Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Have to wonder why the tie-in to overseas trade in an article about wells running dry. Feels more like stoking outrage over foreigners than drought.

View on HN

Depleting an underground reservoir is a matter of national security. Doing it to sell alfalfa to another country is off the charts a matter of national security.

Would it be different if the farm was American-owned, but still growing alfalfa and selling it to another country?

Are you suggesting export controls on vegetables?

Also the US long ago decided to make international trade a point of ensuring and reinforcing national security. Marshall plan and all that.

How about restricting the amount of water one is allowed to extract from the aquifer?

This. We already nationally regulate crop rotation to protect against erosion and disease, which can have effects beyond the boundaries of any given farm or owner: https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/crop-rotation-prac.... It seems reasonable to me that access to an aquifer which also goes beyond the boundaries of any given farm would be a reasonable thing to regulate as well.

And it's important for policymakers to have the context that international trade considerations have introduced incentives to the region that may not have been present beforehand - as a result, one should not simply say "we never needed to regulate this before" because there are material changes to the situation.

Are you suggesting this is not a problem, regardless the labels and frameworks currently available to describe it or address it?

But sure, we can declare any kind of export control we determine a state interest in. Other people can play even better word games than you just tried to, to articulate both the problem and a response. You didn't show how it's an invalid idea at all.

As a non-American, I love how America is about individual freedom and the right to earn a living right up until the point where nationalism is invoked and everyone's back to advocating that the government confiscate farms.

Some more coherent theories of ownership (geo libertarian) do not consider resources like land, ore or water to be individually owned - but rather owned "in common."

Under such a theory this issue actually is regarding individual freedom.

As an American, I feel like you're missing the point. Generally the expectation is that you have the freedom to do anything you want as long as it does not impinge upon the rights of others. Of course, there's a lot of nuance buried there, but that's the general principle. I think it's a good framework.

There are all kinds of potential ways to address this or any other problem besides confiscating a farm, and even confiscating a farm doesn't necessarily have to violate any individual freedom principles, since nothing is pure. There has always been eminent domain.

In the case of farms that rely on fossil aquifers, there is no way to address the problem other than shutting the farm down completely. If the farm relies on an unsustainable source of water, then it doesn't matter if the farm is owned by Americans or foreigners; it isn't sustainable no matter what.

You could regulate use of the water, or tax it, etc. All kinds of things. Have some imagination.

If these things happen to produce a side effect that it's not profitable to use that piece of land to grow almonds or grass or whatever, so be it. You still didn't confiscate anyone's property that they ever had any valid right to in the first place in the libertarian fearmongering sense.

Or you could mark the water resource as public and go ahead and confiscate the property for some reasonable market value (not a value based on selling a valuable public resource). It's not inconsistent with property rights and free markets or anything like that even if you do decide you have to plain take over something.

> You could regulate use of the water, or tax it, etc. All kinds of things. Have some imagination.

Unless by regulate you mean ban, none of that will make a fossil aquifer sustainable. The best you can do is push back the date the water runs out, but the water will run out. You can't call it sustainable just because it lasts longer than your lifetime. By that standard, coal mining was "sustainable".

In regions with regular rainfall where shallow wells suffice, sustainable use of groundwater is simply a matter of balancing inflow with outflow. But in regions where aquifers are deep and sealed, or were filled thousands of years ago when North America was covered in a mile of ice, you cannot use the water and balance inflows and outflows because inflows are effectively zero. The only way to balance inflows and outflows of fossil water is to ban the use of fossil water.

That sounds totally plausible. Do you know in which regions have fossil aquifers, and which have aquifers with reasonable inflow?

Also, I don't immediately see why depleting a fossil aquifer would be bad (as opposed to using coal or oil, which affects CO2 levels). Do I miss any side effects? If not, it might be reasonable to use fossil water as long as it is available to make a region liveable, but restrict its use for e.g. agriculture, to make the water last longer.

"Unless by regulate you mean ban"

I mean regulate, as in devise some rule. The exact details are open ended and infinite. You could make up any kind of rule that says what the water may or may not be used for, how much may be extracted per time period, require other things that will eventually lead to the creation of some other water source while this one is being consumed, etc.

All kinds of things.

I was responding to the previous poster's specific claim that they saw this as a national security issue, and simply looking to clarify whether they believed the farm's ownership was a factor in that position, or whether it was about the actual exporting and sale of alfalfa to a foreign power.

But sure, ignore that context when over-analyzing my response.. ;-)

Also, not sure why you felt the need to take a shot at me in the end there. Apologies if my words offended you somehow?

our malnourished cavalry horses!

...no matter who is doing it.

Are we to believe the water usage would be less if Americans owned the ground?

A point probably worth making, but article is aware enough to consider it already:

With all of this, Gary Saiter doesn't care if the farm is owned by a company overseas. The way he sees it, it doesn't make much of a difference who owns the farm; he just wishes they were better neighbors.

"I am kind of ambivalent about the Saudis," Saiter said. "You can't control where people sell stuff, and it's going to go somewhere."

"I just don't like the crops they're growing and the water they're pumping," he added.

I’m pointing out the editorializing implicit in the framing. Apparently groundwater is used for crops all throughout Mexico and the southwest. I definitely wish it weren’t the case and instead a national water grid like how we have national power.

Interestingly, the US doesn't have a true national power grid. https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/us-grid-regions

The practical difficulty of transporting large amounts of water long distances is even worse than electricity, so I don't think it'll ever be easy to say "Minnesota has a water surplus this year, let's just adjust the pipes to send it to Nevada".

> a national water grid

Awful idea. Why should the wet parts of the country pump their water into deserts where people shouldn't be living/working in the first place? If people want to live in deserts, let them find their own water. No other region should be obliged to supplement their unsustainable desert lifestyle. Let nature take her course and depopulate those deserts in due time. If you want water, move to where the water is.

Why don’t we apply that logic to other things? If you want carrots, move to where the carrots are grown. If you want a car, move near a car factory. You want oil? Move to Saudi Arabia.

Everyone benefits from specialization and trade. I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t apply to water too.

Why do countries exist? To protect the interests of the citizens. Water is an important issue

Agreed. We can do shitty shortsighted things for money, but foreign money is "dirty"!?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com