Comments

1
Yep. Only in Texas. Never happens elsewhere in the world. Africa was the breadbasket of the world 2000 years ago Charles. Oh those stupid Africans, only in Africa right?
2
Well, the government will step in and bail them out, of course. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses — that's the American way! This is why the price of natural gas is so low recently. We're all paying the cost one way or another.
3
The fact that you think this is only a problem in Texas (where all the dumb hillbillies live, right?), shows that you are the one who is bone stupid.
4

Deadly floods hit several states

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-new…

5
And another thing, don't single out Texas. Fracking is causing environmental problems in West Virginia, North Dakota, and a lot of other states too. It''s because we have a voracious demand for cheap energy in all 50 states.
6

#5

That's why SLOG should be promoting hydrogen created from renewable energy.
7
Well, T. Boone Pickens has been buying up water rights in Texas because he knows - and rightly so - that after oil, water is the next big thing.

We may be in the right place to stave this off more than other states.
8
@5 - And England... oh right, that's our 51st state, my bad.
9
In Freeland, on Whidbey Island, the community's water supply wells are threatened by a plume of gasoline that came from a leaking tank. The tank is gone, the owner is ?? - but the damage remains. Who will pay for the extraordinary cost of cleaning up the town's water?

And yet, advocates for protections and limits - i.e., environmental laws and regulations - are always labeled "environmentalists" As if those rules and regulations are only about butterflies and polar bears. As if those environmental rules and regulations have nothing to do with a healthy economy, social justice or a stable government. And so, businesses and the right wing continue to attack environmental protection rules and regulations as too costly* - and "environmentalists" are marginalized.

*No? The biggest hang up in the first special legislative session this year - the session that did nothing except waste time was Boeing's opposition to environmental rules. Or look to see the level of funding for the Dept of Ecology compared to ten years ago.
10
Sort of reminds me of the fertilizer plant that exploded.
11
@6: Hydrogen is a HORRIBLE energy-storage medium. It needs to be kept at very low temperatures and fairly high pressures to keep it a liquid rather than a gas. In the presence of oxygen, it burns rapidly and violently. It's very hard to contain, as the molecule is so small that it readily dissolves in most metals, allowing it to leach through tank walls. Lithium ion batteries are better in nearly every respect.
Bailo, you clearly have no experience with hydrogen. I at least have taken college chemistry.
12
@2 "Privatize the gains, socialize the losses."

I like that.
13
@11 Toyota, Honda, and GM have experience with hydrogen and are still making sizable investments to see if they can bring something viable to market. I guess I'd take my chances seeing if they can engineer and produce something at scale rather than a college chemistry class. The same goes for any other intermediate technology on the way to true carbon neutrality. I think it's too early to declare any of them hands-down losers.
14
@1,

That was the Nile Delta. It was no longer the breadbasket of the "world" after the Islamic conquests shut down the flow of grain supplies to the West. They still grow crops there, dumbass.
15
@1 The climate shift and drought that changed north Africa took over two thousand years. The Sahel (south of the Sahara) has been one of the most environmentally barren places on earth for thousands of years. And the Sahara returned to a desert nearly 3,500 years ago.

The African "breadbasket" (mostly the nile valley) was caught between these two desolate and climatically volatile areas. Again. The process took thousands of years.

Texas has gone dry in less than forty. And exclusively because of human misuse of the water table.
16
@14 true. But not quite like in ancient times and only now due to massive restoration efforts. There was a time when they tried irrigating with saltwater the droughts got so bad.

But yeah. #1 is an idiot making a stupid point. The greed in Texas has fucked up the water in Texas and nobody else.

North Africa was more fucked by cyclic changes over millennia in the north Atlantic currents and geography. Not by over grazing or whatever theory people used to float.
17
All states in the Southwestern United States go dry on a regular basis. It happens more visibly in some states because they do not have water rich neighbors from whom they can steal water rights or the political muscle to enforce stringent water conservation efforts. All of this is information easily accessible to someone who is interested in actual well-rounded reporting. You should try it some time.
18
@4 Yes, of course there will be more large floods. Increased flooding and increased drought are both consequences of an enhanced hydrological cycle with global climate change. Held & Soden (2006, J. Clim) lay out the energy constraint argument very well. Isaac Held also explains it on his blog:
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held…
19
Now, if only the whole state would go dry, everyone would have to leave Texas, and Louie Gohmert and most of the rest of their Congressional delegation would be out of a job. That could be an improvement.
20
Texas is in worse shape than their western neighbors because they're not party to the Colorado River Compact, like AZ, CA, NV, and parts of NM and UT are (as well as two states in Mexico). There isn't any water to steal, unless they figure out how to steal it from the Mississippi.

But having access to other states' water doesn't protect you. The entire southwest has been through a century of extraordinarily HIGH rainfall levels; the true "normal", even before taking global warming into account, is about half of what it has been. Those areas can probably only support about half the population they do now, which is a hard thing, because their entire economy has been dependent on rapid, uncontrolled growth. AZ and NV are especially vulnerable. They're going to be out of not just water but electricity pretty soon, because they're going to have to shut down Hoover Dam fairly soon.

I've said it several times before: water is going cause a shooting war in the American Southwest relatively soon.
21
@17. That's bullshit. Southwest states, municipal water supplies and domestic wells do not "go dry" every summer. The article being referenced was about a drinking water supply - not a creek bed.
22
@18, exactly. Bigger and more frequent storms are not the answer to a water crisis; they accompany and heighten it.

The other way that global warming is destroying the Southwest is by encouraging the spread of bark beetles, which kill the forests. Millions of acres of forest have already been lost, and the resulting desertification encourages the wrong kind of plants.

On the other hand, the legislatures of Texas and Arizona are pretty sure that God is going to save them, because they're special, so I wouldn't worry.
23
@19 The only people who would leave would be the tech carpetbaggers and Brooklyn is welcome to them. They'll come; they'll strip your area of anything original; they'll run up the prices of real estate even more; and then they'll leave for the next "hip" place. They've already ruined Austin. Please, take them.

I acknowledge that Texas has problems. If it were perfect, I might be home and not in SF. But I grow weary of this assumption that the only bad place is Texas; that there's nothing bad happening in Seattle (cops) or NY (cops) or Mississippi (Mississippi). It's cheap and lazy and counterproductive.

On that note and to add something positive to the discussion, I offer this: If you are truly interested in learning more about the complete scope of water issues in the Southwestern US, I suggest you start with this book: "The Cadillac Desert: The American West and It's Disappearing Water," Mark Reisner, Penguin Group.
24
"Praying for a change in the weather couldn't hurt", sez the head of Southern Nevada Water Authority:

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/water-…

She wants federal disaster aid for "drought", but this isn't drought, it's the new normal. And unlike Nevada, Texas isn't even paying attention to the problem, worrying instead about the sexual purity of their neighbors' daughters.
25
@23, Reisner's book is excellent, but it is almost thirty years old. We desperately need a new book on the subject. The closest I've found is A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William Debuys.
26
Ah Fraking, because nothing is a better use of our precious water than mixing it with a slurry of toxic chemicals and injecting it right beneath the aquifer. I suspect we'll be living in a Tank Girl?Solar Babiers-esque dystopia where water is the most valuable commodity fought and killed over.
And why again with the "My first thought was 'god help us", it's a lot like saying "we've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas".
27
Actually, the "bone-stupid farmer" is not the culprit, Charles. If you read the article carefully, you'll note he leases the land. The water rights were probably sold by the *owner*, without the farmer's consent.
28
@ 27 is right. Even if the farmer were a landowner, owning land does not mean owning the mineral rights under that land.
29
@25 Thanks I'll look it up and read it. One thing I would note is that at least parts of Texas do share water. They share Ogallala Aquifer with the Dakotas, Kansas and Oklahoma. Unfortunately it, too, is being pumped dry, mostly being used to irrigate subsidized farm crops.
30
What was it Marie Antoinette said? Let them drink oil... or something like that.
31
After a title like that, I have nothing to add.
32
Please.

Once the water shortages have allowed an appropriate level of corporate consolidation, the Federal Government will be moved to provide the money for a solution.

Failing any huge advances in technology, this will probably involve pipelines to bring ocean water to the high desert, where solar distillation farms will be built and run "at a loss" with federal subsidies and mandated corporate profits. Of course, the resulting particulate will be labeled "waste", and another arm of the company will be paid to remove it; extracting the salt and dumping into our food supply for cheap profits and further distortion of nutrition. Later, most likely extremely environmentally-unfriendly processes will allow for the reclamation of a variety of metals from the other particulate, namely gold, although I am sure there will be others.

Also, the intakes will be "dolphin-safe", by which I mean commercial fishing interests will obviate the need to turn most of the "organic inflow" into a pipeline friendly slurry.
33
dang not good

the only alternative energy comes from calories and sleep

shorten the work week, shorten our commutes
34
nothing much to add to this except to say: it is hilariously ironic that the 2nd major thoroughfare (other than Main St) is Reagan St...I'm gonna guess named for St. Ronnie.
35
Not sure if this is a Texans-are-all-dumb thing. Could have happened anywhere. Texas just may be leading the way.
36
@35: It's not that Texans are dumb, it's more that Texas is our national testing lab for bad ideas in right-wing legislation. California serves the same purpose on the left.
37
Not exactly related. There are several underground water rock formations that can be dried up independently even without drilling and fracking. Also, there are pre-existing geological faults in that area, and with the high water usage there, the water could move away from the water wells anyway without a single oil or gas well being drilled. For example, in the far western Kansas area a big hole opened up where there was no drilling or fracking around, but because of the drought that emptied an underground limestone cavern. This article is nothing more than fearmongering without good scientific knowledge of hydrology and geology and without knowledge of the methods of cementing and user of packers to isolate the oil / gas formation from the other water formations. Do an Internet search for "groundwater hydrology" for that area of Texas and see the independent issues, such as high water usage during a drought.
38
Not exactly related. There are several underground water rock formations that can be dried up independently even without drilling and fracking. Also, there are pre-existing geological faults in that area, and with the high water usage there, the water could move away from the water wells anyway without a single oil or gas well being drilled. For example, in the far western Kansas area a big hole opened up where there was no drilling or fracking around, but because of the drought that emptied an underground limestone cavern. This article is nothing more than fearmongering without good scientific knowledge of hydrology and geology and without knowledge of the methods of cementing and user of packers to isolate the oil / gas formation from the other water formations. Do an Internet search for groundwater hydrology and geological formation characteristics in that area, and you will find that there is high water usage in a drought condition that is taking more water from the formation than can be replenished.

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