This nation is running out of water at an alarming pace. An exhaustive 2023 investigation by The New York Times revealed that – thanks largely to industrial farming and the need for drinking water – “America’s life-giving resource (water) is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won’t come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves if they recover at all.”

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After analyzing tens of thousands of groundwater monitoring wells, The Times found that almost half the sites have “declined significantly” over the past 40 years. Four of every ten sites hit historic lows in the past decade, with 2022 being the worst year yet.​ Already, they reported, the major aquifer beneath Kansas could no longer support industrial-scale agriculture, causing corn yields to “plummet,” and Arkansas was using more than twice as much water from its main agricultural aquifer as rainfall and other sources were putting back in. Arizona had to halt any new home construction that relied on aquifers in Phoenix and drinking water on Long Island was being threatened.

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“In other areas, including parts of Utah, California and Texas, so much water was being pumped up that it was causing roads to buckle, foundations to crack and fissures to open in the earth.” The earth literally breaking apart is clearly bad, but over-pumping can also release the cancer-causing heavy metal arsenic into the water supply.

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This is an incredibly serious issue because we are running out of water. Thanks to a crippling drought and an industrial boom that are depleting its reservoirs, Corpus Christi, Texas, faces a severe water shortage, threatening industrial operations and the water supply for over 500,000 people in seven counties, including those on a Navy base that service combat aircraft like Black Hawks.​Corpus Christi attracted over $57.4 billion in investment over the past ten years, luring plants for the likes of Tesla, Exxon Mobil, and even Saudi Basic Industries Corp., the kingdom’s petrochemicals company. We’re sure it seemed like a smart idea at the time, but these plants use massive amounts of water to do things like refine lithium for electric-vehicle batteries and transform fossil fuels into gasoline, jet fuel and other refined products.​ The Wall Street Journal reports that the Saudi’s $7 billion plastics facility alone consumes an average of around 13 million gallons of water a day – about 13 percent of all of Corpus Christi’s water demand in wintertime.

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Mike Howard, chief executive of Howard Energy Partners – an energy company that owns several facilities in Corpus Christi – put it bluntly, “The water situation in South Texas is about as dire as I’ve ever seen it. It has all the energy in the world, and it doesn’t have water.” 

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The Colorado River is also in crisis and the seven states that rely on its water can’t seem to figure out what to do about it – putting 40 million people at risk. Lake Powell is so low that there’s a chance its hydroelectric plant will no longer produce power, risking the flow of water to Arizona and California.

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The Colorado River Research Group put it like this: “Conditions on the Colorado River are, to put it bluntly, dire. The reservoirs that, when full, provide Colorado River water users with roughly four years of annual flows are now more than two-thirds empty… Both the water supply and institutional systems are failing; many of the environmental systems failed years ago, with others just hanging on desperately. Another year or two of low inflows and we will completely blow through the cushions provided by reservoir storage… entering a world where physically moving water downstream becomes limited both by hydrology and engineering.”