This is Planet Money from NPR.

The climate crisis is really hitting America this week.

We've had Hurricane Ida rampage through the Eastern United States bringing deadly flooding

everywhere from Louisiana all the way up to New York.

And as the Eastern United States gets wetter, on the other side of the country you've got

the opposite problem, super hot and super dry.

Following the summer's heat waves, wildfires are out of control with South Lake Tahoe

evacuated and all of California's National Forests closed.

Rain can't come soon enough.

So our daily podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money, has spent all week digging into

the economics of droughts.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Daryl M. Woods.

Economics is all about how scarce resources are divvied up and fewer those resources are

more important than water.

So today on the show we share a couple of stories of water shortages, how we got here

and also how to take a little bit of pressure off the system.

That's coming up after the break.

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