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Welcome to World Ocean Radio...
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
Sometimes I just reach my limit of tolerance and understanding of how we fail. I often ask “what will it take?” Well, here is an example of what it DOESN’T take: an instance of pure, incomprehensible confusion in the face of crisis. Inside Climate News, a responsible newsletter that covers climate issues worldwide, provides a story of Corpus Christi, a city in south Texas in the United States, which like much of the Southwest, indeed the entire country, has been severely affected by increasing critical drought, to the point that supply without intervention could be exhausted by the end of 2026.
Corpus Christi has a population of some 325,000 with an economy based primarily on fracked oil, intensively water dependent, further augmented by new industrial projects recruited in 2017/18, to include a new plastics plant by Exxon/Mobil and Saudi Basic Industries and a new steel mill by Steel Dynamics, both incentivized by special commitments of necessary water supply by the city development agencies. The estimated water need initially amounted to some 20 million gallons a day, then grew to 30 million, yes per day, to be drawn from a groundwater supply already stressed, further exacerbated by the accelerated depletion by drought.
A desalination plant was proposed, designed to produce 10 million gallons per day at a cost of $140 million and two years to build. What followed was the predictable opposition of citizens to the industrial expansion and untenable water consumption. The city had already initiated water use restrictions, banning all outdoor water use, with the industrial users exempted by special city regulations. The arguments were predictable: the economic growth of the city versus the potential rise in salinity levels of Corpus Christi Bay, a result of desalination residue, site of fishing and tourism and outdoor recreation. It is the classic confrontation of value: opposing studies, outraged public meetings, concretized perspectives, and delays, during which the cost of the project ballooned from $140 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion in 2025.
The Governor of Texas stepped in threatened to cut all city funding by the State if the desalination plant did not proceed; the Harte Research Institute of Texas A &M University produced a study that predicted the increased brine waste from the plant in the Bay would cause cascading negative effect within the coastal ecosystem. The lines were drawn; misinformation amplified; delays increased estimated cost of design and construction; alternatives were explored to include further public limits, emergency groundwater pumping of the already delimited reserve, expensive pre-treatment of polluted water from an industrial canal, volumetric water importation, from elsewhere, and wastewater recycling. The actual online utility of the project extended into 2030 while, daily, the crisis increased. Predictably, this month, the City Council voted after a vituperative public hearing, 6-3 to shut the project down. And the crisis remains, unmet, with the possibility that in 2026 Corpus Christi will find itself out of water.
This is not just Texas. It might be anywhere. The problem is a classic matter of supply and demand. And in the larger world we see so many of those who cannot or will not reduce demand therefor accelerating supply to the point of exhaustion. The world is living beyond its means. And the profit motive driven by the systems of unlimited growth have reached their limit. Something has to give. We are participating in a cycle of exhaustion and, in the end, as in Corpus Christi, no one is exempt. And there is no life without water.
What will it take? It will take prescience, compromise, sacrifice, imagination, invention, and action based on the realities we have created by and for ourselves.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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