As industrial operations move to Texas, residents find that their drinking water has been promised to companies. Rachel Monroe writes.
This September, the city council met to vote on whether to proceed with building the desalination plant. The hearing started around noon; by midnight, it was still under way, and three women in the audience, including a former mayoral candidate and a college professor, had been arrested for disorderly conduct.
Some opponents of the plan voiced concerns about its costs. Others were worried about environmental ramifications. Desalination results in large amounts of salty sludge that must be disposed of. Dumping it in the nearby bay risks harming the ecosystem and destroying the fragile local fishing industry; injecting it underground risks causing small earthquakes. Supporters argued that, without the desalination plant, the local economy would collapse. Around 1 A.M., the council elected to pull funding for the project; where, exactly, Corpus Christi’s water will come from is currently an open question. One possibility is groundwater pumped from nearby rural areas; another is relying on a private-equity firm that provides “water-as-a-service” to struggling municipalities, essentially by building its own treatment infrastructure and leasing the water to the local utility. But those plans, too, have met with local resistance. Texas’s economy has boomed for so long that it would be easy to imagine that the growth might go on forever. But, across the state, residents are being confronted with the alarming reality of limited water supplies. According to the state government’s 2022 Texas Water Plan, by 2070, the population is projected to increase by more than seventy per cent as water supplies decline by nearly eighteen per cent. The impact of dwindling water is already being felt. In Houston’s suburbs, homeowners struggle with flooding basements and cracked foundations—consequences of subsidence, or land sinkage caused by groundwater depletion. In the Hill Country, subdivisions swell while nearby swimming holes dry up. In the Rio Grande Valley, scarce water prompted the state’s last sugar mill to close last year; on the outskirts of El Paso, cotton farmers are fallowing their fields. The last time that Texas was in the news for its water, it was on account of the heavy rains this summer that killed more than a hundred people, including dozens of young girls at a summer camp. But flooding and drought can, and increasingly do, coexist in Texas. “Those major floods on the Guadalupe River—that looks like a freak storm in the middle of a massive drought, and now we’re right back in it again with historically low inflows to the reservoirs,” Robert Mace, the Executive Director for the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, at Texas State University, said. “We keep beating records that you don’t want to beat.” Meanwhile, the state continues to woo thirsty industries: OpenAI’s flagship data center, projected to be among the biggest in the world, is now expanding outside Abilene. Texas increasingly resembles its more arid neighbors to the west, where, as an expert once told me of Arizona, all the easy water is gone. Charles Perry, a Republican state senator from Lubbock and the legislature’s leading water expert, believes that the ominous 2022 projections are too optimistic; he has said that Texas may face an annual water deficit of up to twelve million acre-feet by 2050. “This is the only thing that we’re not addressing that is going to be the limiting cap on the Texas that we know and love today,” Perry said at a Water for Texas conference earlier this year. “The time has arrived. We can’t go any longer without somebody saying something.” Part of the problem is the state’s antiquated approach to water policy. Texas follows the rule of capture, also known as absolute ownership, which allows landowners to draw as much water from below their property as they’d like, even if this has a negative impact on neighboring properties. Critics argue that the rule of capture incentivizes over-pumping, and note that every other Western state has jettisoned the rule, instead opting for an approach that mandates “reasonable use.” In Texas, where private property is regarded as sacrosanct, it’s been harder to get lawmakers to move beyond absolute ownership. But it’s misleading to equate the rule of capture with private property, according to Robert Glennon, an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Law and the author of “Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters.” “Property owners in Texas can’t prevent someone next door with a bigger pump and a deeper well from sucking groundwater from underneath their property,” Glennon told me. “Instead of a private-property right, absolute ownership is more of a circular firing squad.” The rule of capture, once an obscure provision of Texas law, is now on more people’s radar after a fight over water rights in East Texas went public earlier this year. “This is the No. 1 topic, the one thing that everybody cares about the most here,” Cody Harris, a Republican state legislator who represents the area, told me. “Usually, it’s property taxes, border security, education, things like that. But right now, and for the last few months, it’s been nothing but water.” The issue came to the forefront when Kyle Bass, a hedge-fund manager who cemented his reputation by betting against the subprime-mortgage boom, in 2008, announced plans to intervene in the looming water crisis. Like Perry, he believed that the worrying projections in the 2022 Water Plan weren’t ominous enough. “Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, I can identify significant problems before they happen,” Bass told the Houston Chronicle. A proponent of what he calls “conservation equity management”—that is, increasing property values through environmental stewardship—Bass applied for permits that would allow him to drill dozens of high-capacity wells on his East Texas ranch. The idea was to pull up to nearly forty-nine thousand acre-feet of water from the wettest part of the state and sell it to the fast-growing Dallas suburbs. Although such a plan is perfectly acceptable under the rule of capture, and similar projects are already under way elsewhere in the state, East Texans bristled at the idea. When Bass’s application came before the board of the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District, hundreds of people showed up to the meeting. Bass was there, too. When it was his turn to speak, he struck a folksy tone. “I wear boots every day. I wear jeans every day. And I spend about all my time out here in Henderson County,” he told the crowd. “The state of Texas’s main problems are power and water,” and he was hoping to address the issue by “doing things that are responsible by law and by science.” He was followed by dozens of residents, most of whom spoke in opposition to his plans. A gray-haired man in a checked shirt who said that he could trace his ancestry back to early Texas settlers called the area’s water “an inheritance for me and my family.” “Amen!” a woman in the crowd shouted. “The aquifer . . . it’s not going to be able to keep up with demand and it’s going to hurt people. It’s going to kill people,” the man went on. The furor was heated enough that it seemed briefly as if the legislature might finally reconsider the rule of capture. Harris has said that he plans to challenge the policy the next time lawmakers meet. “It’s the first time in my career where discussions have been at this serious level, about considering changing rule of capture,” Mace, of the Meadows Center, told me. “I’ve got my bowl of popcorn, and I’ll be watching very closely to see what happens.” In some ways, the past year in Texas has looked like a preview of what future water wars could bring: agriculture pitted against industry pitted against municipalities; the wetter parts of the states fighting to protect “their” water from thirsty and fast-growing cities. As resources continue to dwindle, experts worry that if water conservation comes to be seen as partisan, taking meaningful collective action will be even more challenging. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Texans are increasingly acknowledging the looming water crisis—and that, at least so far, their willingness to do so transcends ideological divides. Earlier this year, Perry persuaded his colleagues in the Republican-dominated legislature to allocate twenty billion dollars of sales-tax revenue for water infrastructure—desalination plants, underground storage, repairs for leaky pipes—in the next two decades. Although some far-right groups have opposed the plan, on the ground that these funds could instead be used to cut taxes, it has support from most high-level Republicans in the state, as well as from environmental groups. Harris, who sponsored the bill, said that the reason the legislature was able to overwhelmingly support the bill—“across the aisle, across the geographic regions”—was because people are coming to understand that finite groundwater supplies are interconnected, and that draining an aquifer in East Texas could affect the drinking water in Houston. “We’re trying to get everyone to see the big picture,” he said. Last week, Texans overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment, the final step in securing the funding stream. “I think that, deep down, the vast majority of Texans understand how important water is,” Mace said. ♦
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