A parched Texas is giving away water to oil and AI

By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion

Imagine being marched by force through a desert with barely anything to drink while your captor repeatedly cools himself by dumping gallons of water on his head, and maybe you’ll start to get a sense of what it’s like to live in Texas these days.

Water supplies in South Texas, already stretched thin after a seven-year dry spell, are being further strained by thirsty oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other energy-related industries that have boomed in Corpus Christi in recent years, Bloomberg News reported recently. The obvious, bitter irony here is that the fossil-fuel industry that is consuming most of this water is also the primary driver of the climate change that will make it even scarcer in the years to come.

Less obvious is what to do about it. It’s one of the knotty problems communities and policymakers face as they wrestle with the causes and effects of a heating planet while also trying to keep people employed, healthy and reasonably non-rebellious. In a perfect world, there would be no greenhouse-gas-spewing, water-guzzling refineries or petrochemical plants, but in this reality they’re huge employers and taxpayers that can’t just go away overnight.

For Texas, there are few easy answers. Worsening water scarcity is already endangering Corpus Christi’s economic boom by threatening shutdowns and potentially scaring off new investment, the Wall Street Journal suggested recently. Two chief sources of the city’s water supply are at just 12 percent of capacity. Both are on track to go dry in less than two years, leaving the city unable to meet demand.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-a-parched-texas-is-giving-away-water-to-oil-and-ai/