Texas’s Water Wars | The New Yorker

Charles Perry, a Republican state senator from Lubbock and the Legislature’s top water expert, says the dire projections for 2022 are too optimistic; he said Texas could face an annual water deficit of up to twelve million acre-feet by 2050. (The municipal supply used by the entire state in 2023 was just over five million acre-feet.) “That’s the one thing we’re not addressing that will be the limiting ceiling of the Texas we know and love today,” Perry said at a Water for Texas conference earlier this year. “The time has come. We can’t go on without someone saying something.”

Part of the problem is the state’s outdated approach to water policy. Texas follows the capture rule, also known as freehold, which allows landowners to draw as much water as they want from below their property, even if it negatively impacts neighboring properties. Critics argue that the capture rule encourages excessive pumping and note that all other Western states have abandoned the rule, opting instead for an approach that mandates “reasonable use.” In Texas, where private property is considered sacrosanct, it has been more difficult to get lawmakers to go beyond freehold ownership. But it’s misleading to equate the capture rule with private property, according to Robert Glennon, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona Law School and author of “Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters.” “Landowners in Texas can’t stop someone next door with a bigger pump and a deeper well from sucking up the groundwater beneath their property,” Glennon told me. “Instead of private property rights, absolute property is more like a circular firing squad. »

The capture rule, once an obscure provision of Texas law, is now on more people’s radar after a fight over water rights in East Texas was made public earlier this year. “It’s the No. 1 issue, the one thing that everyone here is most concerned about,” Cody Harris, a Republican state lawmaker 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 just water.” The issue came to the fore 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 thought the 2022 Water Plan’s worrisome projections weren’t worrisome enough. “Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, I can identify important issues before they arise,” Bass told the Houston. Chronic. A proponent of what he calls “conservation equity management” — that is, increasing property values ​​through environmental management — Bass has applied for permits that would allow him to drill dozens of high-capacity wells on his East Texas ranch. The idea was to extract nearly 49,000 acres (49,000 acres) of water from the wettest part of the state and sell it to the growing Dallas suburbs. Although such a plan would be perfectly acceptable under the capture rule, and similar projects are already underway elsewhere in the state, East Texans bristle at the idea. (The Texas Water Development Board concluded that the permits would allow Bass to withdraw more groundwater than is available in the area, but Bass said such an interpretation of his permits is misleading and that it would be “silly” to withdraw more water than the aquifer can support.)

When Bass’ application was submitted to the Neches & Trinity Valleys Groundwater Conservation District board of directors, hundreds of people showed up to the meeting. (In Texas, water departments can approve permits to drill wells, but have limited ability to adopt pumping caps.) Bass was also present. When it was his turn to speak, he took a popular tone. “I wear boots every day. I wear jeans every day. And I spend almost all my time here in Henderson County,” he told the crowd. “The biggest problems in the state of Texas are electricity and water,” and he hoped to solve the problem by “doing responsible things under the law and science.” He was followed by dozens of residents, most of whom spoke out against his plans. (Bass would later call the crowd “woefully uninformed and uneducated on the subject” and “obviously very emotional.”) A gray-haired man in a plaid shirt who said he could trace his ancestry back to the first settlers of Texas called the area’s water “a legacy to me and my family.” “Amen!” » shouted a woman in the crowd. “The aquifer… it’s not going to be able to keep up with the demand and it’s going to harm people. It’s going to kill people,” the man continued. (A judge recently halted Bass’s drilling project, which is the subject of a lawsuit from local companies. Bass responded by filing a lawsuit to reinstate the project.) The furor was heated enough that it briefly appeared that lawmakers might finally reconsider the capture rule. Harris said he plans to challenge the policy when lawmakers next meet. “This is the first time in my career that discussions have been this serious about changing the catch rule,” Mace, of the Meadows Center, told me. “I have my bowl of popcorn and I’m going to be watching very closely to see what happens.”