Its obviously not as dire (yet) but I think Texas will face something like this in the coming decades. Its the kind of problem that requires people at all levels of society to cooperate and sacrifice - farmers & businesses need to draw less, people need to use less and government needs intelligent and actionable policy, plus big investment into unsexy and invisble infrastructure upgrades - so basically we're screwed.

Absolutely. It's probably worse than you think though. I work with some groundwater conservation districts in Texas. Texas has some aquifers that they rely heavily on, and they're being depleted at an unsustainable rate. Efforts to regulate the rate at which groundwater is consumed are met with mixed results because of state laws that make it very difficult to regulate pumping.

One particularly depressing example from the recent past is what happened in Hays County. The groundwater situation in Hays County is bad, to the point that springs are going dry.

Hays County managed to push something through the state legislature that'd give the Hays Trinity Water Conservation District more power to manage groundwater use (it passed overwhelmingly), but then Greg Abbot vetoed it - likely at the behest of Aqua Texas, a big water utility company that pumps a TON of water and has been pretty blatant about ignoring pumping caps and generally acted in bad faith.

Source: https://archive.is/b1bp1

The American Southwest needs to get started on desalination. It’s the only long term answer we have now, know works, and is at least within shooting distance of cost-feasible.

People use very little water. Most of what is drawn is returned back to the system. By that I mean if you use 20 gallons for a shower 19 is going into the drain to be reused.

The only real usage of water is evaporation and that's stuff like growing plants and cooling towers.

Texas is doing things to try and address it. Prop 4 passed allocating another billion a year in sales taxes to go towards water infrastructure.

https://www.texaswater.org/prop-4

Texas has also recently started building new reservoirs after a long time of not building any. Bois d'Arc and Arbuckle have recently been finished, others are in progress, and a few more are in planning phases.

There's a lot to hate on about Texas politics but there are some competent people trying to address water concerns. Not saying Texas is doing everything perfectly, we're still drawing on aquifers at an unsustainable rate and need to change that.

Texas is either desert or desert adjacent. We have always gotten our water by having torrential rains inconsistently.

This doesn't mean don't conserve, be intelligent, etc.

But this does mean that your water won't "balance out" year to year, you need to look at big 25-30 year intervals.

Right now the single biggest waste of water in Austin is leaky pipes. Like infrastructure pipes owned by the city. Meanwhile our water conservation budget is going to billboards telling people to rush in the shower. The entire population could stop bathing and not reduce enough to make up for the leaks happening in the crumbling water infra.

I can’t imagine the various legislatures in several “highly skeptical” states that are either considering or have already implemented “no chemtrails” and fluoride laws are going to find it easy to convince people to allow cloud seeding. Pretty sure Tennessee already preemptively banned it.

Those of us who live in other states also have to prepare for the refugees fleeing ruined lands who will bring their destructive ideology with them.