The Southwestern state announced Tuesday that it would spend $500 million on salty water from deep underground and wastewater from oil and gas production as a solution to its shortage.
New Mexico will invest $500 million into purchasing water from controversial sources, including treated oilfield wastewater, as a means to bolster the state’s water portfolio. The purchases are the latest in a long-running series of deals dipping into untapped waters to shore up dwindling supplies as climate change and decades of overconsumption drive aridification of the Southwest.
The water would come from two sources: brackish saltwater, from aquifers deep underground, and produced water—wastewater from oil and gas wells. Neither source, but particularly the latter, is immediately fit for most consumptive purposes. But as traditional water supplies like rivers and groundwater aquifers are depleted in the Southwest, local and state governments are increasingly investing in new water sources to keep up economic and population growth, despite skepticism from environmentalists and water experts.
“In arid states like ours, every drop counts. A warming climate throws that fact into sharper relief every day,” said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham in a press release Tuesday. “This is innovation in action: We’re leveraging the private sector to strengthen our climate resiliency and protect our precious freshwater resources.”
read more: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06122023/new-mexico-aridity-brackish-produced-water/
No joke, if there’s anything the Horizon series gets right, I’ll bet it’s that the next US civil war is about the western states’ water rights. Right now, the copium still hasn’t run out, we’re still telling ourselves that maybe climate change won’t be so bad (it will) or technology will save us (x to doubt. Maybe if all the money going to spyware capitalism was actually going towards fundamental research and real technical innovation, this would be true, but all the ‘tech’ money really translates to is just fancy new ways of selling ads). Soon enough, though, shit’s going to get real. People are going to run flat out of potable water at some point in these states, and maybe the farmers will finally collapse the aquifers, and a whole lot of commerce will collapse all at once and people will have to move or die. Probably around the same time we start seeing catastrophic sea level rises (spoiler: later this decade). This is trying to bail out a sinking ship with a spoon.
What can be done about it? If you’re not political, it’s going to get political when you’re forced to relocate and people start mighty morphing into authoritarian fuckheads against you because you’re not a local. I think maybe the best thing all of us can do is to start working on a voluntary network to support climate migrants from wherever to wherever, and start laying the legal groundwork to support huge population shifts at the local level via better urbanism, more pro-housing policies, building good community hubs/third spaces, and setting strong anti-discrimination laws.