Worth adding some context to this study. We've known about subsidence in our area for many many years. The Houston-Galveston subsidence district was created almost 50 years ago by the Texas legislature to regulate groundwater withdrawal and manage subsidence. https://hgsubsidence.org/ It's worth noting that this regulation has drastically slowed subsidence, but not completely halted due to the groundwater problem, and an exploding population.
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
Thanks for the arcgis link. It is interesting to compare to the Sentinel 1A data from the study[0]. For example there is one existing (ground based) measurement East of Mont Belvieu (P050), but most of the displacement in the satellite data appears just to the West, centered on Mont Belvieu. This is by eye only, so I may be mistaken in comparing the locations.
The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).
The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.
nah, its just thay saying "oil" is too narrow because a huge amount of the extraction is also natural gas. Hydrocarbon is both very clear and accurately specific.
meh only sorta. like, yeah oil is obviously a big deal because it's a valuable resource. but like if something is a huge part of the state's economy and a ton of jobs is working to keep that industry healthy/growing really "being run by it" or is it just good policy?
the good thing is we're stealing all those nice cali tech jobs so it won't be true forever ;)
Vouching for this, because while the wording was confrontational, the points being expressed are valid. Apart from the water kinda. West Texas where they depend on groundwater for irrigation is screwed, but the rest is really well planned and run reservoir systems that catch several states worth of watershed.
Agree with the politics or not. TX isn't going to grab talent from states with strongly pro-choice workforces at nearly the rate it used to.
And the climatic extremes are bad and seemingly getting worse, anthropogenic or not. This summer was brutal, the last was as well, and both winters were fairly horrific as well. Partially because, as pointed out, the power grid isn't up to the current load.
I love TX, but it is because of the friendly people, the power infrastructure and climate situations are atrocious, and TX abortion laws are absolutely going to affect the influx of knowledge workers.
I routinely ignore recruiters from places I don’t want to live even if the job is interesting. Red states, and places with similar politics are on that list.
I spent a week in Utah and heard open antisemitism and anti Mexican rhetoric. I don’t have faith that my wife could get medical care she needs there. Why would I ever want to live there or any of the politically similar places.
I went to grad school in SLC, it wasn't that bad; I found it better than Austin anyways. I couldn't imagine working in Provo, however.
Without Roe vs. Wade, though, I totally agree that the dynamics of these choices have changed. I don't expect it to last very long, however, due to economic competition, but that's just a guess.
> people will be upset about this, very few will change their life plans over it
I am moving from Texas in the next few months, and I own a house here. Texas and Florida Republicans are in an insane game of red-meat one-upsmanship that's leading both states into a terrible place. They are not done yet, and Im not staying to find out how insane they can get.
I wish recent arrivers the best of luck! And hopefully one of y'all will buy my house with your bay area salaries.
Vouching for this too, because it is a reasonable and possibly correct observation. I think people are less likely to leave than they are to weigh it as a factor when deciding to go to Austin vs stay where they are.
Why can't we have conversations about this stuff without voting each other into oblivion?
Just add it to a laundry list of terrible policy decisions in Texas. Might not make someone leave but really reminds a lot of people why you wouldn't want to go move or vacation there.
I had an equal pay job offer in Austin that I turned down (despite a massive increase in the standard of living I'd be able to afford) not because of "abortion" per se (this was several years ago), but I just didn't want to live in a state full of Texans. I like Texans as "characters" but not as my community.
It's true, that tech workers lean politically left, but it's not true that access to abortion is the single-issue that drives everyone's decision making. Nationally it continues to trail behind the economy when people are polled about which issue is most important to them.
California might be great at social policy, but the average person can't afford to buy a $1.5M home while paying exorbitant taxes, and all the pro-choice laws in the world won't change that. Sure there will be some people with strong political convictions who stay, but most people grow up and want a small house, a yard, and a safe neighborhood for their kids to grow up in. California continues to fail in that area by every conceivable metric.
Its not "political". Its a matter of life and death. For the safety, health and security of my partner, there is no way I would ever move to Texas.
The abortion laws, their enforcement, and the impact on other drugs and services is not a theoretical harm it is very real and would've had substantial, possibly lethal harm to my partner when we were trying to conceive.
> California continues to fail in that area by every conceivable metric.
The right repeats this over and over again, hoping for it to become true. Meanwhile, those liberals who bought at $500k now have houses worth $1.5M, and their pay checks aren't taking the 13% hit conservatives keep repeating (because they don't understand how graduated tax rates work). People will continue to move to as well as leave California in remarkably reasonable numbers, I doubt Texas will achieve population parity with California again (they were the same size in 1940) in my lifetime.
> Austin can't be Austin while it's based inside [some insults] modern Texas under Greg Abbott
No doubt this is true for many. But Texas as it is is also appealing to many who are moving there for precisely the things you don't like. Choice is a good thing, time will tell which direction gets more migration
i mean i'm not super behind cali big tech moving here, that was basically a joke. i think they're pretty toxic and distort the cities they call home which is what happened to SF and is now happening to austin. i think overly-progressive city governments have some fault in both but there's no way past the fact that tech will gentrify literally everyone out of a city, not just the poorest, if it ends up all in one city. i don't really want the entire houston-austin corridor gradually pricing out even the middle class which is where it's going rn.
believe it or not, MBAs and execs aren't picking where they put a campus based on abortion. they continued expanding in SF for many years when it's not a "urbane, pleasant, safe place to live" and the only box it checks is "liberal".
i think the only thing that has changed majorly in the past decade is Texas abortion policy. fact is most tech workers have more than enough money to go fly to another state so probably won't turn down a super high paying job at a big name tech company over it. maybe you will but sounds like you're ideologically very fixed on this. like, i won't go work in states that abuse their citizens gun rights so i get where you're coming from and would personally like some liberalization of state abortion policy. but most people don't have those kind of dealbreaker issues.
we can get past water issues, we'll just start piping it in like y'all did years ago. despite some of the goofy ahh rhetoric from abbot Texas is a leader in renewables and that will probably make it economical to do desalination at scale before other states. we're already pretty used to relying on climate control, and there's finally some movement on getting micronukes up for the grid.
tbh i liked Texas before all the cali types showed up. so i'm not gonna be pressed if they leave. i'd much rather we build up our own innovation scene focused on hard tech, medtech etc. rather than importing the cali "culture".
yeah, cool story bro, you mean like the sweet gig at Oracle (who can't recruit in the Bay Area) that will pay you enough to buy an electric generator and a flight for your daughter to get birth control?
One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment: https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
USGS has a network of sensors that you use to see subsidence here: https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e5c75a...
Of note is Katy's subsidence, which I believe is from hydrocarbon withdrawals.
I believe what this study does that's new is analyze Sentinel-1A data and correlate it to hotspots in the Houston area, which is actually super cool.