We recently had a personal meeting with T. Boone Pickens followed by a conference call with the plan’s marketing staff. I am intrigued by this plan, which has good points, bad points, and more importantly a tremendous amount of marketing muscle and public visibility behind it.
We’re going to go piece by piece through it, discussing the implications, and today’s topic is the water aspect of the plan.
Water aspect? The Pickens Plan web site doesn’t say anything about water.
Yup, it sure doesn’t, but there is definitely a water component to the Pickens Plan.
First, let’s talk about water rights.
The eastern part of the United States and the wetter portions of the western part have what are called riparian water rights, and Wikipedia defines it thusly:
Under the riparian principle, all landowners whose property is adjacent to a body of water have the right to make reasonable use of it. If there is not enough water to satisfy all users, allotments are generally fixed in proportion to frontage on the water source. These rights cannot be sold or transferred other than with the adjoining land, and water cannot be transferred out of the watershed.
The western part of the country where the land is dry has what are called prior appropriation water rights. The definition is much different and much fiddled in the legal sense, as we’ve been fighting over water in that part of the world for two centuries.
The legal details vary from state to state; however, the general principle is that water rights are unconnected to land ownership, and can be sold or mortgaged like other property. The first person to use a quantity of water from a water source for a beneficial use has the right to continue to use that quantity of water for that purpose. Subsequent users can use the remaining water for their own beneficial purposes provided that they do not impinge on the rights of previous users.
The riparian rights are based on English common law. The Wikipedia entry on prior appropriation rights is less clear but in other reading I find that this principle is based on Spanish law. It makes sense; both England and the U.S. east are wet, while Spain and the American Southwest are dry.
The land where Mr. Pickens owns easements to place wind turbines is over the Ogallala aquifer, a 174,000 square mile underground lake that we’ve lowered three feet in the last century. The Ogallala aquifer is paleowater from the last ice age and the aquifer is far deeper in the northern end than the south. Now along with the electric transmission corridors we discussed earlier Pickens wants water pipelines to Dallas and other thirsty Texas cities. One has to wonder how much more rapidly the already declining aquifer will fall should the usage accelerate from just local agriculture and municipal use and into full tilt export to urban markets.
Water is going to be an increasingly contentious issue in this country as climate change further dries the American southwest. The Colorado doctrine was laid down in 1922, right at the beginning of a historically wet period that was unlikely to be repeated without human initiated global warming and will almost certainly become much, much worse as temperatures rise.
The effect of climate change on the Ogallala has not yet been determined; we’ll have to wait for a couple of decades after the complete loss of arctic summer sea ice becomes a reality to be sure. If the five hundred year floods now arriving each decade in Iowa expand to cover Nebraska and Kansas that would be one thing, but if Nebraska’s sand dunes go active again and sweep across current agricultural lands that would be something else. We’ve set things in motion and we just can’t be sure what will happen next.
This issue, like the other issues we’ve explored in the previous two diaries on the details of the Pickens Plan, would be amenable to analysis by the Millennium Institute, at least for some aspects. Work in sub-Saharan Africa has already made them quite skilled at assessing water resources along with the economic and environmental effects of their exploitation.
We keep starting with Pickens and returning to Herren; any ‘plan’ that is proffered must be properly vetted, or we’ll be flushing tax dollars into boondoggles and pork barrel spending with little, or worse yet, negative results.