America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Good luck with that one. Southern California has defeated basically every attempt to reform water rights.
The water compacts between states are the responsibility of the federal government, but water rights (i.e. landowners' right to access ground water and sometimes river water) are state matters.
Right now all the people out west think that is something that applies to people in third world countries. In the US it's going to be an attempted migration of the west's middle class to other regions.
At first they will have buyers for their homes to fund the migration...until they don't. Before that there will be a frenzy of wasteful government spending to try to preserve the regions and way of life. It will not work.
Climate change is the reason we keep digging up civilizations that "just disappeared without a trace."
One reason urban developments are so sparse and widely-separated west of the Rockies is that there's simply insufficient water, rights are held under Spanish-derived law (seniority), and those senior rights are held, many by large West Coast cities, most especially Los Angeles.
Climate changes across that entire region will have a profound impact on coastal dwellers, even if sea-level rise is modest and coastal climates are largely unchanged. Simply because that's not where the water is coming from.
(Northern California's water largely comes from Sierra Nevada snowpack (San Francisco, Central Valley), or local reservoirs (mostly coastal counties). Santa Barbara similarly relies on local sources, largely Lake Cachuma, a reservoir in the Santa Ynez Valley. Supplies can dip parlously low in drought years. <https://www.countyofsb.org/2795/Reservoirs>).
Most crops you can’t regionalise, they grow where they grow and that’s about it. You won’t get oranges in Maine (except under greenhouses at insane costs).
The Central Valley is exceptional because of how flexible and productive an environment it is, it’s home to half the fruits, vegetables, and nuts production of the US, 8% of the US agricultural value, and is the primary worldwide producer of several crops.
So what is necessary is to change minds about what produces people get, and when.
Right now many pleases have a tragedy of the commons situation. If you don't use up as much water as possible, and dig deeper wells to use it up faster than your neighbors, then you can end up with no water and out of business. If you could secure specific water rights you could plan your business. Farms _would_ go out of business with crops that are too water-intensive relative to the price, but that is actually a desirable property of the system. Those crops will raise in price until the demand lowers and the cost of higher water is sustained. Lower water-utilizing crops will replace the previous higher intensity usage.
But if the water sources are publicly managed and water consumption is priced progressively (and sustainably) at the source, I don't see what the problem is of letting markets do the rest.
Although water pollution should be addressed as well, but this is required regardless of the scenario.
That's absolutely insane.
Don't worry poor people, you won't be able to drink water because Amazon is being lazy with pumping tap water to cool it's data centers, but it's okay because markets have deemed you irrelevant!
Also data centers don't use water for cooling. They primarily use air cooling, and last time i checked air conditioning doesn't require a constant supply of water.
Some do, some don't.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/thames_water_to_datac...
> Not all datacenters use water for cooling, but of those that do, a large facility might use anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day
Nearly all cooling towers require a constant water supply. Some water is recycled, but it is not anywhere near a closed loop system.
i.e. The more you consume, the higher you pay per gallon.
IANAL but is that even remotely feasible? My impression is that they're basically akin to property rights, and the state unilaterally revoking them is going to be blocked by the courts.
The problem is that the water is still pumped out the acquifer, and non-acquifer water is still water which generally becomes unavailable to other uses because it evaporates or is too polluted.
In that example, 1 oz of beef contains 10 of my taste units while 1 oz of almonds contains 0.5 of my taste units.
Since each person's taste units are different, humans have decided that the best way to allocate food is to sell it on something called a "market", where each person can express their own individual taste units, or "preferences", by buying the food on this "market".
The price of the food on the market reflects the scarcity of the food and everything it took to produce it, although sometimes there are distortions which should be corrected externally (e.g. by a government), not by restricting the types of food we consume, but by addressing their root causes at the source (e.g. by taxing water consumption to address the tragedy of the commons, or by taxing CO2 production to address global warming). These taxes should be increased up to the point where consumption/pollution becomes sustainable.
Beef and dairy can be a way to convert grasslands to human-consumable calories or be used to convert overproduction of grains (necessary as insurance against crop failures) into high quality protein, but it can also be a way to degrade marginal ecosystems and convert groundwater into an unhealthy national diet.
I see this argument often in the discussion around meat (beef, mostly) consumption. I also see the counter that most of that water goes straight back into the ground and most of the rest goes back in after it goes through the cow.
The counter seems logical to me, but I am probably missing something?
For example just looking at the prevailing winds in the San Joaquin valley I'd expect a lot of water that evaporates there to end up as rain in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Does that in fact happen?
If so, where does that water go after it becomes rain?
If not, where does it go?
The Earth's water systems as a whole are a huge collection of cyclic paths, with many branches. If you artificially take water from someplace and drop it someplace else you have almost always just borrowed the water and it will eventually end up back where it came from.
"Eventually" could be a very long time though, and if we borrow enough water for long enough it is possible we could permanently change some of the cycles so that some places never recover their water.
I've not been able to find any analysis that looks at this from a whole systems approach and figures out if we are borrowing enough to permanently change things, or how long it takes borrowed water in specific cases to effectively return.
With pastures, none of that applies.
Like GP I am also more interested in specific details of the water cycle. A strictly X uses Y gallons of water, therefore bad, is entirely incomplete to deal with nuances like GP is talking about, where the water ends up. If evaporation and wind up to the Sierra means 90% comes right back down as groundwater, that net usage is an order of magnitude less, and some other area is still benefiting from more water.
Zoom in a little bit, and that single amount of water is unevenly distributed but still part of a cycle that is global in scale.
Zoom in a bit more, and it's extremely unevenly distributed and a part of regional cycles in which it is relocated in the short term but restricted in the long term.
Zoom in a bit more, and it's extremely unevenly distributed and a part of local cycles, where it never leaves a watershed (for example).
Which zoom level(s) you choose depends on your purpose and your agenda.
Alfalfa consumes 10-20x more water than almonds.
Alfalfa is used for animal feed, is using fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, animal ag produces methane and causes water pollution and oceanic dead zones, is a source of zoonotic diseases, consumes a lot of antibiotics ...
None of that is true with almonds and pistachios, as both crops could replace milk and dairy, and they produce proteins and fats that can feed the population sustainably.
I understand that growing almond monocultures in a desert may be a stupid idea, but remove animal ag. water usage and you will have water problems no more.
Change those almond monocultures (and alfalfa fields) to diverse food forest, and you may reverse desertification and increase precipitation in that area.
> Pasture requires more water
I’m not sure where you’re getting that information?
It’s not a common practice to irrigate pasture. Animals are watered from “dug outs”, wells or rural water programs which draw water from rivers like the Missouri.
Water is *particularily* precious.
On a serious note, we should stop exporting to feed camels in the Middle East and heavily tax water usage for food exports outside the US that go to rich countries (like China or those in Europe).
https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/record-us-fy-2022-agricultural....
South of Berlin, Google wanted to build a data center, but couldn't because they couldn't get rights to water.
If it was for cooling, they could build a high temperature data center, and manage for 30% humidity instead of controlling temperature. Google makes their own servers, so they could make sure it could stand the heat.
I think this too strong of a generalization.
The Great Plains region, for example, relies on the Ogalalla Aquifer for it's groundwater, which has been dropping at accelerating rates because so many farmers and ranchers draw heavily from it (even more than they would otherwise, thanks to crop subsidies), along with being a huge drinking water source. The depletion of groundwater is a big deal in that region.
On the other hand California is 1/6th of the USA's economy, and 12% of the population. The "Southwest, Great Plains, plus California" is a significant part of the USA.
The reality is, when it comes to groundwater anyway, all you need to do is look at land area vs mountain ranges and you can form a pretty intuitive understanding of water flows, since water flows to the lowest spots until it eventually reaches the sea or seeps into the ground. The parent to your post is very correct, California because most of the state is between the sea and a close-in mountain range has minimal ground water outside its direct watersheds, and must use intentional irrigation and pumping to move and use water. Consequently, they are one of the primary users of water originating in other parts of the country. As someone residing in Colorado, we are /well/ (no pun intended) aware of how water is used and how water rights work, and the reality is that California has an out-sized usage compared to other states, and frankly takes more than its fair share.
> Over a third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts are grown in California.
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/Statistics/
> California is America’s food-producing powerhouse. Despite being home to just 4 percent of the farms and ranches in the country—83,217 of them, according to the most recent United States Census of Agriculture—the state generates 11.04 percent of the U.S. agricultural value. In 2021, that meant $54.5 million in cash receipts from agriculture poured into California. In fact, California is the fifth-largest supplier of food and other agricultural products in the world.
The Central Valley alone—the 400-mile-long, 50-mile-wide region starting just south of Bakersfield and extending northward to Redding—produces 8 percent of America’s food supply though it contains just 1 percent of the country’s farmland.
Half of all fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. come from California, and the state effectively produces all (at least 99 percent) of America’s almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, and walnuts. California is also the nation’s leading grower of lima beans, lemons, kumquats, raspberries, strawberries, and spinach—to name just a few.
https://californialocal.com/localnews/statewide/ca/article/s...
That's about the percentage of the US population that resides in California.
If they produce 8% of America's food supply, that means they're a net importer.
As I said, most of the country doesn't get produce from California. It's regional.
The 8% was for the central valley alone.
> As I said, most of the country doesn't get produce from California
Quite a lot of it does; you seemed to overlook “Over a third of the country’s vegetables and three-quarters of the country’s fruits and nuts are grown in California.”
It’s not a problem for just the Southwest. It’s a problem for the whole country. Massive amounts of food derive from the use of groundwater in the U.S. and we can’t just shift production easily. This would cause huge disruptions in the food supply and for the economy. It requires federal solutions. It’s a problem for America.
I don't see why this requires a federal solution. Those states own/control their own water. If they want to use it all up, that's their problem. It's all going to get used up eventually.
The states have formed various compacts, under the supervision of the federal government, the detail how water will be shared among them. These cover, for example, the Colorado, Rio Grande and Pecos rivers.
And if Kansas drains the Oglalla aquifer, that severely screws the other 4 or 5 states that draw from it.
Which is why it is a federal issue since the federal government controls interstate trade. Thus it’s accurate to say that America is depleting its aquifers. Which is the point of my response to you.
That you think states control their own water suggests you don’t understand the issue. For instance, one state can’t just put a dam on river and declare all of the water theirs and not allow distribution of it to other states.
And for the east coast and Mississippi region, they don't use deep aquifer wells, they use rain-charged ground water wells that fluctuate with the climate.
New York and pretty much all states east of the mississippi suffer from an overabundance of rainwater/water. Water will never be a long term problem here, at least not for a very very very long time.
As for kansas, no offense, but who cares? There have always been supposed water issues in that part. If the fear mongers were right, kansas would have been a barren deserted wasteland decades ago. Of course if the fear mongers were right, civilization would have ended already due to peak oil, global cooling, global warming, 2012, the pandemic, etc.
BTW, more than 70% of americans live east of the mississippi. So america isn't using up its groundwater like there is no tomorrow. Small parts of america might be. But on the whole, the US is rich in water. Water isn't a problem in the US and will never be. But for some reason, the fear mongering never ends. Maybe fear sells. I don't know.
Every fear years, the news runs the same fear mongering story. It's like groundhog's day.
Whatever happened to lake mead? Did the apocalypse already happen and I miss it? I swear a few years ago, california was over due to water. California still around? Mount Rainier was supposed to lose its snow cap by now. Is Mt Rainier bald as a monk now?
In MA, polluted groundwater from past industrial usage is often mentioned in political debates. It's so easy to accidentally pollute groundwater because so many people just don't know any better.
If those "don't know any better" were appropriately punished, they would learn real quick.
We have a concept in the US called "ex post facto." Basically, you can't be prosecuted for breaking laws that are passed after you did the crime. I think a lawyer could explain the nuances better than I can.
PFAS is a good example. For example, where I live, there is a groundwater plume of PFAS from firefighters practicing putting out fires. The PFAS was in fire suppressants that fire fighters practiced with.
Who's going to be punished? The firefighters were doing their jobs, and had no reason to believe they were polluting groundwater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-...
At least for those regions closer to the sea level.
But, sufficiently diluted, it’s just seawater.
In a sense, it’s the same effect as water evaporating over the ocean: Water goes out and salt remains.
After that, it’s just slightly more salty seawater.
It starts getting really expensive moving a lot of heavy brine and attempting to dilute it, especially when the amounts of water you'll need will create mountains of salt.
I mean, sure, technically it could run out over millenia or something?
https://www.csis.org/analysis/south-americas-lithium-triangl...
If we are smart about it it’s a win win win. Unfortunately we don’t have the workforce to accelerate nuclear development as Greenpeace etc. scared away investment over many decades.
And of course that's assuming we use desalination for 100% of water use in the entire US.
The full lifecycle cost of nuclear may still be worth it. Though I don't think that's guaranteed and risks are greater than wind, solar, and batteries.
If we hadn't made the terrible decision of halting construction for decades and miring the process in an impossible tangle of red tape, nuclear power would be much cheaper today. The only way forward is to build and build so we get the unit economics down and our energy production way up.
> Several of my colleagues — led by Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle — have spent months compiling data on groundwater levels across the U.S., based on more than 80,000 monitoring stations. Chris and Mira did so after discovering that no comprehensive database existed. The statistics tended to be local and fragmented, making it difficult to understand national patterns.
That reminds me of the situation that came to light a couple years ago during the controversies over police killings of unarmed black people. There were no national records kept of police killings, and often no state records.
The first decent national level data had to be put together by going through local news sites, individual police department records, filing tons of requests under state public record laws, and many I'm forgetting.
This makes me wonder how many other things there are where we might have a national problem but don't know it because we mostly only have local records?
Also, I wonder how many things there are were we only have local records but we think we have a national problem because people assume what is happening where they are is happening all over?
For those who have not read the article, the newsletter has a good TLDR:
> The trends in this new database are alarming. Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.
> The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it. “There’s almost no way to convey how important it is,” Don Cline, the associate director for water resources at the United States Geological Survey, told The Times.
Unironically.
I mean, sure, conserve, but until those lakes drain, the US should be solid.
Plus we pollute the Great Lakes like there's no tomorrow.
I see no way around this except to continue to build large cities in the desert.
The rest of the Great Lakes are unusable for many applications without processing the water first.
Acquifiers are mostly ancient systems that were at equilibrium before humans started pumping from them. Any use of groundwater is potentially destabilizing the equilibrium.
What you said is true of surface water, however: there where you need to seriously limit its use and others where you don't need to care.
Note, however, that even an island as famously wet as Great Britain in recent years has faced water shortage issues, not because the total precipitation across the whole island is too low, but because it falls in the "wrong places".
There actually isn't a lot of spare water in the Great Lakes, certainly not enough to irrigate the southwest, let alone the rest of the country.