Posted on 05/09/2013 8:26:17 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
There's a popular saying in America that "whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." The United States supreme court has been called upon to settle a battle that is raging over access to the Red River which serves Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.
Water-starved Texas feels that it is entitled under the Red River compact, which was signed by all four states, to billions of gallons of water from the Oklahoma side of the river basin. Oklahoma insists that Texas is not doing enough to conserve. Texas is also fighting a battle with New Mexico over access to water from the Rio Grande. This dispute may also end up being settled by the supreme court but whatever the outcome of both these battles, the ultimate victory of having an ample water supply that would allow agriculture and businesses to flourish may be an elusive one.
It's not for nothing that Texas is waging water wars on all fronts. A population boom and a climate that keeps getting warmer and drier has led to severe shortages in much of the state. Despite claims to the contrary, Texas is taking this shortage very seriously indeed. The state legislature recently approved a bill, HB4, which provides for $53bn to be spent over the next 40 years on new infrastructure and water conservation efforts.
Total water use in San Antonio is around the same or slightly less than it was in the 1980's even though the water utility has added 300,000 new customers.
As Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical put it, "Water is the oil of the 21st century." Texas has already had to deal with the economic and environmental consequences of oil well depletion. Coping with dry water wells may prove to be a far greater challenge.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Someone needs to improve desalination. That and a remedy for fire ants.
***A population boom and a climate that keeps getting warmer and drier has led to severe shortages***
After two years of drought this year my garden finally got planted yesterday. Today it got washed away by the rains. It took the dirt and seeds but left the rocks.
A PING to my old FREEPER FRIEND.
Things are starting to come full circle.
/johnny
Install nuclear power plants and use them for power, desal and generation of hydrogen fuel through electrolysis, all at the same time. Problem solved.
Thanks for the ping!
Those Okies won’t stand a chance!
To all my Okie friends, get over it, and insult me back, but be creative.
/johnny
lol.
/johnny
Cotton fields in north Texas have been sucking the Ogallala Aquifer dry for decades now, and Texas water rights law just encourages a race to the bottom. Recharge in the Nebraska Sandhills will keep the water fine up north, but parts of Texas are going to have to find something new to do before much longer.
My garden has burned up for 3 straight years. This year, what with the warm weather, I tried starting it early. Ha, mother nature slapped me down with two floods, two late freezes, two hail storms, one horrendous wind storm and I'm crossing my fingers on tonight's storms. So, yeah, same boat. I've replanted some things three times now and it's still not all planted. I'm holding off on the second and third round of tomato and pepper seedlings to maybe next week.
On FOX Bill O' just now, he was talking the meme about the illegals being down and the woman guest told him Texas is up by three times so they can get in for amnesty. If we could get rid of the illegals, there'd be less traffic so less need for more roads, let use of our hospitals, less taxes on our schools, less everything including water.
My soapbox for years has been LCRA taking the water from up stream at the Highland Lakes causing even more businesses to fail who depend upon the water and not to mention city water resources drying up. Thankfully, this year they finally woke up and cut off sending the water down south to the rice farmers. About durn time. I'm sorry, but plant a crop that doesn't require so much water at the expense of others.
Texas didn’t give away any oil. They can pay for it.
Now now. Those are our neighbors, and they'll be the first ones to get our back if the SHTF.
The problem is, North Texas has been on a mad growth tear for fifteen years or better, and folks gotta drink. An estimated 1,350 Americans move to Texas every day of the year, and a lot of them wind up just south of Oklahoma. The pressure on water resources is inevitable.
I hope our two states (and the others) can settle this amicably.
I appreciate your courtesy, AG :-)
We need to deport the liberals!
er... the illegals
Yeah! Let's kick their sorry behinds outta here. Like...you know....both, er, all of 'em. Oh, you know what I mean!
After the revolution, all liberals will be illegal in Texas.
The real problem is government interference in the market. If there were a free market in water (difficult perhaps, but not impossible), then many of these problems would solve themselves. Right now, government subsidizes the cost of water to some, and that encourages waste and misuse. As others have said, if government managed the desert, there would be a shortage of sand.
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