▲ 81 points
back
70 comments
> But Kansas water rights are based on the “first in time — first in right” principle, which means the earliest users are given priority.
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"?
> Article 1, Section 10 Titles of Nobility clause
It's an intriguing idea. Now spend even one minute thinking deeply about the Equal Protection Clause, and drown in sorrow.
What Title do you think has been granted by having a particular property right tied to a particular piece of property?
Something equivalent to manorial lordship. The title itself would be "senior water rights holder". The right granted by this heritable privilege is the right to first service. A first service which may result in an inferior holder of water rights not getting any water at all.
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/...
> Something equivalent to manorial lordship.
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 the Wikipedia article on usufruct.
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.
The reason why the lawyer looked at you strange is because if you applied that rule it would literally break all property rights, everywhere in the US. So of course no court is going to apply it that way.
Since property can always be inherited, and ownership of property confers rights.
None of this involves ‘nobility’ (necessarily) either.
Its the right to withdraw water, which isnt static
We don't need western Kansas agriculture's production from a national supply perspective. All of those row crops can be grown in other rainfed places.
Western Kansas seems to average in the upper teens to mid 20s of inches of rainfall per typical year (drier years do come as the article notes). If it could be husbanded well you'd think that would be sufficient rainfall to grow these crops.
That’s an average calendar year most likely. A corn crops roughly needs 20 inches of water to be viable. Corn is usually only grown in 1/3 of the year.
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
It is sufficient to grow the crops, but not at the yields you want. You can’t grow in that region without irrigation.
Your user name makes me trust the accuracy of your comment.
For now. And American oversupply stabilizes other regions of the earth.the arab spring rebellion started of as a protest against rising bread prices.The bread prices rose due to American food aid being redirected to biofuels. Good intentions do not transfer to good politics. If change is necessary make it gradually so the world can adapt to it.
"Ogallala Aquifer... is recharged on a geological time scale... That depletion is accelerated by climate change and continued over pumping of water."
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-...)
In general I understand and agree with your point. With respect to recharging aquifers, climate change can have an effect in two ways:
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...
It's my understanding that there's no meaningful way we can recharge the aquifers:
> 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...
This is an important point, and true insofar as it goes (because the discussion you quote is about clay).
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.
Yeah, you'd preferably want to recharge it before the land subsides. But even if you don't it's best to try to maintain the current levels than let them decrease even more.
Increased temperatures also affect evaporation rates (and hence how much watering needs to be done). Climate change and the future of farming are pretty intimately connected.
We need to stop the enormously stupid ethanol requirements in gasoline, and corn subsidies to produce them.
43 million acres of land are farmed for ethanol. Key political positions depend on the corn and ag lobby support, including Iowa. We won’t remove these subsidies, we’ll only destroy demand with rapid EV uptake that destroys gasoline demand for light vehicles (and the ethanol blended into it).
https://www.cardin.senate.gov/press-releases/end-subsidies-f...
https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/understand...
progress, not perfection. Chip at it one bit at a time.
That’s one of the easiest bits to chip off, though. There is zero technical or environmental reason to do it (and quite a few not to).
Certainly, I’m just saying that if the thought is the change is going to happen on the policy side, that is unlikely due to entrenched self interested parties and US governance having mostly failed.
Think in systems. If you are attempting to force them to failure, find the weakest points and exert maximum force at those points.
Agree, but from a political standpoint it's cheap. The subsidies are overall not expensive and it's good to incentivize over production of crops from a nation security standpoint.
Below comments are correct, EVs will ultimately be the equalizer
OK, I started reading the article, and then found this gem:
> 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?
They are going to deplete the river, like the Colorado river, losing most of it through evaporation. This is a stupid idea beacause it is stupid in the south west.
It’s not a solution because it doesn’t solve the problem of excessive water use.
What makes the water use "excessive"?
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?
The Missouri discharges an average of 2,445 cubic meters of water per second (2004). This is 77.1 cubic kilometers per year, but it varies significantly per year, and per time of year. In (2000) 26 cubic kilometers of water was removed from the Ogallala aquifer. So for an average year we're looking at 1/3 of the total flow over the entire basin. And on those years when water is needed the most this is likely to be an even larger share of the river (such as 2006 when 26 cubic kilometers was just over 2/3 of the total Missouri discharge).
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?
The solution is obvious and inevitable.
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.
The diversion of water isn't a solution. You have to pump water up hill. Where are you getting the energy to do this? Are you burning fossil fuels? 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. Are the farmers going to pay the $18 billion and $1 billion a year for this? No they won't. It's always a hand out.
China already did a project like this to move water from the wet part to the dry, because their leaders were eager engineers and wanted to do it. Turns out that the wet part isn't making enough water to the dry part now because of climate change. Same thing would happen here. The rockies already create a rain shadow over the great plains, there isn't a way to get water from the other side of the rockies, because that is what it would take. and Cali has been in a drought for along time too. There just isn't water available.
Denver actually gets its water from the western slope:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Water
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2021/07/19/massive-plumbing-system...
I'm curious to read about it, do you have links? I can (slowly) read Mandarin.
China's South-to-North Water Diversion Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...
Especially with the latest US Supreme Court Rulings, the agencies cannot do anything, it is up to just Kansas or Congress. And without a National Commitment, Kansas alone will be unable to do much.
At some point, people have to come to terms with their poor choices. Building in a flood zone, building in a dense forest and farming in an arid land all seem like poor choices for long term success. However, there may be some good to come of depopulating SW Kansas. With the farmland abandoned, maybe we can finally give it back to the bison?
Why should they care when FEMA will just keep bailing everyone out, subsidized by everyone else's tax dollars. Just look at New Orleans, but now imagine it scaled up to the entire state of Florida...
I don't know man?
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.
No, actully, people can jusdy keep doing stupid things because we have such a largesse of basic comfort. They arnt going to suddenly change and fascism.is likely the.equal choice than any.ecologically smart.one'
Not a bad thing. The aquifer will be depleted, existing use cases will die, and solving this can be revisited decades or centuries from now after the electorate and representatives have turned over. The outcome is based on choices made.
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.
You can't fix a depleted aquifer on human timescales. The ground settles and loses the ability to hold water.
Depends strongly on the geology. Clay will compress greatly, but bedrock/limestone will not at all. Most aquifers consist of a diverse range of geologic materials in varying thicknesses with different ingress types that will vary in capability to recharge.
Even better, thanks for the context.
While math challenged dreamers get lost in quaint medieval Solar & Wind (and Fusion scalable some day don't hold your breath) fantasies...
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.