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--:-- Leila Fadel: Labor Party leader Keir Starmer is Britain's next prime minister. Today we start the next chapter. Begin the work of change. The mission of national renewal.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What will his new center-left government look like? I'm Steve Inskeep with Leila Fadel, and this is Up First from NPR News.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Water levels in the Colorado River are critically low, and most of the federal response is focused on funding conservation. Is it a better idea to spend money on finding new sources of water?
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Florida is vulnerable to extreme weather events like hurricanes and heat waves, and it's also solidly Republican, a party that rejects the idea of man-made climate change. How are both ideas coexisting in the minds of voters? Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.
--:-- Leila Fadel: This message comes from BetterHelp. President Fernando Madeira describes how BetterHelp Online Therapy has helped him.
--:-- Fernando Madeira: For me, sometimes I just need to go and talk to somebody that is not going to judge me, right? Is going to be there and going to listen to me. And I can start just saying, look, I'm not feeling right today. And it feels natural. I love it.
--:-- Leila Fadel: To get matched with a therapist, visit BetterHelp.com slash NPR for 10% off your first month.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: This message comes from Lisa. Lisa mattresses are meticulously designed and assembled in the USA for exceptional quality. And each mattress is designed with specific sleep positions and feel preferences in mind. Plus, they back it all up with free shipping, easy returns, and a 100-night sleep trial. Visit Lisa.com for 25% off mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code NPR.
--:-- Leila Fadel: That's L-E-E-S-A.com, promo code NPR. This message comes from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: A landslide victory in Britain for a party that hasn't won an election since Tony Blair. The next British Prime Minister will be Keir Starmer from the center-left Labour Party, who spoke early this morning.
--:-- [Audio clip of Keir Starmer's speech]
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Change begins now. Literally true. There's no transition in the UK. He becomes prime minister almost immediately.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Yesterday's election was a near wipeout for the incumbent conservatives, their worst defeat in the party's nearly 200-year history.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: Good morning. Good morning. So tell us about the new British prime minister. Keir Starmer is a human rights lawyer and a prosecutor. As a young man, he actually called for the monarchy to be abolished, but later knelt before the monarch to get a knighthood.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And today he's meeting with King Charles to get his ceremonial nod to form a new government. And as I said, he'll move into 10 Downing Street this afternoon.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: You heard a bit of him at the top there. Here's more of what he said in a victory speech before dawn here in London.
--:-- [Audio clip of Keir Starmer's speech]
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: Walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope. Pale at first, but getting stronger through the day. Shining once again. He's speaking in pretty poetic terms there about what he sees as a huge mandate, a new era for the British government, power changing hands for the first time after 14 years of conservative rule.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But he faces a lot of challenges, a state hobbled by years of austerity measures, government coffers near empty.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: Now incumbent conservatives didn't just lose, they were obliterated. Why? Yeah, the one thing that I've been hearing over and over again from voters is that they feel like Britain is in decline and they're blaming conservatives who presided over it.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It's been a tumultuous few years of politics here through Brexit which most Britons now regret through sort of musical chairs of conservative prime ministers the worst cost of living crisis since World War II.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: Here's one voter I spoke to at a polling station yesterday. His name is Nick Bailey. We had five prime ministers in 14 years. We've had Boris Johnson, who was a complete disaster, Liz Truss. And, you know, we need a change, basically.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He mentioned Liz Truss. She was prime minister briefly in 2022. She lost her seat in parliament last night. That's really rare for a veteran prime minister to not even get back into parliament.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: Lots of big names in conservative politics here, including cabinet ministers, lost their races. What about the incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak? He retained his seat. He won his local district in northern England. He also came out and spoke in the middle of the night.
--:-- [Audio clip of Rishi Sunak's speech]
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: There is much to learn and reflect on. And I take responsibility for the loss. There will be some introspection in his conservative party.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: This is the party of Margaret Thatcher that's dominated UK politics for more than a century. But British voters have roundly rejected it now.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: Now, we've been focusing on the two main political parties in the UK, but there are smaller parties, too. How'd they do? There are... Britain has sort of a winner-take-all system in each district, kind of like America. So it's a real feat whenever a third-party candidate wins a seat. And that happened a lot last night.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The centrist Liberal Democrats multiplied their seat count. The environmentalist Green Party had its best showing. So did the far-right anti-immigrant reform UK party. And Nigel Farage, who's this sort of rabble-rouser Brexiteer, will enter parliament. It's his eighth try.
--:-- NPR's Lauren Frayer: But what's notable here is that is the exception. Unlike what we're seeing in France and elsewhere in Europe with the far-right really ascendant, Britain in general took a big turn to the center-left with this election.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: American taxpayers are throwing money at the Colorado River. The funds aim to help people who rely on that river to recover nearly every drop of water they can.
--:-- Alex Hager: Good morning, Leila. Hello, Leila. So drought has shrunk the Colorado River to critical levels, and the federal government has responded with a lot of money. Has it helped? So far, it has helped stave off catastrophe, but it definitely has not solved the Colorado River crisis.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The government plans to use more than a billion dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act to pay people to take less water out of the river. That is happening everywhere from farms in Wyoming to big cities in Arizona.
--:-- Alex Hager: At the end of the day, climate change means less water is showing up almost every year, and the whole region needs to permanently cut back on demand. This federal spending is just buying some time for policymakers to come up with a longer-term strategy.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It also does not hurt that last winter was pretty snowy, which helped lift some pressure. And you went to Arizona recently to report on how some of that money is being spent. What did you see?
--:-- Alex Hager: Yeah, nearly a million of that money is earmarked for Arizona cities to help them conserve water. In Phoenix, I found they're not exactly focused on the types of things that come to mind when you hear that word conservation.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: In the past, it has meant installing low-flow showerheads and paying people to rip out their thirsty lawns.
--:-- Alex Hager: But Cynthia Campbell, who's with the water department in Phoenix, says this. At some point in time, there does have to be a recognition of the scope of the problem as such. You just can't conserve your way out of it.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So now they're focusing on longer-term projects that will help them kind of find new sources of water. They're using federal money to chip in on big, expensive construction. 22 cities in central Arizona are pooling their money to make an existing dam taller and store more water during wet winters.
--:-- Alex Hager: And they're looking at building expensive, high-tech facilities that would take sewage, clean it up till it's safe to drink, and pump it right back into city pipes.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Now, there's a lot at stake here. I mean, cities in the southwest are some of the fastest growing in recent years. And if they run out of water, that growth, economic growth, that would end.
--:-- Alex Hager: Yeah, that's right. Phoenix and its suburbs are still pulling in a lot of new residents and new businesses. Some of them are adding thousands of people every year, and there are giant multi-billion dollar semiconductor plants opening up.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: But at the same time, the state is pumping out groundwater faster than it can be replenished. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs made a big announcement last year that hit the brakes on new building in some suburbs, that national media framed it as the beginning of the end for development around Phoenix.
--:-- Alex Hager: But Hobbs herself said, we are not out of water and we will not be running out of water.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So city and state leaders know they are under a ton of pressure to get this right. You're seeing them try to walk this really fine line of confronting water shortages head-on while still trying to grow the economy.
--:-- Alex Hager: Alex Hager with member station KUNC in Colorado. Thank you, Alex.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Leila Fadel: The states that depend on the Colorado River are hardly the only ones affected by the climate. Florida is among the most vulnerable to change because of hurricanes and sea level rise and heat waves. And it's also solidly Republican, with a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and Republican majorities in the state legislature.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: This fall, Florida is expected to vote for Donald Trump, who has questioned the existence of man-made climate change.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Weekend Edition host Aisha Roscoe saw those two facts in contradiction while visiting Florida, and she's on the line to talk about it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Hey there, Leila. Hello. How was your trip?
--:-- Leila Fadel: It was very wet, extremely wet. This was not the sunshine state when I visited it.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Oh, okay. Yeah, the day my team and I arrived in Miami, Miami got more than three inches of rain. The next day they got more than six inches. So the streets, even just to the hotel where I was staying, was flooded.
--:-- Leila Fadel: We couldn't park our car there, and the water was above my ankles. I was in a dress and sneakers. I had to wade through the water just to get there. My sneakers were soaked for days.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Now, we can't say that that rain was due to climate change. But what we can say is that, you know, storms and rising sea levels will make these flooding issues more likely in Miami.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And it demonstrated how poor the drainage is in that area. It's reminding me, too, this is a low-lying state and Miami has had trouble with flooding for years.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Yes, we spoke to one hairdresser, Gustavo Briand, who used to have a shop in the lowest part of a building in Miami Beach. And he said his shop flooded whenever it rained hard. Whenever it rained, there was a 65% chance that the shop would be flooded.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And at one point, really, we didn't even bother to go and dry it. We just worked like that. So he cut hair in flip-flops and like standing in a couple of inches of water.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: And, you know, customers, the customers were dedicated to getting those haircuts because they would go even in the standing water. OK, not everybody can move.
--:-- Leila Fadel: So how are elected officials responding to this?
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: So some elected officials say they are doing a lot. Like we visited the mayor of Monroe County in the Florida Keys, Holly Rashine, a Republican. She has a wish list of about five billion dollars of things that she wants to do, like raising the roads to protect against rising sea levels and cleaning out canals.
--:-- Leila Fadel: What person or new resident or somebody who already lives in Florida doesn't want a restored Everglades, who don't want clean water or a water supply that's sufficient for their community, a resilient reef, a strong fishery? But those things are really called resilience, like they're protecting the state from the effects of climate change.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: Florida Republicans have not done much when it comes to actually trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that caused climate change in the first place. And in May, they actually changed the state's energy policy to direct the state to boost the use of natural gas.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Now, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the policy is driven by affordability and reliability as opposed to, quote, climate ideology.
--:-- Aisha Roscoe: That's Weekend Edition host Aisha Roscoe, who will have the full report from Florida on the radio on Weekend Edition Sunday.
--:-- Leila Fadel: And that's Up First for Friday, July 5th. I'm Leila Fadel. And I'm Steve Inskeep.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Up First comes your way on the weekend, too. Aisha Roscoe and Scott Simon have the news in this feed or wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Today's episode of Up First was edited by Mark Katkov, Eric Whitney, Matthew Sherman, Jenea Williams, and Olivia Hampton.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: It was produced by Ziad Butch, Ben Abrams, and Lindsay Totti.
--:-- Leila Fadel: We get engineering support from Andy Huther, and our technical director is Stacey Abbott.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Our executive producer is Erica Aguilar.
--:-- Leila Fadel: Join us again on Monday.
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