> Wish this was a problem society could and would tackle as a “group effort”.

From a macro level, it has been. There have been water pacts in the west for nearly a century. But these will likely need to change in order to address the severity of the issue. I'm curious how these will be changed in the future, it seems like there might need to be new legislation sooner rather than later.

Ultimately I think we'll need to have state governments seize those water rights through eminent domain (with fair market value payments), then institute an auction system to allocated only a sustainable level of water extraction. The problem today is that water prices are fixed below the market rate and fail to account for externalities so water users have little incentive to conserve.

Those water pacts are generally very out of date and haven't adapted to modern populations and usage volumes, though. Change must come.

Isn‘t there also an issue where water pacts were drawn up during what appears to have been a rainier period of time?

Most the US southwest seems to be organized around the concept of water rights, typically measured in acre-feet.

Even though this assignment of rights is rather old and has a multitude of problems related to the way it doesn't describe current usage patterns, that's not the biggest problem:

it doesn't help to have the water rights to 300 acre-feet on your property if that water doesn't exist!

Here's the other lovely thing, is the deeper you go with a well the worse the water quality. Deep water could have been sitting there for thousands of years and may have a higher radon concentration.

On the other hand, deeper water is less likely to be contaminated by toxic waste seeping down from the surface.

And the radioactive stuff can be filtered out locally much more easily (activated carbon).

We are solving it as a society. You're free to move somewhere there's more water, or you can not have any.

Tell that to Intel. They’re building a fab in Phoenix.

That's up to the people that live in Phoenix. If they want Intel to deplete their aquifer, that's their choice.

Ah yes, the Ben Shapiro climate solution: "Just sell your house and move somewhere else!"

Who, pray tell, will buy a house with no water?

That’s also not going to work if we’re talking about farmland. Not every parcel of land is exchangeable for every other. It’s one thing to point at a city and say “fewer people could live there” and another to point at farmland and say society won’t feel an impact from not growing the crops on it.