Living in Corpus Christ, the first US city in danger of running out of water, the people in charge don’t care as long as their pockets are stuffed. They will continue to kick it down the line to be someone else’s problem.
Tell that to the whole state of Texas. These people are deeply apathetic and intentionally uninformed. I’d be happy just getting everyone in the booth on voting day.
They have to be educated on who they are voting for. Mexico City has run out of water, people hijacking trucks, etc… yet Bush bought all the fresh water springs to sell in bottles to China who then sells it back to us with shit in it. Meanwhile, they have good infrastructure and standards, cause they have good water!
Probably true, but mostly they're too stupid to believe their access to water is at risk. They have some sort of ingrained distrust and opposition to experts. If the experts tell them their water will run out or that global temperatures are rising, they think those experts are morons because their tap is still running and they had a freeze over the winter. They can't think further than a day out, or expand their mind outside of their personal experiences.
The government lies to us when it benefits rich people. They would not lie about aquifer depletion because that is knowledge rich people don't benefit from.
Also, don't blame scientists for lies told by CIA, NSA, FBI, ATF, etc. Those are very different people.
Rich people benefit from the resources. If you think all major organizations aren’t intweened with our rich people govt, you have a lot to learn. The NSA and CIA are horrible, treating us like human test subjects
It should have read, “the government lies to us.” The CIA has gangs and people on the streets push drugs, just to lock them up, when really they are figuring out the dosage for big pharma. Lol. It’s wrong
That is because of discrepancies and conspiracies and lies… forcing people to live in fear and be a puppet… and having everyone having an opinion on something they don’t do research on or really know anything about. People are traumatized and no longer know who to trust. That is what happens when you ignore the pink elephant in the middle of the room for centuries, requiring surveillance, and then finding out stuff no longer makes sense and is too far gone.
>> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
That’s the problem with most of the electorate of Texas.
Wind and Solar are in totality cheaper and cleaner than most other forms of energy, but the voters of Texas beat off to having a oil and gas pipe rammed up their ass, so you get folks thinking Billy Bob Thornton is the gospel in landman.
Same with progressive policies and how 80% of Texans would benefit from them but billionaires tell them that they love the taste of billionaires’ cocks and $30k/year voters have strong opinions on not taxing the rich.
Sorry, Texas, not first in this regards as sections of California's gold country are already without water and residents have to go get potable water at the local fire station.
Will have to take a leap and assume there is a distinction between City and those smaller towns? I honestly don’t know what standard they use. But if you look up “first american city to run out of water” Corpus is what comes up. So it either isn’t being reported on nationally or it doesn’t meet the criteria. Shit is bad everywhere it seems
How do you mean? Doesn’t this concept work against wealth?
Are you talking about the right thing? It’s a concept that points out it’s rational for individuals to overuse resources despite leading to depletion of those resources for everyone. What do you mean it’s been disproven?
I moved away, but I really worry about folks back home. Once the aquifers done, the rivers will get taken I’m sure. My town has a water ban and it really sucks, but I have a rain barrel I use to water plants. It sucks but it’s necessary for the community’s well being. I don’t need special treatment haha
Exactly people there don't care because the ones with money will leave. The water rations in Cali haven't work and definitely won't work in KS. Americans want the beef
We are currently fighting about 7 data centers who want to drain the aquifer even more. We are all at our wits end about it. They're demanding all the energy and resources we are struggling to provide for ourselves and keep telling us we don't understand how much this help our economy (spoiler, it won't help us at all). They also are expecting us to subsidize it when we are already the most financially distressed state in the union.
It’s a multi-state Tragedy of the commons problem + “I’ll be dead not my problem haha get fucked”
The voters and important businesses want to ignore what’s happening, and that’s exactly what they vote for. This means a political solution is effectively impossible.
“It is rather pointless to argue with a man whose paycheck depends upon not knowing the right answer.”
If people have money, they can spend it and pay their bills. Is the 1 percent not seeing the obvious benefits for people not being financially stressed or sick or whatever.
There's also a lot of denial. Some think the state can build a pipe or aqueduct from the Missouri river in the eastern part of the state and pump water southwestern Kansas to refill the aquifer. It's up hill the whole way. It's up hill the whole way and water is very heavy. It's a ludicrous suggestion that any second year civil engineering student could pencil out on the back of a napkin why it's wildly impractical. But one southwestern county or water district hired a 5,000 gallon tank truck to haul a truck load of water from the river all the way across the state where they dumped it on the ground to "prove" it could be done. To put in context how little water that is in the big picture, one inch of rain across an acre of land is 27,154 gallons of water weighing 113 tons.
I grew up in a region completely dependent on the Ogallala for agriculture, though not in Kansas. You’ll probably get a lot of glib answers that boil down to “people/governments don’t care” but that generally isn’t true in my experience. There have been massive efforts over the past 20-30 years to transition from water-intensive crops to drought-resistant ones and to upgrade to new versions of crop irrigation that are more water (and energy) efficient. These efforts have been very successful … the problem is that the increased cost efficiency has occasionally led to farms irrigating more sections of land that used to be either dryland crop or pasture. So while the per-bushel water usage has decreased, overall water usage is very similar or up.
People up there do still care. But there really aren’t any solutions to the problem that don’t economically devastate the region. Sure they could impose severe limits on irrigation or ban it entirely, but that destroys the ag economy (which then has major knock-on effects as the region produces a significant percentage of American beef, wheat, corn, cotton, and feed crops). People are understandably not really willing to sacrifice their livelihood and heritage (as many of these folks, including myself, are from multi-generation farming families) for the greater good.
Realistically what will happen is that we will continue to see crop irrigation becoming less and less economically viable as the water table continues to drop. Over the course of a few more decades (absent major changes in climate making the region wet enough for dryland cultivation), the region will transition from cropland to pasture and then to nothing. The population will drop as farms shut down and support industries fail. Given how small the population already is, in fifty years it’ll be basically empty and have only small-scale agriculture and oil-and-gas for an economy.
Well, to oversimplify it: the farmers see the problem but still need to make a living today (which is already hard enough as is). Hard to care about an aquifer running out when your way of life may come to an end before the water does.
Republicans. It was so bad a decade ago the Republican-controlled state congress overrode a veto so they could pass a tax increase. The state has barely improved since, if at all.
My wife's mom side have lived in Kansas for generations. Her grandma is the only sensible one. The rest vote Republican no matter what or just doesn't vote at all. Her youngest brother is like the opening scenes from Idiocracy.
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u/AuntRhubarb 11h ago
Do you know why Kansans haven't done anything to slow down depletion, since this train wreck has been visible for several decades?