contend with shortages. Amid a deepening drought and declines in the river’s reservoirs, Greenstone and firms like it have been discreetly acquiring thousands of acres of farmland. The transfer of water rights is being challenged in court by residents of Cibola, but a resolution could be years away.
In the meantime, a bill in the Missouri legislature that would forbid the export of water across state lines without a permit has strong bipartisan support. Just the specter of water scarcity is behind the legislation. Besides persistent drought in parts of the state and plummeting Mississippi River levels in recent months and years, lawmakers are wary of the West and the chance that thirsty communities facing dwindling water supplies will look east for lakes and rivers to tap, according to a report by the Washington Post.
The bill’s proponents point to perennial talks of diverting the Mississippi River west, and of proposals to export large amounts of water from Iowa and North Dakota. They fear it is only a matter of time before someone looks to tap Missouri’s groundwater and the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. Drought currently stretches across about a third of Missouri and is even more widespread and extreme in states upriver on the Mississippi.
“Each year, dozens of proposals, ranging from serious to laughable, are made to export large volumes of water from water-rich states to water-poor ones,” Charles Miller, formerly of the Missouri Confluence Waterkeeper organization, testified last year at a hearing on a similar bill in the state legislature. “Most of these are costly and ill-considered, but without statutory authority to conserve our state’s water resources, Missouri would have no way to stop them.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Ro Khanna are sponsoring a bill to prohibit the trading of water as a commodity, The Guardian has learned. “Water is not a commodity for the rich and powerful to profit off of,” said Warren. “Representative Khanna and I are standing up to protect water from Wall Street speculation and ensure one of our most essential resources isn’t auctioned off to the highest bidder.”
What put a bee in Warren’s bonnet? Remember Greenstone Resource Partners? The Guardian investigation found that it has at least 25 subsidiaries and affiliates registered in Arizona and other states. Business registration records, deeds, loan documents, and tax records show that these companies share the same executives. To local residents and officials it was initially unclear that the business — which had been acquiring thousands of acres of farmland not only in Cibola but across Arizona — went by so many names.
Public records revealed that Greenstone’s financial backers include the global investment firm MassMutual and its subsidiary Barings, as well as public pension funds. At least one of its acquisitions appears to be financed by Rabo AgriFinance, a subsidiary of the Dutch multinational banking and financial services company Rabobank.
On its website, Greenstone describes itself as “a water company” and as “a developer and owner of reliable, sustainable water supplies.” Its CEO, Mike Schlehuber, previously worked for Vidler Water Company — another firm that essentially brokers water supplies — as well as Summit Global Management, a company that invests in water suppliers and water rights. Greenstone’s managing director and vice-president, Mike Malano, managed to get himself elected to the board of the Cibola Valley irrigation and drainage district, a quasi-governmental organization that oversees the distribution of water for agriculture in the region.
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Sinking Arizona
The New York Times recently reported on water issues in La Paz county, halfway between Phoenix and Cibola, where giant farms have turned Arizona’s remote deserts as green as fairways thanks to extracting groundwater to grow alfalfa for dairy cows. Water experts say the pumping is sinking poor rural towns. The ground in parts of La Paz County has dropped more than five feet during three decades of farming. Pipes and home foundations are cracking. Wells are running dry. Summers of record-setting heat and drought have raised doubts for many Arizonans about whether the state has enough water to sustain its farms and fast-growing cities. In a recent poll, 60% of respondents said they believed there is not enough water to support the state’s population and industries.
Water Will Become More Precious Than Oil
Humans believe that all natural resources are infinite and will never run out. Nature, however, is not bound by such magical thinking. There are hard lessons ahead if we do not adjust our thinking to reflect reality. Much of the United States is experiencing a prolonged drought that affects farmers and promotes massive wildfires. The temperatures at Sky Harbor airport that serves the Phoenix area can get so hot that flights are cancelled, because airplanes generate less lift when temperatures soar and can’t get off the ground.
And yet, we continue to pump millions of gallons of polluted water underground to force more oil and gas to the surface and never stop to think what all those poisons are doing to our drinking water. We have to keep pumping because corporations have a God-given right to make money and because America needs to be the largest fossil fuel supplier in the world for some reason.
Resources are finite, unfortunately, and when they run out, life can become intolerable. The one thing that seems quite certain is that the cost of water will skyrocket as the supply shrinks, another consequence of a hotter planet that is leading to rising food prices and soaring insurance costs. People with no access to drinking water can get desperate, which bodes ill for a civil society. The warning signs are there for all to see but are being generally ignored. Dire consequences lie ahead if we do not confront global heating immediately if not sooner.
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