IF YOU CAN TRADE IT, YOU CAN ALLOCATE IT EFFICIENTLY.

Years ago, environmentalist wackos had a gripe that ran something like "We'll have abundant solar energy when Standard Oil can make money off it."  That's cathartic populist froth, but it misses the major point, that making money means engaging in mutually beneficial trade, a reality that is too often ignored by self-styled progressives.

Predictably, the opportunity to allocate Western waters efficiently sets off the current generation of environmentalist wackos.

Financial speculators are buying and selling rights to the Colorado River's dwindling water resources in a bid to profit as historic drought conditions intensified by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis lead to worsening scarcity.

Wall Street investment firms "have identified the drought as an opportunity to make money," Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, told CBS News on Tuesday. "I view these drought profiteers as vultures. They're looking to make a lot of money off this public resource."

Matthew Diserio, the co-founder and president of a Manhattan-based hedge fund called Water Asset Management (WAM), makes no secret of his intentions, having described water in the United States as "the biggest emerging market on Earth" and "a trillion-dollar market opportunity." The company's website declares that "scarce clean water is the resource defining this century, much like plentiful oil defined the last."

A newly published joint investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel found that WAM has purchased at least $20 million worth of land in Western Colorado over the past five years, making it one of the biggest landowners in a farming and ranching region known as the Grand Valley.

According to Mueller, WAM has bought more than 2,500 acres of farmland in the area. But "it's the water"—not the land—that investors are really interested in, he said, observing that the farmland comes with water rights.

To Kenny Stancil, it's apparently sufficient to use "making money" as an epithet, never mind the dynamic his very next paragraph reveals.

Notably, WAM has "hired Colorado's former top water official as one of its lawyers," CBS News reported. Diserio previously stated that "one of his firm's strategies is to profit from water in part by making the farms it buys more efficient and then selling parts of its water rights to other farmers and cities increasingly desperate for the natural resource."

It's not as if using the water more efficiently is some sort of superexploitative plot, the way precision scheduled railroading or adjunctification might be.  Or that the strings the national government attaches will be helpful.

As the long-brewing crisis surrounding the Colorado River grows more acute, the federal government has taken steps to compel state-level policymakers to improve how they manage water resources in the increasingly arid region.

For instance, "Congress recently allocated $4 billion in drought funding that can be used to pay farmers to fallow their land and not use their water," CBS News reported. "Some Western states, including Colorado, are also considering paying some farmers to keep their lands fallow." Agriculture accounts for 70% of withdrawals from the Colorado River.

The Jarrett regency, however, is full of self-styled progressives with lots of sentimentality and no common sense. Is it more sensible to figure out how to raise crops using less water, or to not raise crops at all?

The Future of Water Act, as the congressional Democrats' bicameral legislation is titled, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to affirm that water is a human right to be managed for public benefit—not a commodity to be bought and sold by investment firms. The bill would also prohibit the trading of water rights on futures markets—a recently invented financial ploy widely condemned as "dystopian."

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said at the time of the bill's introduction that "with the climate crisis delivering historically devastating droughts across the West, it is clearer than ever that water should be treated as a scarce, essential resource, not a commodity for Wall Street and financial speculators."

"This groundbreaking legislation would put a lid on dangerous water futures trading before it creates a crisis," said Hauter, "and it reinforces the fact that water must be managed as a public resource, not a corporate profit center."

As if the existing regime of public resource management has performed so well for us.

The costs of the water and power projects are great, but those Yuma growers see low prices for the Colorado River water they use because they are living at the expense of somebody else.  I also recall, in the middle 1970s, something called "flood watering" being a thing in Phoenix.  Yup, cover your lawn with water.  We had water meters, and even in Milwaukee there was odd-even sprinkling days, even with new water intake cribs being built as the city grew, as it still was back then.

But nobody wants to get into the implications either of understanding that water is a commodity and ought be priced accordingly, or that those fresh vegetables (and Californian cheese, for Elsie's sake!) coming to the Twin Cities in the winter look cheaper because taxpayers in the Great Lakes are helping pay for those southwestern water projects, and they might be on the hook for even more water projects.

On the other hand, perhaps the environmentalist wackos would just as soon there be no water projects.  Has the recent Californian flooding been worse for the absence of any new flood control projects?