Hoping for a Miracle to Save the Ogallala Aquifer? Prepare for the New Dust Bowl

> 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"?

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.

"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-...)

We need to stop the enormously stupid ethanol requirements in gasoline, and corn subsidies to produce them.

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?

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.

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.