A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

We’re all going to be better off with a consensus agreement amongst the states. We are dealing with a diminishing water supply, and that is just the world we live in today, and it is going to require new ways of managing this river, and we are all in this together. There is no water user in this basin who will remain unaffected, whether they are required to take a shortage or whether the snow simply doesn’t arrive on the mountain that supplies their local reservoir. We are all going to have to figure out how to use less water in the future.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got a great guest on the program, Jennifer Pitt from the National Audubon Society, aka Audubon, and Jennifer, thank you for joining the show.

Thanks for having me.

Well, you have been with the Audubon Society for a number of years and working on it. A lot of different things, I think, primarily on the Colorado River Basin and the work that you’ve done there. Yeah, just kind of like to always back up to the beginning and say, Hey, what was the path that led you to this environmental, you know, way of life that you’re living?

I actually started working in the Colorado River Basin more than 25 years ago for a different national environmental organization. And I at the time, I was recruited from the East Coast, having worked in DC for a little while on river management issues from a national perspective, for the federal government, I am really happy that I found my way into nonprofit advocacy, and really happy that I found my way to the Colorado River a little bit serendipitously, but I’ve stuck with it for a really long time. So to me, that says it’s been a good fit.

So did you grow up back East? Or where were you from originally?

I grew up on the banks of the Hudson River, and I actually went to elementary school at a time when Pete Seeger was sailing his clear water sloop up and down the Hudson working on getting PCBs out of the river. So I think I was exposed to advocacy for rivers at an early age.

Okay. Well, yeah, I mean, that was back when the country seemed to be united upon the desire to clean up our our waterways and clean up our air from all the pollution that had been dumped for decades and decades now, you know, tell us kind of what your story was, in terms of you went to Harvard and got A master’s in Environmental Science and Policy, and you also went to Yale, what, what drove you to, to get involved in in those areas, you know, before you were in college, I assume.

And I think I figured it out in a long process through school and after, back when I went to undergrad, there was not a clear path to do any kind of environmental studies major. So I ended up studying history and literature of the United States. And I think if anything, that just made me attuned to the stories we tell about our past and our future and how we live, and that that has come in that ability to focus on narrative as a way to Understand a very complex arena and complex array of facts has come in handy.

But if I think back, maybe the one class I took that was most influential was vernacular history of the vernacular landscape. The shorthand for that class was gas stations. But the thought was that there were ways that the United States was developed that had an impact on our landscape that was perhaps not deliberate, but in fact, is very impactful, and it made me start looking at the land. And landscapes in a very different way than I had before, and that got me interested in thinking about what our footprint is.

Yeah, it’s kind of fascinating. I mean, my uncle was a poet, and he taught literature at University of Colorado, and he he was very much a naturalist. Reg sonner, and I don’t know if you’ve seen any of his work, but you know, he was very much a Colorado and and, and a lot of his work is really looking at the natural world and describing it and seeing the wonder in it. And I think that is an important part of teaching people to go look around, look at this amazing world that we live in.

I think when you start looking and pay attention, there’s a lot to learn, and I wish more of us would do that. One, one, really, one part of this career path has been the opportunity to live in the state of Colorado, and it’s given me plenty of opportunity to get outside and I keep my eyes open.

Yeah, well, it’s an amazing state. I was there for the first time since I was like seven years old, to see a friend’s wedding, and drove from Boulder to to Aspen, and the entire ride of whatever it was, 200 plus miles, was just gorgeous. The entire stretch it was it’s pretty amazing to have a state where you can go 200 miles and it just the entire piece was just unbelievable.

It is unbelievable. And I would mention that right now, if you were to do that drive, or if I were to do that drive, knowing what it normally looks like in January, if I were to do that drive today, I think I would be pretty surprised by what I saw, because we’re having an extraordinarily dry and warm winter with a really below average snow pack. So I just yeah, I’ve been thinking about the mountains a lot. That’s the snow pack. Here is our reservoir of water supply for the entire Colorado River Basin, and it’s not looking good this year.

Well, I think we’re seeing kind of the same thing down here in Southern California, talking to a friend, and there’s a Big Bear Mountain maybe 60 miles east of LA and and I was saying, yeah, they should probably be having some snow up there. It’s it’s rained here, but as they reminded me, yeah, they just had mudslides there because none of it stuck. It was all rain. So I kind of want to, like, move to a different area of the world, but then refocus back in Colorado and the Colorado River Basin.

We see some stories coming out of Iran recently, where they’re talking about they mismanaged the water so badly they might have to evacuate the city of Tehran, which is like 15 million people. You know, is it possible that we could mismanage our water to that extent? And what is being done to, kind of, you know, not go in that direction, but are there forces at work that are just more powerful than us, we humans, to to reverse the course of what could be really existential climate change?

It’s a great question in the way I think about it, those kind of risks tend to be the intersection of both unusually dry conditions, extended droughts, but also failures of governance. Typically, society sets up management over water supplies, and certainly in the Colorado River Basin, we’ve set up a ton of infrastructure that the ability of our reservoirs to store water is four times greater than the historic annual average flow of the Colorado River, which is one of the biggest storage to flow ratios of a river system anywhere. Unfortunately, today, those reservoirs sit at about two thirds empty. They were full 20 years ago.

The issue that you mentioned. Are possibly unfolding in Iran is something that we’ve also heard as a worry at times in South Africa and in other places around the world. It’s been described as a day zero, where all of a sudden your reservoir, that’s your water supply for a large population can’t, you know, is empty and typically, particularly in a Colorado River Basin, where our storage is so much larger than the annual water supply. We started with an incredibly we started 2025, years ago, with full reservoirs, with basically a robustly full bank account.

And our governance thus far has allowed those reservoirs to get down to 30% they’re not, they’re not on, you know, in the next year, I don’t think we have a risk of a day zero where water can’t come out of the dams, but what we need for the future is rules that allow the system operators, the federal dam operators, certainty of how to operate and how to allocate shortages to ensure that we don’t ever get there, and that’s what is so urgently important about a rulemaking process that has been underway for a few years now to ensure that There are rules in place for 2027, and beyond.

The existing agreements for how to handle Colorado River water shortages were put in place back that basic the first part of it put in place back in 2007 it’s been amended a few times with additional agreements, but they all effectively sunset at the end of this year, and so we are urgently in need of some new guidelines to make sure that we don’t run the risk of The kind of catastrophic water shortage that you’re describing.

Well in terms of cities that are experiencing water shortages, what, from what I’ve heard, like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Southern Utah, maybe even northern Utah, with the Great Salt Lake kind of disappearing. Things of this nature seem pretty substantial. And then we have farmers that are being fed water, that are are growing crops in areas that really probably were never meant to grow the types of crops that they’re growing. And it just doesn’t seem to make much sense to me that that we’re doing that well,

let me say this, we do all need food and fiber. We wear clothes that are made out of things that were grown, and we certainly eat things that farmers produce. It is true that the Colorado River water, about 80% of it is used in irrigated agriculture, and particularly in the southern portions of the Colorado River Basin, in southern Arizona, Southern California and Northwestern Mexico, those are some of the most productive farmlands anywhere in North America, with consistent particularly in the wintertime, with a consistent warm temperatures and sunshine and a reliable water supply thus far coming from those reservoirs, with Colorado River water producing the vast majority of our North American vegetables and salads in the middle of the winter, when the rest of the country, when In the rest of North America, is often too cold, or in most places, too cold, to produce it.

That said, I’m not going to argue that there’s no efficient, additional efficiency that can be reached in irrigated agriculture. And I also think that in this moment of declining water supply in the Colorado River, where we know that there’s not enough water to sustain all the water uses that have been developed in the over the last century, that something’s got to get. Of and clearly, those of us who are Colorado River water users in cities or, you know, communities, we can all do better job, but doing a better job on 20% of the water supply or 15% of the water supply is only going to yield so much. So it’s clear that some reductions in irrigated agriculture are inevitable going forward.

And I think it’s most likely that, at least from an economic perspective, the you know, the most logical place for some of the water use reductions to take place would be in summer crops that are taking a lot of water because it’s so hot in the desert, in the Sonoran desert and the Mojave Desert, and also in crops that are typically animal feed. So it is still part of our food supply, but it’s pretty you know, it’s crops that are being used to feed animals for either meat production or dairy production.

And the tricky thing about that is that the way water is managed in the western United States is under a priority system, and those farmers, regardless of what they’re growing, tend to have the most senior water rates because they are the first ones to have arrived in this region of the country and developed water under our current water allocation or water Rate systems. So in order for them to be incentivized to use less water, even in the summertime, growing a crop that is not their most profitable, somebody has to, typically pay them to do that. Our current legal framework does not support taking water away from them, because it’s their property, right, and it’s a senior water, right? So they

What about buying them out? What about saying, hey, you know, you’ve, you’ve got this water, right? We’re going to eminent domain it, and we’re going to pay you something for it. We’re not going to give you zero. But, and who knows, maybe they’ll become billionaires, but maybe we’re better off with having some billionaire farmers than having 80% of our water used in ways that are less than optimal.

I think that I haven’t seen a state legislature want to go to eminent domain to take water away from farmers. But I have seen, over the last decade plus quite a few programs that are paying offering to pay farmers, involuntary transactions, sometimes permanent and durable and sometimes temporary and renewable to reduce their water uses. And that has typically been more politically viable because, as you know, not you know, I don’t know about in the water context, but I would assume it would be similar to the land context, nobody is really that wildly excited to be told we’ll pay you, but you must give up your land to eminent domain.

So I would assume the same about water. But I think these voluntary programs have proven a proven track record. So there, are models where investment is allowing farmers to continue farming, but perhaps having invested in their irrigation infrastructure more efficiently. And there are also models where farmers are, for instance, not irrigating their third cutting of hay in the summertime, and instead just following for, you know, partial season fallowing. So they’re still operating, and they’re still keeping in production.

And I will say that that is important from the, you know, from the perspective of the entire Colorado River Basin, or the even the think the American Southwest, that economic impact, say, of of a partial season following might be very small at the scale of the region, but at the scale of the community where that economic activity is taking place. And if you think about, for instance, county sales tax revenues that can begin to add up and have a real impact, and we don’t want to undermine the economic stability of rural communities. So it is important to think about how these. Programs play out both at the very local level as well as at the basin wide level. But you come back to the basic facts that our water supply is shrinking, and we do have to figure out how to use less water, right?

My understanding is some of those farmers, kind of at the Mexican border or the US side, are using have water rights that exceed the entire state of Arizona and Utah combined. So they have and possibly Nevada. I mean, it was like an incredible amount of water rights for this group of small group of farmers, and yes, food supply is important, but my understanding is some of them, as you said, are growing things like alfalfa for export. So it’s not even stuff that we’re even using in the US that, to me, is looks like Insanity, but I think what you’ll see is a real preference in the water management community, at the local, state and federal level, for voluntary programs that incentivize reductions in those uses.

And I think in a sort of rational economic framework, those lower value. And I, when I say value, I just mean economic returns like those would be the crops that a farmer would be most likely to take out, but on a voluntary basis, rather than seeing it imposed in a regulatory team, one has to see the cost beyond just the farmers in terms of the ecosystem and things like that. That that’s the problem with our whole kind of environmental system of laws, is that we haven’t valued things other than pure dollar transactions, and what’s the cost of the community health wise?

And, you know, all the other ramifications of destroying an ecosystem just haven’t been a part of our calculus up to this point in time. Are there things that that are being done that put put more variables into the calculus so that we’re getting a better, you know, accounting for lack of a better term.

It is true that there’s no law that protects the Colorado river ecosystem. There are some laws that apply. The Endangered Species Act has been used to help set up habitat replacement programs in both the upper basin and the lower basin. But typically, the kind of work that I do and my colleagues do is really without any kind of legal backstop or framework, but rather is born of us trying to figure out solutions for places where river ecosystem is not doing well to try to improve that situation without legal tools, but rather in cooperation with jurisdictional authorities and water users, basically looking for solutions that align with management, solutions that they see making sense.

And we have had progress. I’m not saying it’s perfect. It’s just what we are able to do. And so that’s how we work. So one example of that is in actually in Mexico, the last 100 miles of the Colorado River have effectively not had the river flowing in it for most of the last half century, and that is regulated under a treaty framework that’s been in place since 1944 and there really wasn’t any provision for water, for the river, for the, you know, all and for every living thing that depends on the river in that delta ecosystem.

And what we were able to do is work with the federal governments of the United States and Mexico, in the context of them themselves, trying to figure out how the two countries should share in shortages, which is a conversation that really got started seriously around 2007 to eventually adopt a binational agreement that brought the two countries together with voluntary commitments to provide some water for the river, as well as some financial resources to help rebuild habitat. And it’s certainly not replacing the 2 million acre Delta habitat or delta ecosystem.

That was lost through the course of the 20th century, but it is allowing some restoration to be put in place. So I think that is the kind of work that we’re able to do without having legal tools to take care of the river, speaking of legal tools, and I’ve talked to some guests about this recently, and and curious as to get your thoughts as to the rights of nature and expanding the rights of nature, to say, the Colorado River, for instance, it seems as though other countries and some parts of the US have extended rights of nature to various habitats. Uh, have any any organizations seriously started that effort along the Colorado River?

It’s interesting that you asked that because there was a tribe called the Colorado River Indian tribes that is located in on the on the river in Arizona and California, that late last year, adopted a resolution in their tribal council When their tribal government giving the Colorado River personhood. So it is something that we have recently seen emerge, and they see that as a tool to enable them to make decisions in their sovereign homeland that help them take care of the river where they are able to so it is something that has recently come into discussion in the Colorado River, but I haven’t heard any states or others working on it. Okay.

Do you think that it could be effective if, say, the state of Colorado had said they declared the Colorado River to have personhood, and, you know, give it protection?

I actually don’t see the state going there, so I’m not going to speculate on whether or not it would be effective. What are water. Water law is a bit of a blood sport in Colorado, so I don’t know if, if, if I think we’ve made significant progress through consensus and collaboration and cooperation. And I think sending management into a framework where we’re relying on the courts is risky for all parties. I’d rather see us work out solutions where we have a little bit, you know, where the experts have a little bit more control over the outcomes. I’m not sure that asking judges to make decisions over issues that at the, you know, at the level of management are pretty technical, necessarily gets us what we want in the end.

Yeah, I could see that, you know, having to work with judges every day. I definitely can see that I’m curious as to, you know, what’s the future of the Colorado River, given that 30% of the res the reservoirs are only 30% full. Have they? Have they been that low in in recent memory, in the last 50 years, 100 years, and what? What are the impacts do you see of climate change on this situation?

It’s a good question. The reservoirs were full. The reservoir systems on the Colorado River were effectively full in 2000 and in the 80s, there were even some flood years where, not withstanding this enormous volume and capacity to store water there were the snow pack was big enough, the reservoirs were full, and there were huge floods on the Lower Colorado River. That hasn’t happened at all over the last 25 years, and in fact, with water uses exceeding the supply. Over these last 25 years, we’ve seen the reservoirs drop to the point where they are today, at about 30% and that does what like I said, we are not at imminent risk. Of a day zero, but we are not far enough away from that that we can ignore the need for reforms and governance. And what we need right now are the seven states that share in the Colorado River, as well as the United States and Mexico, who under the Treaty Framework, also have to have these negotiations.

But starting with the seven states that share the Colorado River, we need them to reach a consensus agreement about how to manage the river that we have today, which is smaller than it was in the 20th century, and projected to get smaller in the future, as warming dries out this landscape and reduces the water supply. We also need, in addition to agreement about how shortages are shared. We need to see more flexibility in how the reservoirs are managed. Those reservoirs are all built based on authorizing laws, and they all have complex rules around how water is released from them, and that has implications for water users, being able to conserve water and store it for use in the future, kind of like a savings account in a bank. And so that kind of flexibility, which can protect reliability of supply for water users, and can protect or optimize how those dams are operated to produce hydropower, and also can be used to modify flows for environmental benefit. That kind of flexibility is going to be needed in the future as we deal with a water supply that is both smaller and more variable than it was historically.

Well, I look at, you know, I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I look at only 30% full. That’s like just a little over one year supply. And if our rainfall fall is diminishing, that’s cutting into it more and more, like we could be way less than one year supply, or close to, you know, day zero, within what period of time could that hit? I mean, what’s realistic or what’s possible, what’s probable? What are the Doom scenarios? Let’s just put it on the table.

I mean, I think there are some real risks that could be faced in a couple of years with that two successive bad snow packs, and it really isn’t looking good this winter, but I will point out that we’ve already seen water users across the Colorado River Basin conserve volumes of water that you know 10 years ago, five years ago, was not thought possible, but particularly in the lower basin in the United States, California and Arizona’s water uses are lower than they’ve been in decades. And that is both thanks, you know, really thanks to sort of voluntary water conservation, in some cases, compensated. In some cases not.

But they are leaving water in the reservoirs beyond even what they are required to do under existing shortage agreements. So they are showing that it is possible what we need now is our framework for the seven states that acknowledges that we can save water and puts that down in a set of rules and a framework that people can rely on for the future to create that stability and reliability that we need for the water supply in the future.

How is the EPA? What’s the EPA is role in negotiating this agreement with the seven states, and what has the EPA done in the last year in Yeah, in relation to this negotiation?

So actually, the federal authority that plays the biggest role on the Colorado River is the US Bureau of Reclamation, and they are the ones who built and manage the big dams on the systems. So they are situated inside of the Department of Interior, and they have been an active participant in. The seven states negotiations, and in fact, just last week, they issued a draft environmental impact statement with analysis of a handful of different operating scenarios that they are considering for operations in the future.

What’s interesting about them is that almost all of them rely on seven states coming to consensus and then participating in the rulemaking to operate with those roles in the future, absent a consensus, the Bureau of Reclamation has very limited authorities, legal authorities to both change how shortages are shared, and also to have provide the kind of flexibility In the reservoirs that I was just speaking of, and they’ve actually described their existing authorities as a bit of a sledgehammer, when what they really need is a scalpel. So they are an active participant, and they are evaluating a host of different ways of managing the reservoirs in the future, but they are really stuck, because, as a federal authority, by themselves, without consensus and cooperation from the seven states, they are limited in what they can do.

So who’s holding up the negotiations? Which of the states are causing more problems.

Say that they’re all involved in it. At this point, the states are effectively divided into two camps. There’s an upper basin that consists of Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, and a lower basin that consists of Arizona, California and Nevada, and they have been grouped that way since 1922 when those seven states came together and signed something called the Colorado River Compact. And there are, it’s a it’s a complicated document. I don’t want to confuse your listeners by trying to explain it, but basically it was written at a time, you know, certainly before climate change and also before a lot of considerations that we have today for river management were broadly held.

So I think we’re in a position where the states in the lower basin and the states in the upper basin today can point to parts of that compact that prove that their perspective on river management and water management and water supply is correct, and the fact that they’re not coming to consensus means that they’re relying a little bit too much on the pieces of that agreement that they read to prove that they’re correct, and not acknowledging sufficiently what the other basin sees as their rights under that compact. And that’s sort of the core of this disagreement?

Well, there’s kind of like a disjointed population disparity here between, say, Wyoming with less than a million people and Nevada, California, Arizona, having, you know, 55 million people, or something like that, and the that is true, and yet, the way Western water law works has to do with these historic agreements and allocations of water, not what your population how your population has grown. So I’m not saying those aren’t relevant. Wyoming have. Wyoming have just as much of a vote as California.

I mean, I don’t know about a vote, but they have water rights. And it doesn’t really matter whether the water is being used it you know, in what sector the water is being used, they have water rights as a state and allocation as a state that are no different from, you know, they’re different in volume, but no different in sort of priority or legal standing as any other state, right?

So we’ve passed the deadline, the November 11 deadline to get this deal done. You know, is there an agreement that’s, you know, walking into place, or the divergent positions? What’s the chances that an agreement is likely over the next six months or year?

Well, that’s the question everybody has. The Department of Interior gave the states a new deadline of February 14, so we’re all kind of sitting at the edge of our seats waiting to see if the states can come up with something by then, although I will say that they’ve been negotiating for about three years in earnest, so I’m not sure that another few weeks makes the big difference, but we are still holding out hope that they can get there, I think, absent agreement at the end of this year, the existing regulations and operating guidelines that are based both on federal regulations as well as interstate agreements all expire, and without those in place, the federal government still has to operate those federal reservoirs. So I would expect that absent a state agreement they are going to be relying on what federal authorities they have, and we’re going to see a lot of dispute around that, because, as I said, it’s sort of a sledgehammer approach where a scalpel is needed.

Are we talking potential water wars in the Western United States, you know, Wyoming and Colorado shutting down the flow of the river downstream too?

Well, they don’t really have the ability to do that physically. However, you could see, you could there’s certainly absent a consensus amongst the states. There is an enormous risk of litigation. And an interesting thing about some lines of litigation is that, because some of those lines go back to that interstate compact, it is considered original jurisdiction litigation, which would take it straight to the Supreme Court. And there is an example of interstate litigation under the Colorado River Compact that was brought in Arizona versus California back in the early 1960s and that’s a case that took more that took many decades to be fully settled.

So I, for 1am, really hopeful that this case doesn’t end up in the Supreme Court, or, for that matter, any other court, as I was explaining earlier, the way that I as an environmental advocate make progress, and have seen things, some things get better on the Colorado River is through working on solutions with different jurisdictions and water users. And I’m worried that in the context of big litigation, there will be a real chill on those kinds of conversations and that kind of work.

Let me ask you, as we wrap up, what do you think people in cities like LA Phoenix, Las Vegas should understand about this moment, and what should they do, if anything?

I think just you know, if they have an opportunity to talk to anybody with influence, to remind that, to remind them that we’re all going to be better off with a consensus agreement amongst the states, and to understand that we are dealing with a diminishing water supply, and that is just the world we live in today, and it is going to require new ways of managing this river, and we are. We are all in this together. There is no water user in this basin who will remain unaffected, whether they are required to take a shortage or whether the snow simply doesn’t arrive on the mountain that supplies their local reservoir. We are all going to have to figure out how to use less water in the future.

Well, a previous guest on the program, Tracy Quinn from Heal the Bay, and I believe she’s also on the Metropolitan Water District Board, which I think is part of managing the water for 18 million people here in Southern California. I’m curious if you two had crossed paths, or how the paths of you know, the Metropolitan Water District getting water from the Colorado River, and the connection of those organizations?

That’s an astute observation. I don’t know Tracy, but I do see connections between Northern California water the Colorado River Basin and even the South Platte River going all the way over to the Mississippi because we have these cities that rely on both Colorado River water supply and other water supplies. In the case, as you mentioned, of Metropolitan Water District in Southern California replying on relying on Northern California water and Colorado River water, and it’s in some ways, been a real advantage for them, and that they can balance those two supplies. And the snow pack in the Sierras is not the same thing as the snow pack in the Rockies, and that’s probably a good thing, because it gives them a little bit better chance to manage the variability in both of those water supplies, but it does mean that they need to be thinking about both of those systems and how they manage the reliability of their water supply.

Well, let me ask you, how many millions of people are relying upon water from the Colorado River to, you know, for their for their drinking water and and, of course, for their food. That’s probably 10 times as many people?

I just, I don’t know about for the food, but as a water supply, it’s somewhere north of 35 million people. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of people. There’s a lot at stake.

Well, Jennifer, great having you on the show. Really appreciate the amazing knowledge that you bring, and everybody should check out the National Audubon Society and give generously to their programs. Obviously, the work that Jennifer’s doing is important for not only the 35 million of us that are drinking that water, but millions more who are eating the food related that are grown from that that water as well. So Jennifer, thanks so much for being on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. And I’ll just add a reminder that it’s all it is all those people, and it is all that agricultural production, and it is also something like 70% of all wildlife in the interior southwestern US that relies on rivers for some point of their life cycle. So really, the natural heritage of the interior West is enormously dependent on this river. That’s what brings me to work every day, and I am really fervently hopeful that we have good solutions going forward. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, Jennifer. To learn more about our work at A Climate Change and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year. Visit alimatechange.com, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.