AI has come for Arizona’s water

Key points

• • Over the past decade, one commodity crop, increasingly dominated by hedge funds and foreign investors, has become a sort of scapegoat for the state’s water woes: alfalfa.
• • Just hours after the board’s vote, Tucson Electric Power announced it was looking into a rate hike that would increase customers’ bills by an average of 14 percent.
• • Those reassurances, however, aren’t enough to assuage Arizonans, who now have to contend with the fact that the state will soon lose access to nearly 30 percent of the water it receives from the Colorado River.