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Federal Government Announces Mandatory Water Cuts as Colorado River Dries Up; Afghan Women Struggle for Basic Rights After Taliban Takeover; NASA's Mega Moon Rocket Rolls Out to Launch Pad. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired August 17, 2022 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[10:30:00]

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR: More skeletal remains have been found at the bottom of Lake Mead, now this is because the water has dropped so low that you're finding, unfortunately, more and more of these horrific stories. It is the fifth time so far this year that authorities have found remains at the lake as its water levels drop and its shoreline recedes amid a historic drought.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. This is primarily a story about our changing climate. The river that feeds that reservoir, Colorado, is now weakened by drought. It's creating new water cuts from the federal government.

Our Chief Climate Correspondent Bill Weir has the story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting. That supposed Mark Twain quote has been a western slogan since the first settlers. But now the worst drought in 1,200 years has water managers in seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico fighting over every precious drop.

CAMILE TOUTON, COMMISSIONER, BUREAU OF RECLAMATION (voice over): But to-date, the state's collectively have not identified and adopted specific actions of sufficient magnitude that would stabilize the system.

WEIR: That was the commissioner in charge of dams and reservoirs, admitting that upper and lower basin states have failed to agree on ways to cut their water use by up to 25 percent.

PAT MULROY, FORMER COMMISSIONER, SOUTHERN NEVADA WATER AUTHORITY: I think, ultimately, the states are going to realize their playing Russian roulette and they're going to have to come to their senses.

WEIR: For almost 30 years, Pat Mulroy was in charge of Southern Nevada's water and led an aggressive conservation campaign to tear up lawns, reuse waste water and scold water wasters. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can't water in the middle of day, ma'am. You'll be fined if you don't change your watering clock.

WEIR: All measures she'd like to see happen downstream.

MULROY: I think they're kind of kicking the can down the road past the election, if you want me to be frank about it. I don't think anybody wants to make great public announcements about measures they may have to take prior to the election.

[10:35:01]

WEIR: Rather than enforce new action, the feds will let the states keep talking while the next round of automatic cuts will lower water delivery by 7 percent to Mexico, 8 percent to Nevada and 21 percent to Arizona.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You can hear this crunching, it's just starting to dry up.

WEIR: Here, alfalfa farmers are already being paid to let their fields go fallow while some are switching to crops like guayule, a rubber plant that grows in the desert.

KEVIN MORAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF WATER POLICY AND STATE AFFAIRS, ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND: Crop switching, looking at lower water use crops, like guayule, is one of the solutions we need to look at in a drier future to allow communities to sustain themselves.

WEIR: Thanks to creative water accounting, California will not face mandatory cuts next year but their governor is already warning of a future with a lot more people and a lot less water.

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Science and the data leads us to now understand that we will lose 10 percent of our water supply by 2040. If all things are equal, we will lose an additional 10 percent of our supply by 2040.

MULROY: We have the very real possibility this coming year if we have another lousy winter, all things being equal, that we will dry this lake down to elevation 1,000. That is 100 feet above dead pool and you're at the bottom of the martini glass.

So, it doesn't take much to tip that over and get to the point where nothing can go downstream. And if you don't take it seriously now, if you think that you're going to avoid this, do a rain dance, go pray, do whatever, that we have a great winter you're insane.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WEIR (on camera): Pat Mulroy says, really, the only way to fill back up Lake Mead is to pay farmers and ranchers downstream not to use their water and keep it here and to understand this 100-year-old story. You have got to appreciate the dynamic between upper basin states, the mountain states, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, which has all the snow pact, and the lower basin states, Nevada, Arizona that have the storage. Together, they have managed to build the modern American west but they've been squabbling over the rights of who gets it right now.

And there is real frustration, Jim and Bianna, that the feds weren't bringing the hammer, that they weren't the big stern dad in the room telling the states what would happen. But given the politics of the moment, do you really want the feds shutting off a rancher's water? And so there are no easy answers here.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Watch the movie China Town too for a little story how that started. Bill Weir, it's always great to have you on stories like this.

WEIR: Thanks, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Going undercover to reveal the real stories of women living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Journalist Ramita Navai will join the show next to share what she discovered.

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[10:40:00]

GOLODRYGA: It has been one year since the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and so far, they have failed to keep a key promise that the rights of women and girls in that country would be respected. Instead, they have come down on the hardest on those who had dared to protest for their rights.

Investigative Journalist Ramita Navai has been on the ground in Afghanistan to document the Taliban's harsh rule, in one case, speaking to women about the abuse they face after being thrown in prison.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE).

RAMITA NAVAI, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND DOCUMENTARIAN: Mariam (ph) and her friends said while in prison, Taliban officers made them an offer.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GOLODRYGA: Ramita Navai, the journalist behind that PBS frontline report, Afghanistan Undercover, joins me live from London. Ramita, thank you so much for joining us and for this important work that you continue to do in telling the story about women who make up more than 50 percent of the population there in Afghanistan succumbing to these draconian, new rules by the Taliban. They failed to live up to their pledge to allow women and girls to go to school. Women are now forced from the workplace. Some are arbitrarily detained and tortured, as you've noted in the video. Talk about what else you saw on the ground there. NAVAI: Well, we found the situation to be far worse than is being reported. There is hardly any news about how the Taliban are really treating women coming out of the provinces. We found that in the western city of Herat, hundreds of young women and girls were being arrested by Taliban intelligence officers and were being imprisoned. And they had been accused of so-called immoral crimes. So, leaving your husband, being in a car with a man you're not related to.

They said -- we spoke to some of these women who had been imprisoned. They said that Taliban intelligence officers had beaten them, had tasered them and general mistreatment in prison. The worst bit about this, though, was that none of these imprisonments were being officially recorded or registered. So, these women were simply disappearing and nobody knew where they disappeared to.

[10:45:03]

We spoke to four Afghan lawyers who told us they thought that the Taliban were not registering these cases because they were trying to hide from the world what they're doing to women there.

GOLODRYGA: These women were just so brave to take time to be able to speak to you knowing what they faced, if they were caught by the Taliban. You actually spoke with some women who decided to not protest at certain moments because they were too concerned about their own safety, not only from the Taliban but from their own family members. Let's play a clip.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GOLODRYGA: They're still working hard for social justice. And that's a really important point to make because it's one thing to see the Taliban not live up to their pledge but to see their own families and their husbands and brothers turn on them as well and the change that you hear from so many women who had jobs just a year ago who were lawyers, who were doctors, who were teachers and what more. Talk about that impact that it's had on women you spoke with.

NAVAI: Oh, it's devastating. So, the clip that you just showed, two of those women were since imprisoned for a few weeks. They're out now. Absolutely terrified. All those women were and still are receiving death threats. They were being closely monitored by the Taliban.

As you said, young women, if they are accused of so-called immoral crimes, I told you about, they're then cast out by their communities and their families because of the shame. Not just that, we also discovered that the Taliban were abducting women and forcing them into marriage. So, that's something else that these young women have to live with is that fear.

GOLODRYGA: And not only is it because of their own moral obligations to fight for women and their role in society but it's also an economic one, as well. These women were helping to provide, to feed for their families, their children. Hunger is a huge problem now in that country. What did you see there?

NAVAI: Well, Afghanistan has just lost a massive chunk of its workforce, as you rightly said, and this is what these women are protesting for, just really basic rights. Some of these women, I mean, the bravest women I have met in 20 years of reporting, some of these women who are wanted and being hunted themselves by the Taliban have created these underground networks of safe houses and they're helping other women who are fleeing the Taliban and housing them.

So, really, really, this kind of nascent network of female activists is growing stronger and stronger and it's impressive.

GOLODRYGA: Their courage is so inspiring, and as you said, impressive and so important that you're covering their story with work like this.

Ramita Navai, thank you. Thank you so much.

NAVAI: Thank you for having me.

SCIUTTO: Such great stories of courage there from Afghanistan.

Other story we're following, and this is happening now, Nasa preparing for its return to the moon. The Artemis rocket, as it's known, has just this hour arrived at its launch pad for an upcoming trip. How this mega rocket is just the first step towards sending man back to the moon.

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[10:50:00]

GOLODRYGA: Well, now to Jim's favorite story of the morning.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GOLODRYGA: The Artemis 1 mega rocket has rolled out to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. You are riled up, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Never trouble getting space stories on the show. It is getting ready. We should remind you, for liftoff for a trip around the moon and back to Earth, this is just weeks from now in preparation for sending men and women to the moon.

CNN Space and Defense Correspondent Kristin Fisher joins us now with more. So, this is a big step. How many steps between now and repeating Apollo 11?

KRISTIN FISHER, CNN SPACE AND DEFENSE CORRESPONDENT: This is one of the last big ones. And this is a big deal because this is the first time in about half a century that we have seen a NASA-built rocket bound for the moon roll out to the launch pad before a launch. And this is the really the first human grade rocket that NASA has built since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet. So, this is more than a decade in the making for NASA.

And, Jim, what really stood out to me about last night, it's not as exciting as a rocket launch, and you can see it right there. That's the rocket rolling out to the launch pad, because it has to go so slowly.

And as I was watching this, I was thinking I'm not sure what's more impressive, what is the more impressive vehicle, the rocket or the crawler that gets it there. This is the same crawler that was used to transport the Saturn 5 rockets back in the 1960s and '70s. It's essentially carrying a skyscraper four miles, can only travel a mile per hour, took ten hours to get there but it did.

[10:55:04]

Now, we're less than two weeks away from launch.

And, you know, I think a lot of people are sitting back wondering now why are we going back to the moon? Didn't we do this back in the '60s and '70s? But the difference now is we're in a different space race, only this time it's not with the Russians, it's with China. And, you know, if the United States doesn't get their astronauts back there first, China is on track to do so.

SCIUTTO: And is that as a step towards sending a man to Mars?

FISHER: It's a step towards sending a man or a woman to Mars. But it's also about NASA wants to leave more than flags and footprints this time. They want to build a base and so do the Chinese.

SCIUTTO: Well, Kristin Fisher, when I get the invite from that NASA, I'll everybody know. Thanks so much for joining us.

FISHER: You bet.

GOLODRYGA: I'll stay on the crawler, just so you know. That's my adrenaline rush.

Thank you so much for joining us today. I am Bianna Golodryga.

SCIUTTO: And I'm Jim Sciutto. At This Hour with Kate Bolduan starts right after a quick break.

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