GoKawiilThe Ogallala Aquifer sits under eight states and 111.8 million acres of US farmland. A windmill can lift only a few gallons per minute, useful for drinking water but useless for agricultural purposes. In the 1940s, electrification reached the Great Plains and a Colorado farmer invented center pivot irrigation, a sprinkler line on wheels that rotated around a central wellhead. The 1949 version could lift thousands of gallons per minute and irrigate 40 acres.
Since then the aquifer has lost 286.4 million acre-feet of water, comparable to draining Lake Erie entirely. The parts of it beneath arid states have seen much bigger drops. Large parts of Western Kansas have lost 50 percent of their aquifer depth. Texan wells are down as much as 265 feet. On current trajectories, the water there will be gone in 20–30 years.
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Before center pivot irrigation, everyone could use as much of the Ogallala Aquifer as they were physically able to extract without any risk of depletion. An incredible invention created a tragedy of the commons. The southern Great Plains will have to ration water use by some mechanism, probably water charges, or face the total end of irrigated farming.
This is only one example of a common historical story. Fish catch sizes were limited until radar, sonar, and diesel engines; the North Sea Cod population collapsed a few decades after their invention. The telegraph led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon by letting hunters easily communicate about the whereabouts of the flocks. Chlorofluorocarbons almost killed the ozone layer. Technologies can collide with common-pool resources and drive them into extreme scarcity.
The Roadgallala aquifer
This is about to happen again. Road transport, especially the private car, is the dominant mode of transport in every country around the world. None of these countries charge at the point of use for the bulk of their road networks. When traffic gets slow enough – ten miles per hour in Tokyo and eight in Paris – people switch to other modes of transport because they can’t do much else when they are stuck behind the wheel.
This constraint is about to be lifted. Self-driving cars are not a hypothetical future but a familiar part of the urban background in San Francisco. I have driven in them several times and the novelty of seeing a steering wheel turn itself has pretty much worn off. During 2026, Waymo service will expand to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, and Miami, joining Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix.
Right now, self driving is a premium experience, more expensive than a human driver, in part because Waymo uses new cars, and in part because there are still relatively few Waymos on the road, spreading operational overheads thickly on a small fleet. Over time, Waymo and its competitors will become cheaper than human-driven taxis.
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