Biden’s Colorado River Plans Fail to Address ‘Abuse’ of Water by Big Ag and Big Oil: Watchdog – By Kenny Stancil (Common Dreams) / Apr 12 2023
“Any legitimate plan for the Colorado River must directly confront a key driver of the crisis in the first place: the overuse and abuse of limited water resources by big agribusiness and fossil fuel corporations—the very same industries contributing to climate chaos in the first place.”
After the Biden administration on Tuesday released proposals to cut water allotments to the states that depend on the shrinking Colorado River, a progressive advocacy group criticized federal officials for failing to address an underlying cause of the region’s hydrological plight: the overexploitation of water resources by the corporate agriculture and fossil fuel industries.
“Any legitimate plan for the Colorado River must directly confront a key driver of the crisis in the first place: the overuse and abuse of limited water resources by big agribusiness and fossil fuel corporations—the very same industries contributing to climate chaos in the first place,” Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement.
The seven Colorado River Basin states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—have missed multiple federal deadlines to finalize an interstate water conservation pact. Following months of fruitless state-level attempts to forge an agreement on how to preserve the region’s waning water resources, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation proposed two solutions in a draft analysis published Tuesday. The agency also explored the devastating implications of a third alternative—doing nothing.
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