It used to be a staple of enviro-hysteria that the Ogalalla aquifer of the US Midwest was being pumped dry. I guess you can only tell a scare story that doesn't want to come true for only so long before you have to MoveOn™.

Its all about recharge, not merely quantity extracted.

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

General Jack D. Ripper

All;

We'll be fighting wars over water later this century the way we fought over oil last century.

OTOH, note that cheap energy solves the water problem as well.

Fred:

Exactly. It's not as though water is being destroyed...

New Orleans uses so much groundwater that it's sinking at about a meter a century, and in areas adjacent to New Orleans, as much as an inch a year.

Raoul Ortega:

The Ogalalla aquifer is being used far faster than it can recharge.
The fact that it hasn't run out yet doesn't mean that it can't.

Peter and AOG:

Mark Twain was famously quoted as saying (referring to California where water disputes have occured since the Gold Rush): "Whiskey's for drinking; water's for fightin' over."

Houston is also sinking rapidly because of overpumping of groundwater.

I don't doubt that subsidence or other changes in groundwater can occur due to extraction. Rotorua, N.Z. had similar problems in the 1980s with all its backyard geothermal wells not reinjecting the used fluid causing decreased temperatures and decreased hot spring activity in the Maori reserve. (Geothermal energy is not "renewable" but resource extraction like mining.) Then again, places like New Orleans, Houston and Venice Italy are build on unconsolidated sediments and you are going to get subsidence from weight alone.

My point is that we've been hearing these stories for decades. Why are they no longer at the top of the list if they haven't been solved? Take the Ogalalla-- if its still a problem, why don't we hear about it? Is it because the time frame is too long (decades), or that it's self correcting (increased cost of extraction as level drops) or because the Great American Desert, despite all the best efforts, just isn't exotic enough to care about? (National Grasslands indeed...)

Yet another illustration of the sacred heart of enviromentalism. The knowledge that there are too many little brown people in the world.

O.J.,

Problems like groundwater management are the
sorts of ho-hum environmental management tasks
that traditional DPW/water departments have been
doing in the U.S. for decades. These issues
are the essence of the "Act Local" ethos and they
are even the sort of "do-gooder" projects that
used to interest the Peace Corps.

Every summer citizens who would rail against
U.N. control of global resources dutifully obey
local water bans precisely because they are
local and assumed to be based upon some reasonable
criteria.

However, since these projects don't allow for
Jet-setting to interational locales or tying one's self to a giant Sequoia they are not
seen as useful agit-prop unless of course one
could blame the overuse of water in Rajistan
on someone in Texas.

The book "Cadillac Desert" is a good source for learning about the water wars in the American West. It is amazing that the Southwest has not experienced more water shortages to date, with the incredible growth in southern CA, Arizona and Las Vegas especially. A few dry years in the Colorado Rockies could bring this area to its knees.

Oglalla is no longer an issue because, this being a democracy of sorts, the locals decided to pump it dry. It doesn't do anybody any good to leave the stuff down there.

The minority who objected gave up.

When was the last time you heard about the ERA as an issue?

"Climates of Hunger" by Reid Bryson, if you can find it, is good about Western water on a timescale of centuries.