The depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer in Western Kansas
kansasreflector.com
kansasreflector.com
It's not the "earliest users", but the earliest plot of land, municipality, et cetera that gets priority. You can stake your claim and transfer it from what I can tell.
I honestly don't understand how this doesn't fall afoul of the Article 1, Section 10 Titles of Nobility clause. I asked a lawyer who wrote about this clause once in an email and he thought it odd to think that this is a violation of the Titles of Nobility clause. But shouldn't any heritable and transferable privilege to a public good be considered a "title of nobility"?
It's important to note that, at least some, constitutional scholars see a focus on an actual "title" as beside the point. A state can call Michael Jackson the "King of Pop" without violating the clause because this title does not actually grant noble privilege in any way. It's just a name. However granting a heritable privilege that is not available to anyone meeting a similar, non-heritable requirement (such as a driver's license, which is theoretically equally available to all), does violate the titles of nobility clauses even if no actual "title" is granted with it.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C8-2/...
Since property can always be inherited, and ownership of property confers rights.
None of this involves ‘nobility’ (necessarily) either.
It's this senior right privilege, that is granted exclusively by the state, that I'm claiming is the title of nobility.
You’re disagreeing with John Locke, among others, here.
You should be understanding the points I'm making here as I believe I've highlighted what I think is salient. Others can disagree with whether these points are indeed salient, but they (and you) should at least basically understand the point I am trying to make.
I assume John Locke would understand, as he was alive during the passing of the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660.
Anyone can go up to them and draw water from them. Wells and aquifers can be a bit more complicated, but aren’t that different when you get down to it, they just require some equipment to do the same thing. The closest equivalent would be someone needing to use a 4x truck to drive to the lake to get water.
Same with land - anyone can just walk to them and start using them. Beyond what you can personally, physically control at any one moment anyway, which is pretty limited.
What makes them NOT public is gov’t granted monopolies and rules. Like property rights. Society enforced restrictions, which means even if you’re not physically there guarding it 24/7 it can still be ‘yours’.
Examples of natural private property would be something like your own body parts, or things in your possession, or land you are currently standing on, or things in the contents of your mind.
They can be. Native Americans considered e.g. land to be a common resource, and yet today you can own it. What is a "common resource" is a matter of social convention, not a consequence of the laws of physics.
Or do you think the ability to put up fences and signs around an area where other people would like to be too is natural?
There is a reason why wars are fought over land (and who controls it), and adjucation of who controls land is the monopoly of the gov’t - and is literally one of the primary responsibilities of every gov’t.
If it comes down to it, something has to break the tie somehow right? Because while in most years, there is plenty of water, in the years there isn’t it can literally be life and death. And timelines for figuring out who does and does not get access need to be as short as days sometimes.
Different courts have decided different rules, but senior rights holder having priority is basically ‘first person to be using it (historically) gets to keep using it if there is a conflict’.
Which stops someone from moving in and screwing over the existing people (as hard!). Think of the alternative - you build a house in a remote area, dependent on a spring. You have plenty of water.
Housing development gets built 20 years later, also dependent on the spring. In good years, everyone has plenty. In bad years…. You die of thirst? Or what? At least the subdivision knew what they were getting into, when you built your place there was no subdivision!
Same with your farm example. First guy to setup the farm did so with expectations of a certain situation. New guy moves in, and should he now get the rights to half of the ‘the first guys water’ in lean years? Maybe meaning neither have enough water to farm? Or should the first guy have the right to the water he was guaranteed when he first moved in, and the second guy might not get enough in a lean year - but at least knew that was what he deal before he moved in?
Others are king of Solomon like ‘split it down the middle’ (everyone hates this idea, since no one might end up with enough water), or ‘fixed allocations first, then proportional later’, or ‘life critical uses first, then lower priority later’ (easy to game/screw with existing rights holders - add enough new mouths, and none of the ‘less critical’ rights holders get any).
Courts move too slow to resolve these kinds of issues when they become critical - which could be on as short a term as a week or a few days, with no notice.
And not having a general rule resolve these kinds of things leaves a massive amount of uncertainly that due to the severe consequences of these kinds of situations can easily lead to people getting killed or even wide scale wars starting.
Or as they say in the US West - whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.
A manor lord is not a noble. Functionally speaking, people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who held large estates, would have been roughly equivalent in stature to a manor lord, or what was by that time a gentleman. They would have been eligible to vote in, or be a member of, the House of Commons, but not the House of Lords. In general, the goal of the Titles and Nobility clause is to foreclose the possibility of an American peerage.
It is worth noting that there is a very important difference between a title of nobility and title to property rights. Were I an English peer, I would have no right to decide who should inherit my title upon my death (or even before then); the title's inheritance is strictly decided by the monarch. But for property, I can generally subdivide the property at will, and even grant other people the property or use thereof subject to almost whatever constraints I can put on it (this is where things like the rule against perpetuities come in).
Water rights are property rights, not titles of nobility, and it's not even a close question.
From what I recently read, subinfeudation of a manorial property (lesser baron) was pretty much banned in 1290 with the Quia Emptores statute. After passage of the law they could only transfer the right entirely. A manor lord is a lesser noble, just like a knight, just not a peerage noble.
The ability to subdivide or lease out water rights is limited in Kansas according to certain laws. And regardless, it's the heritable senior right to this shared resource that certain holders have, that others with equally sized farms or populations cannot claim, that I'm calling a noble entitlement.
Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in 1789 that "Earth belongs – in usufruct – to the living." Jefferson's metaphor means that, like a usufructuary, human beings have the right to use the earth for their own benefit and derive profit from it, but only to the extent that their actions do not impoverish the earth's bounty for future generations.
I very much agree with Jefferson’s views on this matter.
It's an intriguing idea. Now spend even one minute thinking deeply about the Equal Protection Clause, and drown in sorrow.
We just shouldn’t subsidize crops in this region. If people want to make a run at it, more power to them and it may work in some years. But no subsidy
Is it obligatory to put in stuff about climate change in spite of the fact that it's barely relevant?
We are over pumping when we exceed the replenishment rate. And that is going on in just about every aquifer I have heard about. Climate change has nothing to do with it. Almond tree growing, ease of well drilling, and improper use of the pure water have more to do with it (e.g., https://www.protectouraquifer.org/issues/poas-fight-to-stop-...)
1) Some plants are far better at recharging aquifers than others (indeed, some will basically prevent aquifer recharge). Climate change, along with probably the more significant human element here, will affect what plants grow here.
2) Rainfall. https://climate.k-state.edu/precip/county/ I'm not seeing huge changes over the last 129 years, so maybe this really isn't affecting recharge of the aquifer from Kansas at least.
Some parts of the aquifer seem to be recharging well. I know that Texas has some recharge locations, but I wonder what Nebraska is doing right. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...
> Aquifers hold water in between bits of sand, gravel, or clay. When the amount of clay in an aquifer is particularly high, the grains arrange themselves like plates thrown haphazardly in a sink—they’ve basically got random orientations, and the water fills in the spaces between the grains. But if you start extracting water from an aquifer, those spaces collapse and the grains draw closer together. “Those plates rearrange themselves into more like a stack of dinner plates that you put in your cupboard,” says Sneed. “It takes a lot less space, obviously, to stack the plates that way. And so that's the compaction of the aquifer system that then results in land subsidence at the surface.” > > But wouldn’t pumping more water back into the aquifer force the clay plates back to their random, spacey orientations? Unfortunately, no. “It'll press those grains apart a little bit—you'll get a little bit of expansion in the aquifer system represented as uplift on the land surface. But it's a tiny amount,” says Sneed. We’re talking maybe three quarters of an inch of movement. “They're still stacked like the plates in your cupboard,” she continues.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-ongoing-collapse-of-the-worl...
But not all aquifers are clay. The ones that are composed of coarser material are more stable. Like a lot of Earth science, it's complicated.
But, yes, once clay has compacted, it's not reversible and that natural storage space has been lost.
https://www.cardin.senate.gov/press-releases/end-subsidies-f...
https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/understand...
Think in systems. If you are attempting to force them to failure, find the weakest points and exert maximum force at those points.
Below comments are correct, EVs will ultimately be the equalizer
> The Kansas aqueduct is a nutty idea, but one that has taken root among some individuals in western Kansas desperate for a solution to continue irrigation after the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. Aside from its expense and impracticality, it is a regressive idea that harkens back to the days of ditches and avoids a conversation about us having squandered the resource beneath our feet.
Like, WTF? How the hell a "conversation" can solve the depletion issue? An aqueduct is a possible solution, yet it's bad because it can solve the issue?
In the case of the aquifer, it's clear. It's a finite resource that is going to be depleted sooner rather than later.
But that doesn't apply to diverting water from the Missouri River.
I guess the author just wants people to self-flagellate and repent their sins, rather than look for solutions?
These businesses are going to go under. You cannot run food manufacturing operations with the amount of water they have available. We will grow food someplace with more water.
The people who own those businesses will hold on until the bitter end. This is expected. They will try increasingly desperate measures to continue running their business, including but not limited to ecologically destructive practices. It won’t work. There’s no water.
2004 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_discharge
2000 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
It might work, though would be expensive, but what are the literal downstream effects?
However, calling the proposed aqueduct "regressive" is not a good reasoning.
For them it means: "Actually thinking about a solution instead of wringing hands"
Solar, wind, nuclear, biodiesel?
In particular, Kansas gets a whopping 50% of energy from wind and 14% from nuclear. They still use coal for 30% of the generation, but it's on the way out.
Mind you, mandating that the pumps are powered by renewable energy would be a good requirement.
> If so then you are making climate change worse just so you can grow crops in an area that isn't suitable for for growing crops because of a lack of water.
So your whole idea is to wring hands, self-flagellate, and then to write tearful articles about that?
There are some problems that can be solved if everyone gets over themselves and applies a can-do problem-solving attitude. There are other problems that are caused by fundamental system constraints and can't be solved, only worked around.
The trouble is that a certain kind of manager believes that every problem is the former kind, and considers everyone who acknowledges the existence of the latter kind to be weak-willed.
Yes, the water pumping is unsustainable, so we need to talk about the way to replace it with sustainable water sources. It will probably also involve optimizing the water usage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Water
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/07/19/massive-plumbing-system...
Sibling comment mentions returning the land to nature; new expanded national lands would be great. If anything, efforts to accelerate the depletion should be undertaken to speedrun the outcome. This avoids the slow decline of unnecessary intensive farming of the land, and pushes the system to failure more rapidly.
"Some areas in Mexico City are slipping as fast as 20 inches a year in recent decades, according to researchers. Overall, the clay layers under the soil have compressed by 17 percent in the last century. A culprit for the uneven sinking in Mexico City, researchers say, is pumping water from underground. The water extraction enables the porous soil to compact and depress. Because more than half of the city’s water supply comes from underground aquifers, its leaders have struggled to tackle the problem. Most of this sinking, the researchers say, is irreversible because the Earth is still compacting and responding to the ways water was drained a long time ago. Cabral-Cano and his colleagues project the land is going to sink another 100 feet over the next 150 years."
I was working for Halliburton, so I knew there were good reasons to bail Houston/New Orleans out. Just take a cursory look at any map of our energy infrastructure.
Conversely, there is little reason to bail out Kansas.
There are just some uncomfortable realities about how logistics and infrastructure work in this nation. And that means places like, LA, Norfolk, Seattle, New York, New Orleans, Houston, etc are far more important than, say, Fort Lauderdale or Miami. Not that we shouldn't try to help places like Fort Lauderdale or Miami. But for instance, not that it ever would, but if it came down to Norfolk or Miami, it's gotta be Norfolk we save. If it ever came down to Houston or Savannah, it's gotta be Houston we save. Those choices are just engineering sense.
The issue here is Kansas didn't do anything to make that area of its state indispensable to the US. Maybe wind farms or something? I don't know? But having been around the people who make those calls, I can tell you they aren't terribly sentimental by nature. If they are sentimental at all, it is by legal obligation (ie - force) or political pressure.
I invest my dreams in modern civilization and molten salt thorium breeders built along existing corridors of grid transmission lines with no need to be sited near water (or even near people if they're skittish about it). Growing a massive HVDC grid that spans the continent and ultimately the globe, which feeds legacy HVAC tuned grids.
While "too cheap to meter" has been abused as a cheap sound bite, the real objective is to put energy on the grid steadily and with every new ~3GW plant along the corridors the net-cost of electricity (aka cost of personal and business living) will decrease over time until terawatts of energy capacity are being introduced on a regular basis. The Government will have to be involved on some level, but not the current regime that seeks to impose financial burdens to curtail "growth", which brain-dead people have declared as synonymous with "harming the Earth". They have been convinced that "people are sh*t" and only the worst ideas will prevail in the end. So why try? Throw a monkey-wrench in it! And surely me and my family will be part of the elite entitled to the thin gruel of energy!
No, it is recognized that the energy density of clean energy matters. And for molten salt nuclear it is a ratio of a million to one over a carbon-hydrogen bond. And the cleanliness of wind and solar are dismal considering manufacture, tiny yield, ecological disruption and the political corruption involved in selling it as any kind of 'solution'. Ironically without nuclear we cannot even afford the energy budget to recycle the parts in wind and solar! And with it we wouldn't need wind & solar. Molten salt nuclear in tiny buildings carries no inherent risk of explosion or contamination of the wider area. Any damage (inevitably caused by nasty people, not the process itself) results in hot material in a very small area waiting for cleanup.
The delivery of practically-unmetered energy to the DC grid means that Big Projects become possible, projects that you know require massive energy unless you are insane. Such as finally permitting EVs to roam the landscape, a renaissance of continent spanning electric rail and the electrical generation of separation of synfuels and fertilizer to power legacy uses like aviation and shipping... without ground extraction of dwindling petroleum products. But "natural gas will last forever!" they whisper to each other as they use it to supplant wind & solar to an extent that is practically fake.
And one such Big Project is recharging the Ogalla Aquifer with fresh water piped from the North, where polar weather patterns replenish supply. Such a massive aqueduct that farmers can irrigate directly from it with the massive surplus returning to the aquifer itself.
In place of being hysterical as doomsayers rattle about global temperature, a practical application of massive energy to a practical result, monitoring the gradual RISE in the aquifer towards its historical level rather than its 'inexorable' fall. Proponents of energy scarcity are actually pushing for more dust bowls as we just retreat from the lands we have changed, rather than heal them.
It is just a dream, and I'm always being flamed by people who hate plants (CO2) and yearn for some brown Earth of yesteryear. I am just too old, for I remember old times when hippies could have been sold on 'greening the Earth and increasing crop yields' as a good thing.