by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
June 24, 2026
Chris Tomlinson’s recent column posted below, “Texas is running out of cheap water, and will need to make salty water sweet,” should land like an alarm bell across the state. His central point is simple and sobering: Texas is outgrowing its freshwater supply. Population growth, drought, fracking, semiconductor production, data centers, and the vast water needs of artificial intelligence are converging into a crisis that can no longer be deferred.
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Tomlinson rightly points to Corpus Christi as the canary in the coal mine. There, the city’s surface water supplies are running low, new groundwater wells have not delivered as hoped, and desalination remains expensive.
Meanwhile, the endless drive to attract industry is increasingly ill advised, stretching the water supply beyond what residents can reasonably bear. The result is a familiar Texas pattern: public resources get promised to private growth, and ordinary people are left to pay the bill.
This is where the water crisis becomes more than an infrastructure problem. It is a democracy problem. Who gets to decide how much growth is too much? Who benefits from water-intensive development? Who pays when systems fail? Who is asked to conserve while industries expand? And whose communities are treated as sacrifice zones in the name of “economic development”?
These questions echo themes I have raised in other posts about the Hot Earth, climate disruption, and the extractive logic that governs so much of our public policy. Climate change is not some distant abstraction. It is arriving through heat, drought, flood, fire, migration, insurance costs, utility bills, and water scarcity. It is arriving through the quiet violence of unaffordability. It is arriving through the realization that the poor, the elderly, rural communities, and working families will be the first to experience what policymakers long treated as someone else’s future.
Tomlinson’s column is especially important because it pierces the illusion of cheapness. Texas has “run out of cheap water,” as Sen. Charles Perry put it. That statement deserves our full attention. Cheap water was never really cheap. It was subsidized by aquifers, rivers, ecosystems, Indigenous dispossession, rural extraction, underpriced infrastructure, and future generations who were never asked for consent. Now the bill is coming due.
Desalination may become part of the state’s water future, but it is not a magic wand. Making salty water sweet requires enormous energy. It also produces concentrated brine that must be handled carefully to avoid serious environmental harm. If desalination becomes another excuse for unrestrained growth, we will have learned nothing. We will simply be using more energy to solve the water crisis while worsening the climate crisis that intensifies drought in the first place.
The same concern applies to artificial intelligence and data centers. As I have written elsewhere in reflecting on AI and extraction, artificial intelligence is not weightless. It is not merely “in the cloud.” It is physical infrastructure: land, water, energy, minerals, labor, servers, cooling systems, and communities asked to absorb the costs. The language of innovation often hides the material reality of extraction. In Texas, that reality is becoming increasingly visible as rural communities confront large-scale data centers that demand huge amounts of water and electricity.
It is telling that even Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has called for a moratorium on new data centers, warning that rural communities that have conserved water and land for generations are now being asked to compete with corporate giants whose demands could overwhelm local resources.
That alone should widen the conversation beyond partisan politics. This is not simply a left-right issue; it is a question of stewardship, fairness, and whether Texas will protect the communities that have long sustained the state before handing scarce resources over to the highest bidder.
Water also forces us to rethink what we mean by prosperity. For too long, Texas leaders have equated growth with success. More highways. More subdivisions. More warehouses. More data centers. More fossil fuel extraction. More tax incentives. More ribbon cuttings. But growth without ecological limits is not prosperity. It is debt. It is risk. It is a form of policy denial.
And as with so many policy debates in Texas, inequality sits at the center. Wealthier households will absorb higher water rates more easily. Poor and working-class families will not. Rural communities may see their aquifers strained by development they did not invite. Colonias and historically underserved communities may face the worst infrastructure deficits. Urban residents may be told to conserve while industry receives favorable treatment. This is how environmental crisis becomes social crisis.
We should be deeply concerned that Texas is discussing water scarcity largely as an engineering challenge rather than a justice challenge. Pipes matter. Treatment plants matter. Desalination facilities may matter. But governance matters, too. Public voice matters. Conservation matters. Climate policy matters. Land-use planning matters. Accountability matters. Without these, water policy will reproduce the very inequities that brought us here.
The Legislature will have to confront this in 2027. But Texans should not wait for lawmakers to frame the issue for us. We need a broader public conversation now—one that includes educators, scientists, farmers, Indigenous communities, rural residents, environmental advocates, labor, students, and families already struggling with the cost of living.
Water is life. It is also memory, land, culture, food, health, and public trust. It is the connective tissue of ecology and democracy.
Texas can still choose a different path. We can invest in infrastructure, conservation, reuse, repair, and fair pricing. We can scrutinize water-intensive industries before granting them public support. We can protect communities from being overrun by extractive development. We can treat climate disruption as real rather than optional. We can insist that economic development serve the public good rather than private accumulation alone.
But we cannot keep pretending that endless growth is compatible with finite water.
Tomlinson’s column is a warning. Corpus Christi is a warning. The draft State Water Plan is a warning. The Hot Earth is warning us, too.
The question is whether Texas will listen before scarcity becomes policy, before crisis becomes normal, and before ordinary Texans are told—once again—that there is no alternative but to pay for decisions they did not make.
References
Texas Water Development Board. (2026). 2027 state water plan: Draft, phase 1. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/waterplanning/swp/2027/docs/DraftSWP27-Water-For-Texas.pdf
Tomlinson, C. (2026, May 21). Texas is running out of cheap water, and will need to make salty water sweet. Houston Chronicle.
Texas faces a costly water crisis as growth, drought and industry outpace freshwater supplies statewide, writes columnist Chris Tomlinson.
Texas is outgrowing its freshwater supply.
Communities across the state need billions of gallons more water for growing populations and thirsty industries like oil and gas fracking, computer chip etching and artificial thinking. What happens this summer in Corpus Christi is a sign of what’s coming for all Texans.
The price of creating freshwater and keeping the economy growing will leave consumers with sticker shock, state lawmakers recently acknowledged. A draft of the 2027 State Water Plan says Texas will need to spend $174 billion to meet the water needs of the next 50 years — twice as much as lawmakers estimated just four years ago.
“The taxpayer is going to pay for this stuff one way or the other, be it property tax or be it fees, or be it insurance cost increases,” state Sen. Charles Perry, chairman of the Senate Water, Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee, said during a hearing last week. “There is no free lunch here, or if they don’t pay, we end up with a Third World state.”
Inconvenient truths
Lawmakers will need to have “a big conversation” when they gather in Austin next year, Perry predicted. The level-headed Lubbock Republican is not prone to hyperbole or known for rhetorical flourish. When he speaks up, Texans best listen up.
Droughts and floods have complicated life in Texas for eons. The population and economy only began to grow once people started damming rivers and drilling into aquifers. But experts say those water sources are insufficient for a growing state.
Corpus Christi is the canary in our coal mine. The city’s surface water supplies are running low, new groundwater wells have disappointed, and citizens can’t afford to make seawater drinkable.
In the City Council’s drive to attract industry and bring in new jobs and revenue, it stretched the water supply too thin. Now that the inevitable drought has arrived, the council will likely declare an emergency and impose strict rationing.
Experts told the Senate committee on May 11 that while 57% of city-owned water utilities say they have long-term plans with sufficient funding, 10% have no plan, and 43% do not have enough money.
This year was the first time the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas fell short, capable of providing only $1.28 billion of the $4.2 billion that water utilities requested. The Legislature created the fund 11 years ago to help local authorities pay for water projects.
The Texas Water Development Board, which administers the fund, rejected the Nueces River Authority’s request for help financing a Corpus Christi desalination plant, claiming it had to prioritize other projects.
Statewide, Texas doesn’t know where it will find 10 million to 12 million acre-feet of the 17 million the state will need over the next 50 years, Perry warned (an acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons). Making existing water treatment plants and pipelines more efficient will only meet 3% of the need.
“If I have to pick between spending all of my dollars on leaky pipes or all my dollars on supply, I will pick supply every day,” Perry said.
Water users will need a lot of dollars.
Well runs dry
Producing drinking water from ground or surface sources typically costs between $1.10 to $4.30 per 1,000 gallons, according to the Texas Comptroller’s Office. Desalination costs range from $7.50 to $11 per 1,000 gallons.
“Everyone in the audience is going to say, ‘That’s too much, that’s double what we’re paying,’” Perry said. “But that’s the cost of new water in Texas … we have run out of the cheap water.”
If Texans will pay those rates, utilities will deliver. Companies are working to permit three seawater desalination plants, with state officials anticipating seven plants along the coast over the next decade.
Arid nations around the world use desalination, but in addition to requiring a lot of energy, they produce a brine that is twice as salty as the water going in. If the waste stream isn’t handled properly, it can cause severe environmental problems.
Critics question the wisdom of trying to grow Texas beyond what its natural resources can sustain. Community activists want to prioritize residents’ quality of life over industrial development, and environmentalists want conservation over development.
Sid Miller, the Republican agriculture commissioner, called for a moratorium on data centers to conserve water.
“They draw massive volumes of water for cooling, even amid ongoing drought,” Miller wrote in a press release on Monday. “Rural communities that have conserved resources for generations now compete with corporate giants.”
Should a higher power grant South Texans' prayers and bring a week or more of steady rain, a heaven-sent storm will not solve the state’s long-term water shortage. We’ll still need to turn salty water sweet.
“We have a lot of poor people that aren’t going to be able to live in Texas much longer if we don’t figure this out, and there needs to be a sense of urgency about it,” Perry warned. “The status quo has to break.”
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.
Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas for Hearst Newspapers. He can be reached at ctomlinson@hearstcorp.com.
In 2025, Tomlinson was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, an honor society that recognizes distinctive literary achievement. In 2021, the Texas Association of Managing Editors awarded him columnist of the year, and the Headliners Foundation named him Texas's Star Opinion Writer. He’s authored two New York Times Bestsellers, “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth” and “Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Tomlinson Name - One White, One Black.”
Before joining the Houston Chronicle in 2014, he spent 20 years with The Associated Press reporting on politics, economics, conflicts and natural disasters from more than 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
