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Hi, everybody. Cheryl Atkison here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure after hours. Today we're going to talk about something you may not think is going to impact you, but I bet it will. It's America's water wars. Well, I hope you find this week's cover story on Full Measure, which will air Sunday, April 25, to be delightfully original and off narrative. Something that probably most news programs haven't talked about in a long time and maybe you didn't know much about. I certainly didn't before I started covering the story. It has to do with what I call America's water wars. And there are water wars going on across the country. They take a lot of different forms depending on the region that you live in. And for my cover story, I decided to focus on the Colorado river and a particular dispute that's going on centered in Arizona. So let's back up a little bit and give some background because there are a lot of people probably like me who lived in places like the east coast or maybe other places that don't have the same water concerns that they have out west. They have different water concerns, but not the same ones. This is really interesting because this involves the Colorado river, which, as you know, cuts through the Grand Canyon. It spans seven states, and it supposedly provides water to about 40 million people and about five and a half million acres of farmland. To some, this has become as valuable as oil. And all the questions lie in who has the right to use it and to take it, who owns it. This question's gone way back. Early Americans who were settling the west began moving water from the beginning. They had to for mining or farming. And they basically lay the groundwork for the very system that we are using today as far as who has the right to do what with water. In 1922, seven states, the ones where the Colorado river goes through, they signed on to the Colorado River Compact. That's a water sharing agreement that basically divvies up the river's annual flow. And it's my understanding that the federal government let or codified the ability of the states to come up with this agreement. And it basically decided the water has to be shared equally between what it called the upper basin states and the lower basin states. The upper basin states are Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. The lower basin states are California, Arizona, and Nevada. Well, there has been infighting ever since, all kinds of questions and disputes that are settled over time. But one recurring question that keeps coming up is who has the right to move and use the water and where they can move it to. So I consulted an expert on all of this, an attorney named Michael Pierce, to answer some questions. And I started by saying I really thought nobody could own water. This is a natural resource. Does anybody really own the water that's flowing through the land? And Michael Pierce said it's true that in the western United States, the rule has always been you don't own the water. He says, you don't own the molecules of water. You own the right to divert it. You own the right to put it to what's deemed to be beneficial use. And he says as long as you do that, it's like a property right. Michael Pierce, the attorney, represents both the buyer and the seller in one of the most important water disputes going on involving the Colorado River. That's the one I focused on in my story. For full measure, here's what's happening. The owner of farmland in Arizona's Cibola Valley wants to sell the right to transfer water 300 miles through the Central Arizona Project canal to a town called Queen Creek. So, in other words, there's farmland right along the Colorado river in the Cibola Valley, and they want to transfer. They want to sell their right that they have to transfer the water far away to a town that wants to buy it called Queen Creek. According to Michael Pierce, who's representing both the buyer and the seller in this instance, he said, we're talking about way less than 1% of the flow of the river. It's amazing they can measure these things, and especially when it's a thing that's variable from month to month and year to year. He says the Colorado river moves what they call millions of acre feet. And he says the amount that they want to move for the Queen Creek proposal, you wouldn't even be able to notice it. It would have no visible impact at all on the river. So next you may ask, why does Queen Creek want to buy the water? You might guess that it's a place that has no water. Well, that turns out not to be the case. Queen Creek is a quickly expanding suburb of Phoenix. Actually quite beautiful. I think it's considered a very doable, livable place by people maybe who work in the Phoenix area and they want to live outside the city in a place that's very family friendly, low crime, very pretty, and a new community, relatively, in terms of its most recent growth. It's growing fast. People are discovering this place, and it's not seeking the Colorado river water because its own supply is running dry. There's plenty of water they have underneath the ground in Queen Creek. So what is this all about? Well, I spoke to Paul Gardner, who is Queen Creek's utility director, and he explained to me that importing surface water like they want to do from the Colorado river is cheaper than using the city's underground water. So part of the law in Arizona is if you pump out a gallon of water from underground, a gallon has to go back. So how do they accomplish that? Well, there's a district that this community belongs to, for example, called a replenishment district, that puts water back, but they have to pay. The community has to pay the replenishment district to put water back in the ground when they use water. And it can be very costly. So Paul Gardner says the city decided that as a town, they could probably do it more efficiently and cheaply, more cost effectively, and not use up the groundwater if they had control of what the costs were by getting their own water supply, not using all the underground water. So I asked, well, when you're paying to have somebody put the water back in the ground for you, like they have to do now, what does it cost? And he said that throughout the metropolitan area of Phoenix, there are recharge sites, and these are areas that take surface water and put it basically back into these basins and return it to the water aquifer so that you can say you've put back the water that you pumped out and the groundwater is not being used up. Makes it sustainable. As for the calculations as to how much less expensive they think it's going to be to ship it in from the Colorado River 300 miles versus having to pay people to put water back into the ground, gardeners said that if they do nothing at this time on the water supplies, or their groundwater credits, as they call them, that they've acquired, residents will be paying about $15 million additional over the next 30 years. But if they buy this water supply from the Colorado river like they want to do and make some future purchases, they say that will end up saving people tens of millions of dollars as they move forward. So very interesting, right? And if the seller wants to sell as they do and the buyer wants to buy, well, where's the controversy? Because, you know, I'm usually going to do a cover story that handles some kind of controversy. Regina Cobb is an Arizona state representative, and I talked with her to explain where the problem comes in, at least from her view. She's fighting the water transfer in large part, she says, because of who owns the farmland that's selling the water rights. It's a multinational hedge fund. So Regina Cobb, the representative for the state, says this is commoditizing water, picking winners and losers. She says it'll be the first case that water will be transferred from the Kala river internally way into urban Arizona. But really, the hedge fund part of this equation is the main thing she says she objects to. The company is called Greenstone, and they've bought up more than just that farm property in Cibola that wants to transfer the water rights. Which means Cobb is worried that investors who are thirsty for profits will complicate the water wars going on in America, turning water into a commodity where shareholders make money off things like drought and water shortages because they own water rights and they control them. Water is, of course, a scarce commodity in Arizona, so it does become as valuable as oil, Regina Cobb points out. And it's like any other product. She thinks if you start putting it up on the market and treating it like a commodity, letting hedge fund buyers come in, it's going to start going for the highest price. And she thinks companies like Greenstone and other hedge fund groups, when they come in, they're really in it, looking for ways to make money off water for the future. They're not buying farmland up, she says, to farm along the Colorado River. They're looking for ways to commoditize and trade on water. Well, Cobb isn't alone in her objection to this sort of transaction. When the state of Arizona collected written public comments on this transaction, for every one person that said they were for the Queen Creek deal, there were 47 comments opposed. So one to 47, even though Queen Creek argues that the water that it wants to bring in from the Colorado river will go to much better use in their town than back on the farm. And that's part of how decisions are made. Who is putting the water to the most beneficial use, sometimes for the most people. And in the Queen Creek case, the community argues that the water transfer would support over 5,000 homes, 2,700 permanent jobs, and $115 million in annual wages. More on this story right after a short. We are back talking about America's water wars, centered on one landmark dispute in Arizona where a local community outside of Phoenix wants to buy the rights to move water from the Colorado River 300 miles away to where they are so that they don't have to pay to use up the groundwater that's under their town as fast as they otherwise would. I mentioned that when they took public comments on this transaction, there was overwhelming public support against the proposal and the attorney who wants it to go through, he represents both the buyer and the seller, the hedge fund group and the community. Michael Pierce, he says, really the hardest thing to overcome in a proposal like this is it's almost a religious fervor that water should not go from the Colorado river to central Arizona. And he says, really, it's a difficult argument to defeat with logic. But he says, if you look at this objectively, under Arizona water management principles, Queen Creek needs the water, and they need it more than we need alfalfa growing in the Cibola Valley. And so, he says, from a water policy, water management perspective, the water should move well. The Arizona Department of Water Resources agreed. Despite the strong opposition, the department gave the thumbs up to the water transfer last fall. But there's still a final hurdle which is pending, and that's approval from the federal government. I asked the attorney, Michael Pierce, the question that Regina Cobb raised. If this transaction goes through, is there anything that would prevent more private investors from really changing how water rights have been handled all of this time, making water more of a commodity, an investment, and a profit center for investors on Wall Street? And Michael Pierce kind of pooh, poohed that idea, saying that water transfers are not that easy to do. He says he's been doing them for 30 years. It's a very regulated process with tons of hurdles they don't always go through. So he claims that the idea that investors are going to come in and buy up land that has water rights, for example, along the Colorado river, and then turn around quickly and sell them for a fabulous product, he says that's just a myth. And in fact, he says if anybody really thinks they can do that, he would discourage them from trying because he doesn't think it's feasible. But whatever the final decision is, when it comes on Queen Creek, it could help determine whether more international investors choose to dip their toes into America's water wars and change perhaps forever, how our most critical natural resources divvied up. You could see a time, maybe envision a time in 50 years, 30 years, maybe even sooner, if transactions like this continue, where we'll look back and hardly remember a time when water was considered less of a commodity and more of a natural resource. I asked the legislator, Regina Cobb, to look down the road a little bit, and I asked her what she thinks will happen if this water transfer is approved. And she thinks the same company will continue with other pieces of property that they've bought and find buyers for the water rights and commoditize it. She thinks the price of water will become sky high. If that happens, just like you're buying gold or silver or copper and wherever you stand on an issue like this, I think one thing I learned is these kinds of disputes are going to be coming to other parts of the country. In fact, attorney Michael Pierce said of course, that the west is known for being arid and dry, but other parts of the country are seeing other kinds of water problems, problems that you might think they wouldn't have in water rich states like Georgia and Alabama and Florida. But he pointed out there is a dispute over the Chattahoochee, the Apalachicola Rivers because Georgia, he says, wants to dam the river at the headwaters in Georgia and keep the water from flowing down. So there are all kinds of disputes going on and he does think they're going to be more common in the eastern states than they've been in the past. Now, as I'm working on this story, well, lo and behold, some news crosses on Associated Press that says western states including Colorado are preparing for possible first water shortage declaration. This is only going to make the fight worse, it says. The U.S. bureau of Reclamation released 24 month projections this past week forecasting that less Colorado river water will cascade down from the Rocky Mountains through Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Now this story is written a little bit like Inside Baseball. Kind of hard to understand for people who aren't already immersed in this issue. But it says that water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, through which apparently water comes from the Rocky Mountains and into the deserts of the Southwest and the Gulf of California, the water levels are expected to plummet low enough for the federal agency to declare an official shortage for the first time, threatening the supply of Colorado river water that growing cities and farms rely upon, according to this report from ap. The AP report talks a little bit about climate change impacting snowpack flows into the river and its tributaries. I'll go ahead and say it. Although most of the media is not fair on this topic when reporting it, many scientists don't believe there is a man made climate change impact. Others say there is. This is under much debate, but regardless, the story says the agency's models, the federal agency project that this operative Lake Mead will fall below 1075ft for the first time in June 2021. And that's the level that prompts a shortage declaration under agreements negotiated. Remember I told you about the agreement earlier in this podcast under the agreements negotiated by the seven states that rely on the Colorado River. Then after sounding fairly alarming, the story dials back a little bit and says the April projections that are just out do not have a binding impact because the feds regularly issue these long term projections, but they don't use those. They use projections in August to make decisions about how to allocate river water. So maybe the projections will change by August. If not, it means the federal government declares a level one shortage condition and there would be cuts to be implemented in January. How do you cut water usage? I guess they implement all kinds of limits on farmland and residents to make sure they don't use up too much when the water level is low. Now the article says that Arizona, Nevada and Mexico have voluntarily given up water, I guess limited some of their usage under a drought contingency plan for the Colorado river that was signed in 2019. But a shortage declaration would subject some states to their first mandatory reductions and Arizona would stand to lose roughly one third of its supply. A lot of this is no surprise, according to state officials who say it reflects the dry, warm conditions across the Colorado River Basin this year and the impact of a prolonged drought that has been impacting the Colorado river water supply. But here's a nightmare scenario. There is a projection that Lake Mead will drop to a point that they have worried before, according to the article, could threaten electricity generation at Hoover Dam, which is the hydropowered dam that serves millions of customers in Arizona, California, Nevada. So the water situation can affect electricity and power. And that kind of harkens back to other stories that I've been covering on full measure. That said, there is an expectation of power shortages in places across the country, even as we have enjoyed ample production of oil and gas here in this country, there are other things at play that can cause us to be short on power, less water pushing the turbines in the dam. And the AP article says hydropower water power costs substantially less than energy sold on the wholesale electricity market because the government, which maintains the Hoover Dam project, charges customers only for the cost of producing it and maintaining the dam. So you can sure see how one thing leads to another when it comes to water supply and potential commodization of water. Again, you can watch for that on April 25 on full measure on Sunday. It's our cover story. We have some other great, unique original stories as well. The amazing Lisa Fletcher joins us with an interesting consumer story about odometers. There was always the scam you heard about years ago of possibly having the numbers rolled back, the mileage numbers rolled back on a vehicle because it increases the price of a used car quite substantially, makes a difference of thousands of dollars. Well, maybe you thought that the new technology, the way cars work and the way odometers work would kind of rule out or make it much harder to commit fraud. Turns out it might be easier to commit the fraud, sad to say. And Lisa Fletcher is going to tell us how that's done and. And how big a problem it is. I'm also going to update that story I did a couple of months back that exposed how the cdc, Centers for Disease Control, had intentionally distributed disinformation repeatedly falsely claiming that COVID 19 vaccine studies had proven that the vaccines are effective for people who've already had coronavirus. And as I reported, with audio tapes that were surreptitiously recorded by a Congressman Thomas Massie, that wasn't true. And CDC knew that it wasn't true as it continued to distribute the information to doctors and other medical people as well as the general public. I think this is one of the biggest stories in the past year or so, one that didn't really get picked up very much because of today's managed information landscape. But it's critically important that CDC was caught giving false information on purpose. That had a potentially devastating impact in some cases because, as Congressman Massie pointed out, under the mistaken belief fostered by CDC that studies proved it was effective for people who've already had coronavirus to get the vaccines. Based on that, there were people getting in line to get vaccines when there was a shortage of for people who really needed them. Congressman Massie said he knew of instances firsthand in Kentucky, his home state, where there were young people who'd already had coronavirus and were certainly not priorities for a vaccination, but lining up nonetheless to get them when there were older people who were considered priorities going without vaccination. And this gets at the heart of something very serious. There's sort of a crisis in confidence in information the federal government distributes, including public health officials. And they have nobody to blame but themselves because of instances like this. When they get caught intentionally distributing disinformation for whatever reason and then fail to promptly correct it or correct it at all, and they then therefore create an environment in which people understandably begin to question all the information that comes out, even that which is true, because they don't know what might be true and what might be false, they create this doubt, this crisis in confidence, and then they blame the public for wondering what the truth is. On the heels of that, I would point out that the CDC director recently gave some important disinformation when she falsely claimed that all the data suggested if you've had The COVID vaccines, you don't carry or transmit coronavirus. And that's ridiculously false for anyone that's looked at a few of the adverse event reports or any of the studies. I'm not sure where she got that from if she didn't know or she was intentionally distributing disinformation. But in this case, CDC did come out pretty promptly right after that and corrected because it was so obviously false. I had actually tweeted out when I saw her make that statement that it was provably false. And yet a lot of people, confused, understandably confused, were answering back that it was true and it was to be believed. And then CDC officials came out and contradicted their own director. And that confused people still further. Anyway, I will have an update on that story and what CDC has done, if anything, about this disinformation regarding the studies supposedly showing that Covid vaccines are a benefit to people who've already had coronavirus when the studies showed no such thing. And then we will also have on this week's program a story that I first read about probably about a year ago. I got some kind of notice and I thought it was so interesting. It reminded me of a story I covered at cbs. But this was a story about a pharmacist in Tennessee who has figured out a very unique way to make use of medicine to repurpose medicine that is unused and untouched but. But had been prescribed to somebody who passes away. The relatives always want to know what can we do to put this expensive medicine to use or give it to somebody who needs it. And they're usually told there's nothing you can do, you have to flush it down the toilet, which by most accounts is a really bad thing to do because that's why a lot of drugs are in our water supply. I've done a story on that on Full measure too, where we're all basically ingesting birth control pills and antidepressants and statins and all kinds of things because not only do we pee out drugs into the system, but drugs are routinely flushed, even by hospitals and nursing homes, flushed down the toilet. When somebody passes away and they can no longer be used, they're disposed of in this way. But what I love about this story is this pharmacist that used his ingenuity and his heart to try to figure out a way to make use of medicine and to help people who can't afford medicine. So you'll love to see that story. You can see the latest list of our stations where you can watch Full measure@cheryl akison.com Click the full Measure tab. It's all right there. You can also download the Stir app. That's our app. S T I R R not only seeing Full Measure live or on demand anytime, but there's all kinds of other TV programs and movies and local news that you can see. All for free. But the easiest way, as I always say, if you don't have a station near your it's too complicated to figure it out. You can go to FullMeasure News online. You can go there right now in fact, and see last week's program. And every Sunday around noon Eastern time after the show airs on TV, we post the segments at FullMeasure News so you can see the replays. You can also watch live if you can't wait at 9:30 Eastern Time Sundays at FullMeasure News. So lots of ways you can catch Full Measure and tell your friends about the program. Original reporting, off narrative reporting, investigations, news the old fashioned way. Stories you're not going to see on the other Sunday TV programs. I hope you'll check us out. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. I'm trying to shed light on and give voice to various views, scientific studies, factual information that others are trying to censor in this very dangerous environment. Whether I agree with the views or not, that's not what's important. It's to protect the free flow of information in America. And here's how we can defeat information control. Go to cherylakisson.com and check out the Censored tab for more stories and information on censored people, topics and studies. Left, right and nonpartisan. When you hear that powerful interests or big tech are trying to censor or ban or controversialize information and keep you from getting it, that should be your signal to find out more about the topic that they're trying to control. Also, I hope you will check out my book how the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism. Read the reviews on Amazon of Slanted and it might help convince you that there's information here you need. Do your own research. Make up your own mind. Think for yourself. Sam.