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Middle East oil and gas facilities hit in fresh attacks
A UAE gas field suspended operations, a tanker was hit near an Emirati port, and two drones hit an oil field in southern Iraq.
A contrast at the core of the US-China rivalry
A rare American atop a Chinese firm argues the US ‘can outpace China,’ but not without changes.
Can MomTok Survive Taylor Frankie Paul and Dakota Mortensen?
<em>People</em> reports that production on <em>The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives </em>season 5 has halted following domestic assault allegations involving the two.
Klobuchar seeks to stiffen antitrust review process in wake of Live Nation scrutiny
The senator plans to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would broaden the judiciary’s abilities to approve — or reject — antitrust settlements.
As the Gulf Burns, Political Uncertainty Looms Over Iraq
Nouri al-Maliki, the former prime minister, is grooming himself for another stint in power as war consumes Iraq.
The Trump Administration Just Won a Terrifying Victory Over Protesters
The future of protesting in the United States may have been decided in a cramped Depression-era courtroom in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, on Friday. Nine defendants, who federal prosecutors claimed were part of an “antifa cell,” were found guilty of an array of charges, including providing “material support” for terrorism, for attending a demonstration outside an ICE facility that turned violent on July 4, 2025. The verdict is a clear victory for the Trump administration, which, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, has stretched the definition of “domestic terrorist organization” to include a staggeringly broad set of “terroristic activities,” such as “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” The Trump administration had already informally labeled its perceived enemies as radical terrorists, from Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal agents in January, to Marimar Martinez, who was shot several times by a Border Patrol agent last year. But last Friday, for the first time, the formal designation stuck in court.What constitutes an antifa terror cell? Apparently, a group of people who did not all know each other before being scooped up and charged as one. While some of the nine defendants who were convicted on Friday had met through self-defense classes, the Socialist Rifle Association, and an anarchist book club, loosely associating through Signal group chats, others didn’t know anyone—and only happened to be at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center last July 4 because they found the details for the demonstration online. The events of that night lasted about half an hour: A handful of protesters arrived outside the facility around 10:37 p.m. wearing dark clothing—what prosecutors defined as “tactical gear” and “black bloc” attire—and set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with the detainees inside. Some brought weapons—11 firearms were recovered at the scene, many from inside cars or unassembled in backpacks—though group chat logs before the demonstration suggest they thought carrying them would act as a deterrent against violence from police or federal agents. At least two protesters broke off from the main group and spray-painted cars in the parking lot and an empty guard shack with anti-ICE slogans, slashing a van’s tires and breaking a security camera. It took approximately 15 minutes after the demonstration began for corrections officers to call 911. Two minutes later, a local police lieutenant, Thomas Gross, arrived at the scene and drew his weapon, aiming at the back of one of the alleged vandals. An FBI official previously stated it was unclear who then shot first, but Gross was shot in the trapezius muscle, between his neck and shoulder, by a protester identified as Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist who was carrying an AR-15-style rifle. (Gross was airlifted to a nearby hospital and released a few hours later; Song was found guilty of one count of attempted murder on Friday.) There was enough ambiguity to the claim that Song fired out of malice that the federal judge—Mark Pittman, a Trump 1.0 appointee—had to rule that the defendants couldn’t claim self-defense. Prosecutors had called self-defense theories in this case “legally insupportable” and compared the Prairieland case to precedent set against the Branch Davidians, members of the religious cult made famous during the 1993 siege in nearby Waco. In the Waco trial, the question of who “shot first” was hotly contested, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit eventually ruled self-defense arguments were out of the question. This wasn’t the only allusion to cults made during the trial. Indeed, the most consequential piece of the case against the Prairieland defendants is how prosecutors defined what counts as “conspiracy.” With the outcome of this trial potentially creating a new weapon with which the Trump administration can bludgeon its political opponents—sidestepping the First Amendment—prosecutors effectively concocted a “criminal enterprise” through innuendo and partial truths. Before the trial, the FBI described one defendant’s home as a “commune,” presumably because the group of friends living there together were pooling cash for the mortgage. Meanwhile, prosecutors had to walk back their claim that there were multiple shooters, given evidence to the contrary, but still argued what happened that night was a “planned ambush.” They drew broadly from reading material found in protesters’ homes, including a review of the 2019 film Midsommar titled, “The Satanic Death-Cult Is Real”—a scintillating header belying a more mundane dark art (literary criticism). They tapped Kyle Shideler, who works at the Center for Security Policy think tank—described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece”—as an “expert” witness. If his testimony was unconvincing, prosecutors also referred to protesters’ use of nicknames on Signal as evidence of their malevolent plot—names such as “Champagne,” “Jon ValJon,” and “Not Beating the Little Creature Allegations.” But does the use of nicknames on messaging apps such as Discord or Signal automatically portend a malevolent conspiracy? Does carpooling? If someone else brings a gun to a protest, even in gun-friendly states like Texas, are you liable for what they do with it? Apparently, you are. Although Song pulled the trigger, five were charged with attempted murder. Song was convicted, and the four others were acquitted of that charge, suggesting a slippage between what prosecutors argued and what jurors bought. Still, eight were convicted of rioting, providing “material support” to terrorists, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and the use of an explosive—the “explosives” being the fireworks, which the warden testified did no damage to the facility. Moreover, the use of fireworks at noise demonstrations is commonplace: After Renee Nicole Good was killed, Minneapolis protesters lit fireworks outside an ICE-occupied hotel, and during New Year’s Eve noise demonstrations last year, fireworks were used outside jails in Chicago; Detroit; Durham, North Carolina; and even in Austin, Texas. Were these ambushes too? As Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice, told KERA News—North Texas’s public radio affiliate—the broad definition of “antifa” employed by prosecutors “introduces a degree of ambiguity that is going to result in Americans choosing to not exercise their constitutional rights for fear of being swept up in some kind of dragnet.” The “Death-Cult” article was found in the home of Daniel Sanchez Estrada, the only defendant on the federal case who wasn’t even at the protest but who was convicted of corruptly concealing documents and faces up to 40 years in prison for transporting a box of zines from one suburb of Dallas to another. Sanchez and his co-defendants at the federal level are—along with a handful of others who, like Sanchez, weren’t at the protest—on the hook for a state-level case yet to be announced. “There will be an appeal,” Patrick McLain, defense attorney for defendant Zachary Evetts, wrote in a statement. He alluded to irregularities during the trial that had “raised many reasons” for appealing: the first and most obvious, that Judge Pittman declared a mistrial hours into the first day of jury selection, expanded the juror pool from around 75 to 130, and single-handedly selected the jurors on the second go-around, using questions defense attorneys submitted to the court under seal. These moves were all legal, of course. Yet multiple studies have shown jurors act differently when questioned by a judge versus an attorney. An attorney close to the case, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, described a “chilling effect” enacted through repeated orders against how the defense could argue its case. Amber Lowrey, older sister of Prairieland defendant Savannah Batten, noted that the first jury pool was more critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration. (The official reason for Pittman’s decision was a “politically charged” T-shirt featuring civil rights icons underneath a defense attorney’s blazer, which he deemed prejudicial.) “He knew that the first jury was not going to convict these people,” she told me the night after the verdict. The odds of a federal judge in Fort Worth, of all places, being some kind of peacenik were always slim, but the fact that the case is being overseen by Pittman, a founder of the Fort Worth–area Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, had already caused dissension. In 2023, Pittman was slammed—by the Fifth Circuit Court, no less—for “abuse of discretion” in his courtroom, at least the third time the court ruled that he was too quick to sanction litigants, a pattern that has continued in the Prairieland case. And in the middle of the Prairieland trial, Pittman held a private meeting with former Attorney General William Barr, who in 2020 threatened to take “all action necessary” against “far left extremist groups and anarchic groups using antifa-like tactics.” Barr told the news site NOTUS he “knew of” the antifa case but claimed he was just “getting a tour of the courtroom” and hadn’t discussed the trial with the judge. He was in town for a Fort Worth–area Federalist Society panel. Notably, the Prairieland case was for months overseen by Nancy Larson, also a Federalist Society member and the interim head of the Northern District of Texas U.S. Attorney’s office, who joined Barr’s boutique law firm, Torridon Law, as partner on February 6, days before jury selection began. Given just how broadly the word conspiracy has stretched during this trial, what should we call this?Following the verdict, Lowrey and her mother sat in her car for an hour and a half, shaken. “I’m still processing everything,” she said the next day. “My sister feels like a ghost. Things that seemed so important a few days ago are just nothing now.” Lowrey, a mother of three, has been advocating for her younger sister from the beginning, making statements to the media when others feared reprisals, waking up at around 4 a.m. to sit through the trial every day, and returning from the courtroom after her kids have gone to bed. Last July, after the FBI raided Savannah’s home, she came by to coax her cat, traumatized by the flash grenade, into her car. With sentencing set for June, and an appeal sure to follow, she remains determined. “We’ll just keep taking care of her cat and loving on her and wait,” she said, “until her cat mom gets home.”
The American West Is Drying Up. Can the Market Help?
When members of the Colorado River Water Users Association, or CRWUA, descended on Caesars Palace for their annual conference in December, few showed much enthusiasm for Las Vegas’s popular diversions. Attendees mostly bypassed the slots and roulette tables, the magic shows and nightclubs. The sole planned excursion on offer—an early morning jaunt to Hoover Dam—was the definition of a busman’s holiday. This was not a decadent bunch. They were serious-minded people dealing with a monumental problem. Some called it an emergency; even the most sanguine considered it a crisis.Water was running out.The CRWUA conference is always in Vegas. Water wonks have been making the pilgrimage since 1945, when the Strip was still known as Highway 91 and Elvis was playing dairy shows back in Tupelo. The city’s transformation, for better or worse, was as much their predecessors’ doing as it was gambling kingpin Meyer Lansky’s. They’d subdued the mighty Colorado River, channeling its waters—along with the megawatts of power they generated—to build not only Sin City but Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, and as much as 15 percent of the United States agriculture sector. It was not cowboys or pioneers but federal water engineers who birthed the West as we know it, “a culture and society built on … a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature,” as historian Donald Worster put it.This year’s meeting drew 1,700 or so attendees. Along with policy experts, hydrologists, commissioners, and environmentalists were many of the stakeholders—the property developers, agribusiness executives, tribal representatives, and so on—whose livelihoods, and in some cases lives, depend on the dwindling and beleaguered waterway. The pilgrims hailed mostly from seven Western states, divided a century ago into competing factions: the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah) and the Lower Basin (Nevada, Arizona, California). They talked flow, irrigation, conservation, and, in more somber moments, seepage, evaporation, bathtub rings, and dead pools.A week before the conference, local news stations aired a story about a man in Laughlin, a 90-minute drive to the south, who’d literally walked across the river and back while a drone hovered overhead, memorializing the escapade. The amusing human interest story had a forbidding subtext: The Colorado was drying up, thanks in part to the West’s 26-year-long “megadrought”—its worst in 1,200 years—which many scientists believe may be permanent.The science isn’t complicated, but these days it bears repeating. Due to a warming atmosphere, snow lines in the Rockies and other ranges flanking the river are in retreat, meaning less spring snowmelt trickling into the basin, even as increasingly parched earth and warm air claim their share of the remaining moisture. As a result, the river’s 46 reservoirs, including the enormous man-made Lake Powell and Lake Mead, now stand more than two-thirds empty, according to a recent report by the Colorado River Research Group. A few more dry years coupled with continued overconsumption, the report suggests, could plunge Lake Mead into “dead pool” status, when levels fall so low that hydroelectric power (already running at a reduced capacity) flickers out and water no longer reaches the outlet works that channel it downriver.As Matt Diserio, co-founder and president of Water Asset Management, a hedge fund that has spent millions buying land in the area (principally for the attached water rights), noted last year in an investor pitch, “It’s underreported just how severe and near-cataclysmic these risks are.”How bad could it get? In late January, the United Nations released a report declaring the advent of what it called global “water bankruptcy”: a catastrophic new normal. The new terminology would seem to suggest a long-shot gamble that the language of financial insolvency might somehow spur action among leaders who have grown numb or even hostile to more sciencey admonitions.One can hope. As the report states, “available water resources … have been significantly reduced, with some impacts … effectively irreversible on human time scales.” (Damn those human time scales.) The authors found the most severe threats in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and, yes, parts of the U.S. Southwest. Similar forecasts are outlined in a study by South Korean researchers published in September in Nature Communications. Under high-warming scenarios, the authors determined, both Phoenix and San Diego will be among the areas where extreme, multiyear water scarcity—what the authors term “Day Zero Drought”—is projected to emerge within the coming decade.Although Chennai, Cape Town, São Paolo, Mexico City, Kabul, and Tehran, among other localities, have already flirted with similarly apocalyptic circumstances, for the crowd at Caesars, such nightmares seemed remote. “We are not running out of water,” said Rhett Larson, professor of water law at Arizona State University and one of the conference’s keynote speakers. “We are running out of cheap water.”Indeed, to many observers, the substance has been greatly undervalued for decades. Water used for irrigation—which in Arizona accounts for more than 70 percent of the state’s total usage—is had for a tiny fraction of its real cost. This enormous subsidy has encouraged many commercial ag firms to plant thirsty crops like cotton and alfalfa, much of it for export. Meanwhile, Arizona remains one of the fastest-growing states in the country, and property developers are eager to see that water directed toward new housing. As a result, a handful of speculators have stepped in, buying up farmland in hopes of channeling its water toward more urban areas for a tidy profit.Amid this ongoing tussle, a few lonely voices, including a right-wing Arizona state representative named Alexander Kolodin, have been proposing a seemingly radical solution: What if we just ... gulp ... let the market decide?To the extent that the CRWUA conference boasted anything close to a celebrity attendee, the honor belonged to Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona and later secretary of the interior. In between posing for selfies with fans, the fit 87-year-old weighed in on the dire state of affairs. The basin states would soon “be operating on what they call ‘run of the river,’” he told me. “We’ve been putting off the crisis by using the storage in these giant reservoirs of Glen Canyon and Hoover. There’s about a year left before there’ll be structural problems in Glen Canyon. There’ll be dead pool, probably, in Hoover Dam. So we really are at the decision point.”Indeed, a political crisis quietly loomed over the conference. The Colorado River Compact, an agreement hammered out in 1922, had bestowed upon the Upper and Lower Basins an annual 7.5 million acre-feet of water apiece—a surging, rippling bounty that simply no longer exists, if in fact it ever did. Last updated in 2007, the compact was again up for renewal, and some tough-to-swallow compromises would be required.The tug-of-war pitted the states of the Lower Basin, which for decades made eager use of their allotment—with the impressive population growth, agricultural output, and economic spoils to show for it—against their slower-to-develop and historically less needful neighbors to the north. While the Lower Basin states have cut back sharply and have agreed to shoulder the largest future reductions, they’re pressing the Upper Basin to chip in as the deficits grow. Meanwhile, the Upper Basin states, which never made full use of their entitlements, have clung fiercely to their water rights and the chance at future economic growth they represent. As in 1922, no representatives from the 30 or so Native American tribes who call the area home (and hold some of the most senior water rights, if not the infrastructure to exploit them), or from Mexico, which is also entitled to a portion of the Colorado’s flow, have been party to the negotiation.State water commissioners had already blown one deadline when, on the conference’s final morning, they took the stage in the packed Augustus Ballroom for an event that felt like a cross between a high-level summit and a hostage video. Most attendees had already checked out of their hotel rooms—their wheeled suitcases lined the periphery of the space—but few dared skip this top-of-the-card reckoning.Seated at a long dais draped with gold skirting, flags hanging behind them, the commissioners mostly stuck to their talking points. They trumpeted their states’ respective conservation efforts, highlighted the pain already felt by their various constituencies, demanded more flexibility from their opponents, and invoked the implacable power of Mother Nature to force a reckoning one way or another. (In other words, the house always wins.) Aside from a swaggering opener by California Commissioner JB Hamby (“California is here to save the Colorado River,” he began), the only real drama concerned the matter of whether Colorado Commissioner Becky Mitchell—recently dinged in the New York Times op-ed pages for her alleged recalcitrance—would become teary-eyed as she sometimes does during such appearances. Her voice cracked a bit, but the dam held fast.The conference adjourned with no sign of progress. An extended deadline had been set for February 14, and late January would find the commissioners and their respective governors summoned to Washington for a skull-cracking session with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. But no one I spoke to seemed to think the states would come to terms—not until the legal complaints started flying. “You can see the need for broad compromise,” observed John Fleck, an expert in water policy with the University of New Mexico Department of Economics. But the commissioners then “have to go back home and sell that compromise to local political constituencies, who say, ‘Don’t give up our water, fight for it.’ That makes a sharp cutback difficult.”“The politics just dribbles down,’” observed David Zetland, a professor of political economy at Leiden University College and author of the book Living With Water Scarcity. “Say you have someone from California say, ‘OK, we’ll give up water to help Colorado.’ Immediately the water users in California will sue about their water rights.”The current impasse was more than a century in the making. While water rights in the Eastern United States have long been based on an ancient concept known as riparianism—if a person holds land bordering a body of water, they automatically have the right to its use—in the West a new framework emerged, known as prior appropriation: Water rights were granted, in perpetuity, to whoever exploited them first. This approach was key to the settlement of the West. “You just turn it into a race,” ASU water law expert Larson explained in his CRWUA speech. “You say, ‘If you run as fast as you can into the desert and grab the most valuable resource … you’ll own that resource.’” There was a catch, however: If you failed to make use of the water, you’d lose it. Rampant overconsumption was thereby incentivized from the beginning and remains so in many areas.Meanwhile, it’s now widely understood that the architects of the original 1922 compact profoundly overestimated the volume of water flowing through the Colorado River, and so promised the signatories considerably more than could reasonably be delivered. Nonetheless, the flow was sufficient for a time. Mining operations sprung up. California’s Imperial Valley became an agricultural marvel. Rural Arizona exploded in cotton fluff. Great cities rose from dust—then sprawled in all directions. It was all pretty great until it wasn’t.Even before the impacts of climate breakdown were understood, a few keen observers saw the water issue plainly. One was Maj. John Wesley Powell, the explorer who’d drawn the first scientific maps of the Colorado. In 1893, at a Los Angeles meeting of the International Irrigation Congress, he informed the assembled delegates—men for whom Manifest Destiny was at that moment playing out precisely as promised—that they might want to scale back their ambitions just a smidge. “I tell you gentlemen you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights,” he predicted, “for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.”Perhaps unsurprisingly, Powell’s appraisal was cheerfully ignored. Well over a century later, the reservoir named in his honor is “dancing with deadpool,” as the Colorado River Research Group recently put it. Indeed, some water management experts are seriously considering letting the river simply bypass the Glen Canyon Dam altogether, thereby draining Lake Powell to the dregs.In his 2015 novel, The Water Knife, set in the southwestern United States after the Colorado River has gone dry, author Paolo Bacigalupi writes of how the water managers of the West “had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they … pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land.”He’s talking about aquifers, essentially sponges made of limestone, clay, gravel, or other porous geological matter. In places where surface water is too distant to reach, people have long made use of groundwater by sinking small communal or private wells, which may be replenished by rainfall. But dig a little deeper—for instance, to irrigate a large agricultural operation or provide drinking water to a new housing development—and you’re tapping water that’s lain undisturbed for millennia.“Imagine you have a bathtub full of water, and every 10 years, a drop comes out of the faucet, but every day you take a bucket out. Well, within a week, you’re going to empty the bathtub.”“Most of the aquifers that we’re talking about require thousands of years to recharge,” Larson explained. “Imagine you have a bathtub full of water, and every 10 years, a drop comes out of the faucet, but every day you take a bucket out. Well, within a week, you’re going to empty the bathtub.”That’s what’s happening under Gary Saiter’s town of Wenden, Arizona. Saiter spent years as an executive for Sherwin-Williams before retiring and delving into municipal governance. “I didn’t know anything about water before I went on the water board,” he told me. “I know a lot now.”While prior appropriation still dictates the apportionment of Arizona’s surface water (provided it’s put to “beneficial use,” vaguely defined), groundwater is different. For decades, Arizona law allowed just about anyone who owned a parcel of land to essentially stick in a straw and suck up whatever lay beneath. This free-for-all was challenged in the late 1940s by landowners in the town of Laveen Village, now a Phoenix suburb, whose wells ran dry due to the aggressive overpumping of a neighbor who was using the water to irrigate land miles away. The state Supreme Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor, before reversing itself under pressure from powerful agricultural interests. For decades thereafter, so-called percolating water was considered a kind of bonus accessory of the dirt from which one drew it.The problem was obvious: Land is stationary, but water flows and trickles, usually down. As the water table drops, elementary hydrology suggests that only those with the financial wherewithal to drill the deepest wells will thrive. As Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It, pointed out, “Instead of a property right, it’s like a circular firing squad.”In 1980, the legal framework changed with the Groundwater Management Act, now considered one of Babbitt’s crowning political achievements. Its most consequential provision was the curtailment of groundwater extraction in urban areas. But as pathbreaking as the legislation may have been, it contained a rather large loophole: In rural counties, where Big Ag held sway, the free-for-all continued unchanged.In 1991, Arizona officials, already well aware that the surface water supplies on which their thriving cities depended were being depleted, designated several aquifers as “transportation basins,” from which water could be pumped into the Central Arizona Project, the 336 miles of canals stretching from the Colorado, for use in metropolitan areas should the need arise. These basins “were specifically set aside as casualties,” explained Kathryn Sorensen, director of research for the Kyl Center for Water Policy. “It is allowable under state law to essentially drain them and then import the water into the Valley of the Sun and other areas.” One of these, the McMullen Valley Basin, lies beneath Wenden—albeit receding deeper every day. Sixty-nine years ago, Saiter told me, residents only needed to drill 107 feet down to find water; now, the water table sits at more than five times that depth. “Fifty percent of the aquifer is gone,” he said. “So, we’re dying.” But, he added quickly, “We’re not dead.”There’s an important caveat in the law that created the transportation basins: Only those who have owned acreage in McMullen since 1988 are eligible to transfer water—and the last landowner who met that criterion, the city of Phoenix, sold off the parcel in 2012. The buyer, a company called International Farming Corp., soon gave up on winter vegetables, which had long been produced on the site, in favor of alfalfa.A forage crop beloved by livestock, alfalfa has been a contentious topic in Arizona since 2015, when it emerged that a Saudi Arabian dairy company had bought thousands of acres in La Paz County and was aggressively irrigating its alfalfa fields for export to the kingdom. “Foreign countries with limited [water] supply but lots of money realized that the U.S. is an open market with no regulations, so let’s just go grab some,” Glennon recalled.“If you have free water, you grow alfalfa,” Zetland agreed. “This is the American taxpayer subsidizing Saudi milk.”Meanwhile, in neighboring McMullen Valley, an agribusiness based in the United Arab Emirates was up to the same thing. While gulf nations were hardly the only corporate interests to realize that Arizona’s regulatory patchwork had created a significant business opportunity, the foreign angle lent the issue additional salience. Amid a public outcry, the state canceled several Saudi leases due to “excessive amounts of water being pumped from the land—free of charge,” and the McMullen Basin parcel producing alfalfa for the UAE was sold for a staggering $100 million (a 233 percent markup). The new owner, a firm named Emporia III, was eventually identified as a subsidiary of Water Asset Management, one of several water-focused investment groups, and for many observers, the most deplorable water villain since John Huston’s menacing turn as Chinatown’s Noah Cross. “They went out there over a period of years and bought up individual farms under different names, different corporations, which all interestingly enough have the same email address in New York City,” Babbitt explained.Now, the company is banking on a legislative change that will allow it to sell off the water to the highest bidder, most likely property developers eager to further expand the exurbs around Phoenix. Water Asset Management declined several interview requests, but in a panel discussion at a recent Goldman Sachs forum, Diserio outlined his company’s strategy. “There’s a substantial arbitrage between a molecule that is regulated or allowed to only be used for agricultural consumption,” he said, “and then having regulatory rules that also allow for municipal and industrial consumption of that molecule.”“What they talked about doing in 1991, you’re seeing it now come into fruition,” said Holly Irwin, a La Paz County supervisor who’s been fighting to protect rural aquifers since watching a similar dynamic play out in the adjacent Harquahala Basin. In that case, the town of Buckeye, a fast-growing municipality west of Phoenix, purchased a single acre of land in the basin for $80 million, which will entitle it to nearly 6,000 acre-feet of water per year—enough to more than double Buckeye’s current population of 125,000.Plans call for the area to eventually house well over one million people, according to Mayor Eric Orsborn. Meanwhile, communities in the designated transportation zones look on in dismay as the water they rely on disappears from under their feet. “It’s not fair to take water to allow another area to grow when you’re killing off a community that is reliant on that natural resource,” Irwin said.Gary Saiter of Wenden agreed. “Frankly, I don’t care if Buckeye continues to grow or not. Does it have the resources to do it without damaging other parts of the state? No, they don’t. We have to give up our assets and potentially our way of life just so Buckeye or whoever can grow. Morally, I find that reprehensible. Why are they better than us?” Legislation allowing Water Asset Management to spirit McMullen water out of the county recently passed out of committee. Should it become law, it will greatly accelerate what is already an existential crisis for Wenden. “It’s a train coming down the track,” Saiter said. “I mean, it’s out there a ways, but it’s coming.”In terms of water, “Arizona’s like living on Mars, OK?” Alexander Kolodin told me, sitting in the modest, comedically cluttered office of his Phoenix law practice, an ADHD fever dream of half-empty soda cups and Jenga-like towers of legal briefs. An intense, wiry election-law attorney, Kolodin currently serves in the Arizona statehouse, representing the affluent golf mecca of Scottsdale, long a conservative stronghold. “I like to say we censured the FBI before it was cool,” he said.Kolodin, who is running for secretary of state, is perhaps best known for his supporting role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. (He was the local attorney who filed Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuit alleging massive election fraud.) Admonished by the State Bar in 2023 after a disciplinary panel held that he had “violated his duty to the legal profession, the legal system, and the public,” he agreed to take a series of ethics classes.Clad in a dark blue suit with a red tie, Kolodin spoke emphatically and at a fast clip. The Turning Point USA annual conference was underway at the nearby Convention Center, and he was hoping to put in an appearance. (Asked about the AK-47 resting a few quick steps from his office chair, he explained, “after Charlie Kirk got assassinated, I’m not taking any chances.”)Since winning his first primary in 2023, Kolodin has steeped himself in the nuances of water policy. “I realized that we were headed for a pretty bad situation, and I wanted to be able to do something about it,” he told me. And he thinks he has a solution to the problem. “The actual water crisis,” he said, “is the red tape.”Under Kolodin’s scheme, the license to pump water—for instance, to irrigate one’s farmland—would be converted into property that could then be sold to someone else. Instead of the guy with the longest straw being able to slurp up his neighbors’ water, rights would be “correlative,” with each party entitled only to the percentage of the basin corresponding to his or her sliver of acreage above.“You can farm it, you can blast it off to the moon, you can sell it, you can lease it, whatever you want to do,” Kolodin explained. “But once that water is gone, it’s gone. If I pump it all out next year, my land becomes effectively worthless, and so I’ve got an incentive to slow down. But in our current system, I have an incentive to use every drop of water that I am legally allowed to pump. Why? Because my neighbor’s got the same incentive. So either I use it or he uses it, which means you’ve actually created a situation where everybody is competing to pump the aquifer dry.”While studying law at the University of Pennsylvania, Kolodin was a Reagan Fellow with the Goldwater Institute, and, like any good libertarian, he deplores most regulation. “It’s not for the government to come in and say, ‘Your use bad, your use good,’ right?’ This is this kind of Central Planning mentality that’s fucked our state, frankly. With my solution, it’s win-win. If I’m a developer, I can come along and make an offer to somebody who has an agricultural operation, maybe for part of the water, maybe for all the water, whatever. I think what would happen is that the water would flow to where it was most needed and most useful to the largest number of people.”One might imagine such thinking would appeal to speculators like the team at Water Asset Management, but Kolodin considers them his toughest opponents. By his reckoning, the last thing the investors want is more water on the market, as it would instantly devalue their primary asset. “If you can keep the rest of the state out of a market-based system, these guys get to name their price,” he said. “The few corporations who hold Arizona’s lifeline, this is the biggest lie that they tell—that we have to protect the public from the market, when in fact the market would protect the public from them.”Nonetheless, he thinks the demonization of the company and others like it is overblown. “They’re not evil, right? They’re rational actors responding to incentives,” he explained. “A rational actor is interested in maximizing profit. He looks at a restricted supply of transferable water rights in a state stricken by drought, and goes, ‘Shit, that’s the biggest no-brainer investment in the history of Earth! Of course, I’m going to try to corner that market with my buddies....’ Arizona should be concerned less about rational actors doing what rational actors do than, ‘Hey, why did our elected officials create the environment for those rational actors to monopolize the water that my city depends on?’”Of course, adopting Kolodin’s scheme would do little to solve the underlying problem—less water to go around with every passing year, due in large part to the wanton defilement of the atmosphere. “Personally, I have no idea about climate change,” Kolodin said. “I don’t know if it’s real, not real, what’s the magnitude. Because I’m not a climate scientist, and I don’t trust the people who are. The relevant thing for policymaking in this state is that we have lower flows on the Colorado. That could stop next year; it could stop in a hundred years. What a prudent person does in that situation is say, ‘I want the state to be ready for the worst-case scenario.’ The second people start going, climate change, climate change, climate change, now it’s politicized.”Whether the problem is man-made or not, he figures, his free-market approach would at least impose some fairness, discipline, and rationality on a system that has long been dangerously short on all three. “The farmer loses nothing, gains a potentially valuable right,” he said. “The cities gain an alternative source of water. And it’s good for the aquifer, because pumping is reduced. You would think that would be an easy sell, right? Except that a lot of people make money off of the scarcity.”His only goal, he said, is to protect his constituents and, ultimately, his state. “I want to make sure that Arizonans enjoy the things that we got to grow up with—being able to eat a good steak, having a swimming pool in the backyard, and having grass in the local park. I mean, this is my home.”Still, he knows it’s a hard sell. Water is hardly the only precondition for human survival, but we tend to place it in a unique category, a tendency University of North Carolina professor of environmental sciences Dale Whittington attributes to “ancient instincts” acquired during our hunter-gatherer past and best discarded. “People always say, ‘Water is life,’” Kolodin observed, “but that does not mean that it’s immune from the economic laws that govern every other good and service. The market always gets the last word.” Paraphrasing Ayn Rand, he added, “You can avoid reality, but not the consequences of ignoring reality.”Given my enduring belief in the legitimacy of the 2020 election, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with aspects of Kolodin’s reasoning. But numerous water policy experts I spoke to offered similar views. Much as we recoil at the idea of water as a commodity with a particular value, most of us pay real money to a municipal water utility, after all. Scarcity will demand difficult compromises among competing parties. Assigning an economic value to this substance—something markets excel at—is not a bad first step in deciding how best to use it.Besides, Zetland explained, it’s not as if our current approach to water management is even remotely fair. “The alternatives to a market are essentially lawyers, best friends, back-scratching, theft, almost anything you can think of,” he said. Better to let the water flow toward its most valuable uses, agreed Fleck, director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program and co-author of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River. “If you look at it in purely market-good terms—the value of water in an urban setting versus the economic productivity of that water on an alfalfa field—there’s just no comparison,” he said, adding that residential uses are “orders of magnitude more valuable. So what the pure market economists would say is, ‘Well, let’s set up a system where transactions could move a good from low value to high value uses, and that generates net societal value.’”For Babbitt, who has spent more than half a century grappling with the issue of just who gets water in Arizona and under what terms, the idea sounds OK in theory, but he doubts it could actually be implemented. “Where you gotta be realistic is, there is no way of undoing a hundred years of history and moving into a free market,” he said. “It’s all kind of abstract, because you couldn’t unwind all the laws and stuff.”It certainly isn’t easy. For years, the only nation in the world to implement a genuine market-based system of freshwater rights was Chile—and it took a CIA-backed military junta to make it happen. But in 2007, Australia, which had been experimenting with similar designs on a much smaller scale for years, created a national water market of its own. The catalyst was the so-called Millennium Drought, which began in the mid-1990s and then got worse, particularly in the Murray-Darling River Basin, a key agricultural center. By around 2001, the country was nearing a state of crisis. “We’d got to the stage that, actually, the River Murray was not flowing,” Mike Young, an economist and water policy expert at the University of Adelaide, recalled. “There were boats lying everywhere on their sides.”Young was one of the architects of the new cap-and-trade water regime, under which existing rights to water from an aquifer or river catchment were converted to an “entitlement,” a percentage share of what’s available at a given time. The system allowed corporate and individual rights-holders to log into special accounts on “water exchange platforms” and view their holdings—the monetary value fluctuating day by day—as easily as checking an investment portfolio. They could then sell their entitlements or lease their annual allotments, in whatever amounts they chose, with the click of a mouse. Or they could use them.Many chose to simply sit on them. “The prices went up, because suddenly you could save water,” Young said, “and that was the right thing to do.” The system made water rights nearly as fungible as water itself. One of the more popular aspects of the plan, Young said, was the opportunity to use water as a form of collateral. “A farmer whose shares had gone up in value”—and they did, in some cases by 20 percent per year—“suddenly had a new asset. So if they wanted to make a big investment, new irrigation system, a new tractor, they just borrowed the money against the water because it was so secure.”Now, in years of scarcity, Australia’s water prices spike, prompting farmers to fallow their fields and unload their allotments, thereby surviving downturns that might otherwise force them out of business. Much of that water is purchased by producers of higher value crops such as wine grapes and nuts. “Australia now has an almond industry which is almost as big as America’s,” Young enthused, noting that he and his wife are big fans of the famously water-intensive crop.Australia’s new water scheme was far from perfect, however. One wrinkle involved the way shares were granted. Aboriginal groups that had never received their due once again felt shortchanged when the government opted to divide up shares based on preexisting rights. “A lot of people argued that it should be done as if we’re gonna make everything fairer at the same time,” Young allowed, while insisting that doing so would have probably tanked the entire project. “Soon as you start playing that game, you end up in strife.” The government has recently begun buying up shares to compensate Indigenous communities.Other issues have emerged. In 2017, an explosive documentary revealed the extent to which some large operations were gaming the system—quietly extracting water to which they had no claim, sometimes by tampering with monitoring equipment. The boldest of them created massive storage pools and pumped them full of river water, often illegally, to the dismay of local residents.And an extensive government inquiry released in 2021 found “scant rules governing the conduct of market participants, and no particular body to oversee trading activities, undermining confidence in fair and efficient markets.” The report called for stricter regulation, a mandatory code of conduct for water brokers, and more transparency around trading data. A special police force has been empowered to uncover wrongdoing and hold water thieves accountable.Young has heard the criticism, which he termed “people grizzling and complaining,” but said he considered it a natural part of a radical transition. “The only thing you know with certainty is there’s going to be a need for adjustment,” he said. “Australia actually, I think, has done an incredible job. It’s very close to perfect.”One chilly winter day in the early 1990s, a political science professor at the University of Indiana found herself far from home, on the banks of the Indrawati River in Bahunepati, Nepal. Doffing her shoes and rolling up her trousers, she stepped into the frigid current and began to wade across. Elinor Ostrom was perhaps more accustomed to academic settings—she would go on to become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics—but her ideas were based on concrete, real-world evidence. On the far side of the river, an hour’s walk uphill, lay the Majha Kulo Irrigation System, one of more than 100 “farmer-managed” water projects she and her colleagues would study and catalog as part of an elaborate research project. Ostrom believed that only by talking to the farmers themselves could she truly begin to understand how scarce resources were collectively managed for the mutual benefit of participants.Prior to Ostrom’s work, conventional wisdom held that such resources would inevitably come to ruin due to the innate selfishness of the human species. This notion had been popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin, whose influential essay lamenting the “Tragedy of the Commons” appeared in 1968.While Hardin’s formulation remains popular—I heard the phrase used several times at the CRWUA conference—his fierce opposition to immigration and advocacy of eugenics, among other racist obsessions, have rightly cast a shadow over his legacy. But the strongest refutation of his hypothesis came from Ostrom, who demonstrated through her fieldwork that, all over the world, societies do in fact manage commons, be they fisheries, pastures, forests, waterways, or farmland, for their collective benefit.Ostrom was no credulous utopian. She noted that certain factors made such systems more effective—among them, the direct participation of stakeholders in management, infrastructure maintenance, rulemaking, and enforcement. Her studies of irrigation systems showed that those overseen by the farmers whose livelihoods depended on them, as opposed to government agencies or NGOs, produced markedly better results.There are lessons here for those working to allocate water in an era of ever-increasing scarcity. For one thing, resources operated on a small scale tend to be better managed, suggesting that a system as vast as the Colorado River Basin is best approached as a collection of mini-systems, overseen by groups of stakeholders who share responsibility for stewarding their allotments, but who also have meaningful input into systemwide decision-making. As for free-market approaches like the one proposed by Kolodin, they are most successful when the parties doing the buying and selling actually use the water. Australia’s decision to open its market to any armchair trader looking to turn a profit—while in theory adding a measure of liquidity—tended to naturally erode the sense of community interest such frameworks require.Perhaps more important is an acknowledgment that not every party with a meaningful stake in this most precious of all planetary resources can participate in a market. While experiments like those undertaken in Chile and Australia can be credited with boosting GDP and channeling water to the “highest and best use,” such uses are inevitably defined in economic terms. The value of a flourishing ecosystem, a thriving watershed, a healthy river, or an ancient aquifer is not so easily plugged into an Excel spreadsheet. Certainly, there’s a commercial rationale for producing high-end wines, “flavor forward” almonds, pima cotton, premium ice cream, and tens of thousands of pristine new Spanish-style ranch homes in the desert. But a market that funnels all available water toward those ends would not in fact be operating to our collective benefit—whatever the market signals indicate.Certainly, there’s a commercial rationale for producing pima cotton, premium ice cream, and tens of thousands of pristine new homes in the desert. But a market that funnels all available water toward those ends would not be operating to our collective benefit.Zetland considers Ostrom his “intellectual godmother,” and he’s done a lot of thinking about how to synthesize her work with the laws of supply and demand. His conclusion? Markets can indeed provide an answer to our water woes, but only a partial one.Economic theory defines goods as either excludable (something that can be privately owned) or non-excludable (things we share). Water falls into both categories—you can buy a bottle of Evian but not the snowpack on Pikes Peak. If you rely solely on a market to allocate a non-excludable good, for instance, the contents of a river or ancient aquifer, he said, “You’re fucked. It’s not gonna go well.” Zetland points to Chile, where property rights remain sacrosanct. “They forgot to set aside water for the environment,” he noted. “And what that meant is that everybody, all the mining companies, and the cities, and the farmers, had very good access to water rights, and they use water very efficiently. But there was literally no space for the environment.”Zetland suggests we think of two distinct categories: social water and economic water. Our first priority must be setting aside sufficient supplies to sustain life in its varied forms. “Whatever’s left over is economic—let the market roar,” he said.As of Valentine’s Day, negotiations between the Upper and Lower Basin states of the Colorado River remained deadlocked, and reports suggested that the Trump administration would unilaterally impose a solution, likely setting up a protracted legal battle at a time when the river and those who rely on it can ill afford one. It didn’t help that, days before, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gleefully announced that the United States would essentially do everything in its power to devastate the planet’s ecosystem—a poignant act of charity on behalf of a handful of coal and oil executives, many of whom also happen to be big Trump donors.Whatever approach we land on for navigating our new era of water bankruptcy, the GOP’s craven and unconscionable indulgence of the fossil fuel industry is guaranteed to make the crisis much, much worse. But “normal folks don’t care, as long as water’s coming out of the tap,” Zetland said. “They don’t notice the environment dying. The businesspeople just keep their heads down and keep pumping water. The government is like, ‘Kick it down the road.’”Short of a radical rethinking of our relationship to the environment that sustains us, he added, “People are just going to keep watching the water going down the drain. And it’s gone.”
Watching Hoppers With My Kid Was Moving—and Uncomfortable
Hoppers, Pixar’s latest feature film, opens with a flashback. Mabel, who will grow up to be our teenage protagonist—a skateboard-riding environmentalist staging one-woman protests in defense of local wildlife—is just a child, staring at her classroom terrarium, home to a much-poked and prodded turtle. She waits until the recess bell rings and her classmates sprint outside before pulling the turtle out of the tank and stowing it carefully in her backpack. Soon, she’s cramming the backpack with every critter in the building—a guinea pig, birds, mice, a snake—and making a run for freedom. But the heist comes to an ignominious end when Mabel is intercepted, and we see on her face—as she’s reprimanded by teachers and parents—a deep sense of anger and sadness, not just that her jailbreak was foiled but that she’s the only one who sees the need for a jailbreak at all. Why don’t any of her classmates, her teachers, or her parents give a damn? The lonesomeness of Mabel’s fight for animals remains a central theme in Hoppers. We see it again immediately upon cutting to the present day, when Mabel stands alone in front of a demolition crew, trying to stop the bulldozing of a wooded glade—her childhood haven—that the town mayor, Jerry, wants to turn into a new expressway, “getting you where you need to go up to four minutes faster.” Mayor Jerry tells Mabel that she’s the only one who wants to save the glade, whereas everyone in town wants the highway. To prove him wrong, Mabel launches a petition drive, which leads to a montage of doors getting slammed in her face—once more, it seems like Mabel is the only one who cares.After that, the story becomes increasingly zany, as Mabel discovers an experimental “hopper” technology that allows her to Avatar herself into a lifelike beaver robot and set off on a journey to recruit real beavers to return to the glade (since beavers can bring back the wetlands that might create a permitting obstacle to Mayor Jerry’s overpass plans—because, yes, this Pixar movie has a distinctly anti–abundance bro sensibility).But throughout these madcap adventures, the film reiterates that taking the plight of nonhuman animals seriously can be a lonely endeavor. In one moment of despair, Mabel turns to a beaver she has befriended, and cries, “Why doesn’t anyone else care?” Watching this movie with my 5-year-old son beside me was a peculiar emotional experience. He is a committed vegetarian, and sometimes—particularly when he sees people he loves, like his cousins or grandparents, eating meat—he’ll get sad or frustrated, unable to wrap his head around how people he knows to be good could be so unconcerned about the suffering of other living creatures. But for the most part, he still lives in a world where feeling empathy and compassion for nonhumans is the norm. It’s almost a universal truth that kids love animals, and this fondness is generally encouraged. Until, at some point, it’s not; at some point, we become adults, and adults are supposed to put aside childish preoccupations with animals and center our worldview on people. Understanding humans as the only beings whose welfare truly matters is practically a marker of one’s maturity. And to resist this dominant perspective is to invite ridicule.Anyone who’s spent time as a vegetarian or vegan knows a bit about that ridicule. The internet is full of articles with headlines like “Why do people hate vegans?” This animus isn’t just anecdotal—a peer-reviewed study from 2015 found that omnivores evaluated vegetarians and vegans more negatively than people with other dietary restrictions, with those motivated by animal rights or environmental concerns treated particularly poorly. And new versions of this scorn are regularly evolving, perhaps the most recent iteration coming from the billionaire funders and millionaire pundits behind the abundance movement, who have endeavored to reframe environmentalists—not oligarchs or fascists, but rather people like Mabel, fighting to protect their local glades from expressways—as the source of all society’s ills.Of course, there have been valid reasons to criticize the environmental movement over the years, not least the white supremacy of a number of its early founders. And given that our world is overflowing with more human suffering than any one mind could ever hope to get a grip on, it’s a completely reasonable choice to limit one’s empathic focus to our species.But that doesn’t explain why people so frequently treat the destruction of nature and the suffering of animals as undeserving of legitimate concern. If misery and loss are bad, then these are among the greatest catastrophes taking place today. Around 10 billion chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs are slaughtered in the United States every year. Animals that research suggests are just as smart as the dogs and cats we adore, and just as capable of joy and affection and sadness and suffering, are subjected to the most cruel, barbaric, would-get-you-immediately-arrested-for-animal-abuse conditions that you can possibly imagine (though I suspect many of us are literally not capable of imagining the actual horrors of this factory-farmed existence).Meanwhile, we are rapidly turning the rest of our planet—to our current knowledge, the most uniquely precious place in the entire universe—into a degraded wasteland. The statistics can feel somewhat numbing. Humanity has caused the loss of 85 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants. Since 1970, North America’s wild bird population has fallen by three billion. In that same time, human activities have significantly altered 75 percent of the ice-free land surface on the planet, and destroyed over 85 percent of the world’s wetlands. When I watch Planet Earth or other nature documentaries with my son, he is shown a world teeming with wildlife. But in reality, the animals these shows depict in their beautiful diversity are marginalized exceptions to what our planet has become. Humans and our miserable livestock now account for more than 96 percent of all mammal biomass on earth. Every other mammal—every whale, big cat, moose, beaver, monkey, kangaroo, mouse, elephant, deer, fox, all of them—in combination adds up to just 4 percent.Indeed, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in earth’s history. Every single day, species that have been evolving and adapting and surviving for millions or tens of millions, or in some cases hundreds of millions, of years are being brought to an abrupt and inescapably permanent end—life forms that will never again be seen in the universe—because of us. My son, who loves dinosaurs as much as he loves all other animals, will sometimes get sad thinking about the asteroid that caused the fifth mass extinction event 66 million years ago. This was the single most catastrophic moment in our planet’s history from a biological perspective—every nonavian dinosaur lineage wiped out, and countless other species too, so that for millions of years afterward, earth was a barren world of small and monotonously similar creatures. I’m still never quite sure how to communicate to my son that we are creating, of our own free will, a comparable disaster today.And yet, this almost incomprehensible tragedy is barely discussed—even by people like me. There’s no crisis in the world that causes me as much existential anguish as this one, and yet I barely ever speak about it, post about it, write about it. I write about climate change, but climate—while it’s a major cause of biodiversity loss—is a fundamentally human story; it’s our civilization that is at risk of collapsing due to climate change, which has driven nearly every civilizational collapse in human history. The breakdown of global ecological systems and the mass suffering of animals are less human-centered problems, which is why it almost feels embarrassing to take these desperately urgent crises seriously. In most contexts, doing so is a lonely affair.So it’s pretty remarkable that Hoppers—a movie about a young woman who takes the natural world as seriously as it deserves to be taken, while grappling with the heartache and fury she feels toward everyone around her who couldn’t care less—has been for two weekends in a row the top film virtually everywhere on the planet, with a global box office take of $165 million so far. That’s a lot of people who have watched and enjoyed this story, and—perhaps, to some small degree—internalized some of its themes. In a moment when good news can feel hard to come by, that feels worth celebrating.When we got home from our screening, my wife, who hadn’t joined us at the theater, asked our son what the movie was about. He said it was about “believing.” A bit of a head-scratcher, that answer—there’s not really any explicit discussion of believing in Hoppers; no scenes where Tinkerbell is brought back to life through the power of belief. And I couldn’t get the kid to expand on his initial response, which was open-ended enough to allow an essay-writer to layer all sorts of profound meanings on top. He’s five—5-year-olds say weird things all the time. But I can’t help but give his response my own spin. After watching this movie, and seeing the world’s response to it, what I am choosing to believe is that there are a lot of us who care about the nonhuman world. If we all just had the courage to be as loud and proud about that belief as Mabel, maybe this fight wouldn’t have to be so lonely.
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