SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
water
As Trump Pushes to Defund Infrastructure, Water Systems Serving Tens of Millions Face Flood Risk
The White House has proposed slashing funds for the nation's water systems by 90%.
Sep 02, 2025
As the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress push to eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for water infrastructure, they are increasing the flood risk community waters system face across the United States—making it more likely that close to 60 million people could lose access to safe water during or after such emergencies.
The environmental justice group Food and Water Watch (FWW) on Tuesday released a report on a sometimes overlooked impact of flooding: In addition to the devastating damage that floods can do to homes, roads, and community buildings, flooding can contaminate water supplies while overwhelming water utility systems and putting treatment plants out of commission even after the water has receded.
In Washed Out, FWW warns that the flood risk to the 448 largest community water systems in the country is growing as extreme weather events become increasingly common and more severe, with more than one-third of those systems facing "significant" flood risks.
At least 10% of the land served by the systems with the highest risks lie in areas prone to flooding, according to FWW, and 59.4 million people rely on those systems for safe drinking water.
About 15% of water systems evaluated by FWW have "elevated" flood risks, with at least 20% of land in high flood risk areas, where nearly 22 million people live.
Florida, which had at least four billion-dollar flood disasters between 1980-2024 and experienced several "100-year" rainstorms last year, was identified as having the highest flooding risk for large community water systems. The state is home to 10 of the country's 15 large systems that serve areas where at least half the land is in high flood risk zones.
New Jersey and Louisiana each have two large systems at high risk, while at least half the the area served by Boston's water system is also in a flood zone, putting more than 2.5 million people at serious risk of losing water access in the event of a flood.
Other high risk areas identified by FWW include New York City, where the municipal water system serves 8.2 million people and which has more than 12% of its land in high risk flood zones; Corpus Christi, Texas, where 23% of land is at high risk of flooding; and Alameda County, California, where 42% of land is in a flood zone.
"Now more than ever, it is imperative that all members of Congress stand firmly united against any shortsighted attempt to strip support for our critical water and sewer infrastructure."
"As our analysis illuminates, scores of water systems serving highly-populated communities are at significant threat of flooding that could suddenly break safe water delivery and sanitary sewer operation—for days, weeks or even months. Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans in Congress are seeking to decimate the key federal funding that keeps these systems operating safely," said Mary Grant, water program director at FWW.
Republicans in the US House are currently seeking a 25% cut to the Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds (SRF)—the primary source of federal funding for the nation's water and wastewater systems.
An appropriations bill released last month by the House Interior Subcommittee would slash the funds from $2.8 billion to $2.1 billion, bringing them to their lowest level since 2008.
The proposal does not go as far as President Donald Trump's push to cut the programs by nearly 90% with a plan to eventually zero them out, but FWW noted last month that the proposed cuts "come at a time when the needs of our nation's water and wastewater systems are substantial and growing."
"According to the latest needs survey of the US EPA, upgrading our water and wastewater infrastructure will cost $1.3 trillion over the next two decades just to comply with existing federal law," said the group.
Slashing funds for water infrastructure, including building more climate-resilient systems, would also put the drinking water of millions of people at risk at a time when flooding and other extreme weather disasters is becoming more common due to the continued extraction of planet-heating fossil fuels.
Scientists last year said Hurricane Helene—which along with smaller storms that happened around the same time dumped 40 trillion gallons of rain on the Southeast—was made about 10% more intense and dangerous by the human-caused climate crisis. The flooding left Asheville, North Carolina without safe drinking water for more than seven weeks.
FWW on Tuesday renewed its call for the US to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources—instead of slashing regulations for oil and gas industries as Trump has—and warned that "local water providers must also improve their systems to withstand today's climate reality."
"This level of investment will require a strong federal commitment," said the group.
FWW called on Congress to pass legislation like the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (WATER) Act "to guarantee federal support for safe and clean water in every community" and reject efforts to strip crucial funding from the SRF.
"Now more than ever," said Grant, "it is imperative that all members of Congress stand firmly united against any shortsighted attempt to strip support for our critical water and sewer infrastructure."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Artificial Intelligence Is on a Collision Course With the Green Transition
The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.
Aug 23, 2025
The tech industry’s accelerating buildout of infrastructure to power artificial intelligence is rapidly turning an industry once lauded as “clean” and environmentally friendly into an air polluting, ecosystem destroying, water guzzling behemoth. Now, there’s an intensifying rift on the left about how to approach what was, until recently, a steadfast Democratic ally.
Progressives are now at a fork in the road with two very different options: a political reckoning with Silicon Valley or a rapprochement paid for with environmental havoc.
Some pundits and industry figures have counterintuitively argued that the proliferation of data centers to power AI is a good thing for the environment. The massive energy demand for training artificial intelligence will, in this telling, necessarily prompt a massive investment in clean energy and transmission infrastructure to meet that demand, thereby catalyzing a world-altering transition toward renewable energy. This argument, already suspect years ago, is entirely untenable now.
Following US President Donald Trump and company’s evisceration of the clean energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the narrow path of AI buildout being aligned with a green transition is now completely walled off. The choice now is whether the United States continues to aid and abet Silicon Valley’s environmental rampage or to fight it.
At present, there is simply no way to have the scale of AI buildout that the United States is seeing without terrible environmental downsides.
Even prior to Republicans torpedoing the IRA, AI electricity demand was growing faster than both renewable energy production and overall grid capacity. Without strong additionality regulations to require that new data centers be powered by the construction of new renewable energy generation, the AI boom will continue to increase consumption of fossil fuels.
Much of the increased energy demand was already being met by natural gas before the Republican spending package. It’s only going to get worse now. Without the clean energy tax credits, the advantages of incumbency that fossil fuels enjoy mean that the AI energy boom will further hook us on unsustainable resource consumption.
The firms building out AI infrastructure know this and often point to major investments in clean energy to protest characterizations of data centers as environmentally disastrous. But there are two major problems there. First, those investments may be in totally different locations than the actual data centers, meaning the centers are still consuming dirty energy. Second, and more importantly, at our present juncture in the climate crisis, we need to be actively decreasing our use of fossil fuels, not just containing increases in dirty energy production. (It’s worth noting that AI is also being used to enable more fossil fuel extraction.)
And the environmental destruction doesn’t stop there. The Trump White House recently moved to exempt data centers from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, paving the way for tech companies to despoil local environments without a second thought, and limiting opportunities for the public to gain information about data centers’ environmental impacts.
Perhaps nothing captures the excesses of AI quite so clearly as its water usage. Despite some pundits glibly claiming that there’s actually tons of water to go around, data centers threaten to worsen already dire droughts. We’re already beginning to see this in arid places like Chile and the American Southwest.
The Colorado River’s mismanagement is the stuff of public policy legend at this point. Aquifers across the Western US are being depleted. People were not mulling the idea of partially rerouting the Mississippi River for giggles. There is, unequivocally, a water crisis unfolding. And those data centers are very, very thirsty. A single data center can use millions of gallons a day.
There are already more than 90 data centers in the Phoenix area alone. That’s hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day. Protesting that “there’s plenty of water” is not just detached from the drought-stricken reality, it’s dangerous.
Data centers are being built in arid places intentionally; the low humidity reduces the risk of corrosion for the processor stacks warehoused there. Fresh water supplies, when depleted, are not easily renewed. Devoting more of it to cooling GPUs means less for drinking, irrigation, fighting wildfires, bathing, and other essential uses.
And there isn’t a way to bring water to the arid environments to mitigate that, either. Some people point to desalination, but that isn’t tenable for multiple reasons. To start, most of these data centers tend to be inland, as the sea air has similar corrosive effects as humidity. That, in turn, means that even accepting desalination as a cure for water scarcity, data centers would require transporting massive quantities of that purified water over significant distances, which would require complex energy-and resource-consuming engineering projects unlikely to proceed within the hurry up and go of our AI bubblish moment. (Desalination also has its own serious environmental harms.)
At present, there is simply no way to have the scale of AI buildout that the United States is seeing without terrible environmental downsides. The only choice left is whether to get out of Silicon Valley’s way or whether to slow the industry’s pace.
Keep ReadingShow Less
When Water Becomes War: The Moral Failure of Global Governance in the Middle East
Global powers that once justified their interventions in the Middle East with rhetoric about human rights remain silent when basic rights are violated through the denial of water.
Aug 21, 2025
The Middle East today is witnessing a transformation that goes far beyond conventional geopolitics or the competition for oil. One of the most urgent yet underexplored dimensions of its crisis is the question of water, which has increasingly become both a scarce commodity and a weapon in the hands of states and non-state actors alike.
According to the Pacific Institute, in 2022 and 2023 alone there were roughly 350 conflicts worldwide linked directly to water, and the Middle East—particularly Palestine—accounted for a disproportionate share of these incidents. This reality is not accidental. It reflects the way global climate change intersects with regional inequalities, colonial structures, and authoritarian governance to create a cycle of violence where access to water itself becomes a matter of survival, control, and domination.
For decades, international observers focused on energy as the main axis of power in the Middle East. But as climate patterns shift, it is water that increasingly defines the possibilities of stability or conflict. Israel’s control over Palestinian aquifers and its systematic restriction of water access in Gaza and the West Bank is a striking example of how resource management is turned into an instrument of collective punishment. For Palestinians, the denial of water is not simply a matter of inconvenience; it is a violation of their most basic human right, used deliberately to weaken their social fabric and impose dependency. In this sense, water becomes no different from a siege or a blockade: It is a tool of war under another name.
The instrumentalization of water is not confined to Palestine. In Iraq and Syria, dams on the Tigris and Euphrates have repeatedly been manipulated by regional powers and armed groups to gain leverage over civilian populations. The deliberate flooding or drying of entire areas has been used both as a tactical weapon and as a form of coercion against communities already devastated by decades of war and sanctions. In North Africa, the tensions between Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan over the Grand Renaissance Dam reveal how water disputes are reshaping the geopolitics of the Nile basin. These examples highlight a pattern that is not unique to one country but characteristic of the entire region: Water is increasingly governed not as a shared resource but as an instrument of power, deployed in ways that exacerbate fragility and deepen mistrust.
If water continues to be treated as a weapon, the region will face not only deeper wars but also the erosion of any possibility of trust among its peoples.
Overlaying these conflicts is the accelerating impact of climate change. The Middle East is warming faster than many other regions, and prolonged droughts are already destabilizing entire societies. In Syria, a decade of severe drought preceding the outbreak of civil war played a major role in driving rural populations toward cities, where state neglect and economic desperation created fertile ground for unrest. In Iran, recurring protests over water shortages reveal how ecological stress translates directly into political instability. In Yemen, the depletion of groundwater has compounded the devastation of war and famine, pushing communities into cycles of displacement and despair. These are not isolated events; they are symptoms of a systemic crisis in which the environment is no longer a neutral background but an active driver of conflict.
From the perspective of the Global South, the crisis of water in the Middle East cannot be separated from broader patterns of structural inequality in the international system. Just as natural resources such as oil or minerals have long been subjected to forms of colonial extraction, water too has been folded into systems of control shaped by external powers and neoliberal institutions. Privatization schemes, often promoted by global financial institutions, commodify access to water and place it in the hands of corporate actors whose logic of profit directly contradicts the principle of universal human rights. For vulnerable populations in Gaza, Basra, or Sana’a, the question is not merely ecological but profoundly political: Who controls the flow of life itself?
The human cost of these dynamics is staggering. Water scarcity strikes hardest at the most vulnerable—children, women, refugees, and the poor—who bear the brunt of disease, malnutrition, and displacement. When families must choose between buying water or food, the very notion of human dignity is stripped away. In refugee camps across the region, inadequate water supply is linked to rising health crises, while urban populations face soaring prices as corporations exploit scarcity. To speak of water in the Middle East is therefore to speak of justice, of whose lives are considered expendable in a system that treats water as a weapon rather than as a shared right.
At the same time, the weaponization of water reveals a profound moral failure of the international community. Global powers that once justified their interventions in the Middle East with rhetoric about human rights remain silent when basic rights are violated through the denial of water. This silence reflects a double standard in which ecological violence is normalized when it serves geopolitical interests. It also underscores how little regard is given to the voices of the Global South, where communities consistently insist that climate justice cannot be divorced from political justice. To demand fair access to water is to demand a reordering of priorities that places human survival above strategic advantage.
The irony of the current moment is that while the West proclaims its commitment to universal values, it is in fact the countries of the Global South that articulate a more compelling vision of planetary justice. In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, movements have emerged insisting that water is a commons, inseparable from human dignity and beyond the logic of commodification. This resonates deeply in the Middle East, where communities understand that peace cannot be built on pipelines of oil or weapons, but only on the guarantee that every person can drink, irrigate, and live without fear of thirst. Such a vision requires not only local cooperation but also a radical shift in global governance, one that dismantles the structures of environmental colonialism and affirms water as a fundamental right.
The Middle East stands today at a crossroads where climate change, conflict, and inequality converge. If water continues to be treated as a weapon, the region will face not only deeper wars but also the erosion of any possibility of trust among its peoples. Yet the very urgency of this crisis also opens a space for a new discourse, one that reframes water not as an object of control but as a foundation for coexistence. To imagine such a future is not naïve; it is the only realistic response to a world where climate shocks are intensifying and old paradigms of power are collapsing.
For those of us in the Global South, the lesson is clear: The struggle for justice in the 21st century is inseparable from the struggle for water. To defend the right to water is to defend the possibility of peace, dignity, and life itself.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular