BEYOND THE PIPELINE /// Water-pumping Windmills tap into the giant Ogallala Aquifer 50 feet below the surface in Nebraska, where a leading expert says the State Department is "supposed to protect the United States interests and resources, and they haven't done their job."

Under the high plains of the midwest, there is a resource called the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a subsystem of a huge underground mega-system called the High Plains Aquifer. It is made of permeable layers of sand, sandstone, and gravel within which are contained billions and billions of gallons of water. The nature of the aquifer geology makes the water easy to pump. The system covers 174,000 square miles beneath eight different states, ranging north-south from North Dakota to Texas, and from Nebraska in the east all the way west to parts of New Mexico. Nebraska depends most vitally on the water found in the aquifer. And there are two concerns about the aquifer that ought to be serious concerns in our politics, but that aren't. One of them isn't being treated as a concern at all. The other is not being treated seriously, but instead as a slogan and one more litmus test by the Republican presidential candidates, and as some sort of nuisance complaint by a Democratic administration that appears to be falling down on the job.

The first problem is that portions of the aquifer are running dry. The second is that Trans-Canada, the Canadian oil giant, wants to run a pipeline through a portion of the aquifer in Nebraska. How you feel about that depends entirely on how much you trust oil companies these days, because your State Department appears to be taking a dive on the question, and your Environmental Protection Agency is dodging it entirely.

Make no mistake. You screw with the Ogallala Aquifer and you screw with this nation's heartbeat. Twenty percent of the irrigated farmland in the United States depends upon it. Pumping the water from it is all that has kept the Dust Bowl from coming back, year after year. Any damage to it fundamentally changes the lives of the people who depend on it, their personal economies, the overall national economy, and what we can grow to feed ourselves. Absent the aquifer, and the nation's breadbasket goes back to being a prairie, vast grasslands that the people who first crossed them referred to as a desert. You end up with dry-land corn and some dry-land wheat. And the aquifer is far easier to empty than it is to fill. The technology to fully exploit it has existed only since the 1950's, and portions of it are already dangerously low. It won't be fully recharged until the next Ice Age.

Water is the next big fight in this country. By now, we are used to the big fights over energy reserves, over coal and oil. There are even some new ones, over fracking for natural gas and over things like the XL pipeline, which we will get to shortly. But there haven't been serious fights over water for a while. Now, they seem to be coming thick and fast. A report by the Congressional Budget Office as far back as 1997 said that, particularly in the West, conflicts over water would take many forms — farmers vs. cities, sportsmen vs. developers, environmentalists vs. practically everyone else. The report concluded:

First and foremost, western rivers provide water to agriculture to grow crops. They also help cities meet municipal and industrial needs for water and generate electricity. Other benefits that rivers provide — such as habitat for fish and wildlife, recreation, and cultural values for Native Americans — were historically ignored in the water equation but increasingly are considered legitimate and valuable uses. Demand for water by existing agricultural and urban users outstrips available supplies in many cases, however, so demand for water for public purposes or for increased urban supplies necessarily conflicts with existing patterns of water use.

The ongoing drought exacerbates all of these concerns, particularly in the most imperiled portions of the Ogallala Aquifer, which are in Oklahoma and in the Texas Panhandle, were the drought has been the most severe. This has caused the demand for water to skyrocket as the available supply dwindles. Texas did put in place some water-conservation rules that restricted the amount of groundwater that farmers could pump, but they fairly well defined the concept of locked barns and escaped horses. Moreover, Governor Rick Perry, who is now running for president, after a fashion, anyway, did manage to arrange for one of his billionaire campaign donors to get a contract to build a radioactive waste dump in an area that environmentalists say puts a portion of the aquifer in danger:

Environmentalists raised concerns because the site was near the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides water for drinking and agriculture from Texas to Nebraska. The engineers and geologists reviewing the application for the commission said it didn't address those water contamination concerns. Glenn Lewis, part of the TCEQ team that reviewed the permit, called the initial application "laughably deficient."

Silly environmentalists. What could possibly go wrong there?

None of the GOP candidates, including Perry, take at all seriously most of the science behind the anthropogenic climate change that many scientists believe is behind the horrendous drought conditions that are putting such a strain on the depleted aquifer. (Perry thinks the whole thing is a scam thought up by scientists who are just trying to suck up grant money.) But, while they may not be concerned about the Ogallala Aquifer, they do all love them some of that XL pipeline. Prior to the Iowa Straw Poll, all eight of them pledged their undying fealty to the project. It is now one of those things you have to say if you want to be a serious Republican player. No abortions. No tax hikes on anyone or anything ever. And glory be to the XL pipeline.

The XL — also known as the Keystone Pipeline — is an ambitious project that seeks to transport 900,000 barrels a day of synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen all the way from upper Alberta in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This is to enable the energy companies to exploit the Athabasca "tar sands," and it is the latest miracle of "energy independence" being peddled by the extraction industries. There is a lot of money and political clout behind it; to the surprise of absolutely nobody, the Koch Brothers, the Randolph and Mortimer Duke of wingnut welfare, stand to make a fortune if and when the pipeline is built. Environmentalists have pushed back against the development, which, because it involves both the U.S. and Canada, now rests with the State Department, and with President Obama, who will make the final decision as to whether or not the pipeline is built.

Many of the environmental questions about the pipeline concern the extraction and use of tar-sands oil itself, which is said to be remarkably "dirty" oil. But the main environmental objection to the pipeline concerns a 92-mile portion of the pipeline that crosses through a section of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Sand Hills region of north-central Nebraska. As part of its environmental-impact statement, Trans-Canada, the Canadian oil company who will build and maintain the pipeline along with ConocoPhillips, had to give the federal government its assessment of a "worst-case" scenario in which the pipeline ruptured, spilling its contents into the aquifer. Which is where John Stansbury comes in.

Stansbury is a professor of environmental water resources at the University of Nebraska. He got a look at Trans-Canada's proposal and decided to put together his own report about what a "worst-case" spill in the Sandhills really would mean. His findings were radically different than those put together by Trans-Canada. Stansbury estimated that worst-case spill would contaminate nearly five billion gallons of groundwater, and that the "plume" of benzene and other contaminants would be 40 feet thick, 500 feet wide, and 15 miles long. This was far worse than Trans-Canada's worst estimates. Last June, Stansbury filed his report as part of the "comments" on the Trans-Canada environmental impact statement. Which was about when politics fell on his head.

"You had to expect that Trans-Canada would try to refute what I say," Stansbury says, "because I'm taking issue with what their findings are. I'm not upset with them. They're trying to make a profit. I am upset with the State Department, because they're supposed to protect the United States' interests and resources, and they haven't done their job. They're supposed to make sure that the environmental-impact statement is produced through independent and unbiased sources and they absolutely have not done that."

What Stansbury thought would happen was that the State Department would take his findings and have them assessed by an independent agency. Instead, what the State Department did was hand his report over to Trans-Canada so that the oil company could evaluate Stansbury's criticism of itself. At the same time, Stansbury found himself caught between environmentalists, some of whom hyped his findings, and advocates of the pipeline, who called him an alarmist.

"One thing I did not do was say that a spill could ruin the entire aquifer, which is what some people maintain that I did," Stansbury says. "But that's beside the point. You shouldn't get to pollute just some of the aquifer. You shouldn't get to pollute just some of the air."

The decision on the XL pipeline is stalled. Opposition is rising. Famous people have been getting arrested outside the White House while demonstrating against the pipeline. On the other side, the calls for the now-iconic XL Pipeline are growing more and more shrill. And, it seems, somebody finally cares about the Ogalalla Aquifer.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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