We need to move water from Midwest west. Let's get on with it.
desertsun.comDear desert sun,
It's your old neighbor the Midwest. Haven't seen you for a while. Not since you moved out to the sunny desert. Made fun of us for our high taxes and our unions and our dying manufacturing. Har har.
Anyway, how's retirement going? Taken in a lot of Ted talks? Good. For. You. Anyway, enough small talk. We got your letter asking for a favor and here's our reply:
We warned you decades ago not to build large population centers in an arid desert. We warned you to shepherd your meager water resources carefully. To landscape with something other than green lawns. To not build suburbs full of private pools and sprawling, car-dependent development. To not grow alfalfa and other water intensive crops.
You ignored us and you prospered. Until now when you hit the brick wall we told you was coming. We even told you when it was coming. You have been greedy and you have been arrogant. And so we quietly protected our water with laws. As one does from fools.
If you want us to share it, we are happy to. All you have to do is move here. I took the liberty of pricing some flights. Turns out it's a lot easier to ship you here than to ship water to you. I know it's gonna be rough starting over after losing all the equity in your house. Hope you see the humor in so many mortgages underwater as the result of a drought. It's important to laugh in tough times.
I bet you are ready for some good news? There are tons of jobs available here. Turns out all the businesses you created when you disrupted Midwest industry & Midwest labor are hiring. You can work at an Amazon warehouse. Or drive a car for Uber. Have your tips stolen by Instacart. The opportunities are as endless as the medical debt you'll be in should you ever become sick.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing you at a cookout real soon. Hope you remember how to make potato salad. Or figure out how to make desalinization work on a massive scale. 'Cause no moving back if you don't bring potato salad. The spicy kind with the miracle whip please.
Sincerely, The Great Lakes basin and Missouri / Mississipi watershed.
Thank you for penning this. I thoroughly enjoyed it. P.S: It’s all true.
This topic would be less of a sick joke if there werent absurd "water rights" given away 100 years ago that bankrupt the system.
I worked as an intern at NIH and buying fancy office furniture & computers was a thing to maintain budgets. There's a hoard of "farmers" using "water rights" to grow incredibly water ineffective crops (pistaccios, almonds) and just wasting water in general that far outstrip residential demand. Society owes these people, these leeches, nothing.
The idea of buying this illegitemate system out is disgraceful; none of this has ever been reasonable or fair. Change the California constitution that protects this horrific abomination & just end this world-killing pact.
Great idea, but I can save you some time and money. Lake Tahoe is nearer to you and has a volume of 36 cu mi (150 km3; 120,000,000 acre⋅ft). Since it sits at an elevation of 6,225 ft, the path would be mostly downhill.
So call the folks living in Incline Village on the North side of the lake and discuss your plans.
Hurry now, let's get on with it. .
We need to stop building massive cities in the desert and expecting that they'll have enough water. Maybe we should get on with that, instead?
And, when someone proposes that a grand "we" need to do something that will benefit them personally, that makes me a lot more skeptical. You want a water pipeline? You go build it. Don't look at me; don't even look at my tax dollars. But if you want it, feel free to get right on it.
If the cities weren’t built up the agricultural water users would likely just use more water. They account for 80% of California’s use.
Right, but "XYZ Alfalfa Farm is going under because it can't get enough water" is a lot different from "Phoenix is without water". It's different in terms of economic impact, and it's different in terms of number of people affected.
Most of that watershed is also theirs. The cities have taken more and more of it.
They can drive the farmers away, that is an option - then they'll have high food prices _and_ drought.
This is a curious way to put it. No matter what legal rights to water we have previously allocated, when everybody is going to be short of water - the legal rights only go so far. The whole reason for society to invest in carbon emission reductions, was to avoid difficult and costly outcomes like this.
The most legal solution to the legal shortfalls would likely for the right holders to go sue fossil fuel companies.
If my house burns down because I built it in a wildfire area, I don't get to steal half of your house and call it redistribution.
This is an area that has always had drought issues. It is not just global warming. You don't get to sue whoever has a dollar.
If someone neglects to clear their home area of burn material, and their house catches fire then burns their neighbors house - there certainly is a liability.
We live in a society where individual actions and rights have boundaries when they cause social effects. Part of goverments function is working out the fair way to discuss and act one it - particularly during trying times - like mass regional drought.
> If someone neglects to clear their home area of burn material, and their house catches fire then burns their neighbors house - there certainly is a liability.
This is actually incorrect. Liability only exists if you start the fire (and often times requires the element of negligence or intent).
> We live in a society where individual actions and rights have boundaries when they cause social effects
And that's why it's illegal to siphon your neighbors groundwater. We have hundreds of years of court cases on groundwater rights and they are generally clear - the owner of the land has rights to the groundwater before appropriation.
You can't build your home in a desert and then complain that it's a desert. That's a you problem. Go live somewhere with water.
The article was published on desertsun.com
Nope. Just nope. Not going to happen.
You can move, you are mobile. Move to where the water is.
It seems easier to move water than people.
Plus, sun is good for people and crops. Transferring water to where it will be useful seems like the kind of thing a government should do.
My visceral reaction was also anger and opposition. It's questionable if it can be done in a way that's not harmful to the Mississippi watershed and ogallala aquifer. But you're right, the human good it could do would justify much.
The advocacy group NRDC has a much better explanation of the general concept and specific Mississippi/Ogallala proposal: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/Water-Pipelines-rep...
Two things become clear. The mississippi/ogallala project would have to be an aqueduct project and not a pipeline if it wants to move a helpful amount of water to justify itself and it would require an exorbitant amount of energy to pump water from, say, Omaha to Denver. It doesn't seem like it has a chance of happening before many smaller projects are attempted first local to the southwest.
> My visceral reaction was also anger and opposition
It is interesting that a project like this runs into visceral opposition from two different sides. Those on the left may object that we shouldn't be messing with the natural world in ways that will have consequences we won't understand. Those on the right may object that we shouldn't be attempting large expensive government projects that will intrude on individual liberty.
Both objections have some validity. But neither are cost/benefit analyses, which is a much better way to evaluate whether we should be doing something than asking whether it perfectly aligns with my principles.
I don't know how you figure that. People move every day on their own.
People can literally just start walking east for free.
> Plus, sun is good for people and crops
We've got plenty of sunlight in the Midwest, I assure you. We don't need any of yours.
> We've got plenty of sunlight in the Midwest, I assure you. We don't need any of yours.
I grew up in the Midwest. Plenty of sunlight are not words I would use to describe it.
It seems easier at first, in much the same way that an O(n) algorithm may seem faster than O(1) at first.
You'd have to move very approximately one tanker full of water for each person every week, for the rest of that person's life. You can think of much more effective ways to do it than with tankers, but can you think of any that are more effective than moving the person to the water?
I’m not sure why “effective” is the metric you are using. I’m saying it is easier to dig a canal that can provide water for tens of millions of people than it is to move tens of millions of people to a new state.
This has been discussed before on HN. Quoting an actual engineer from faulty memory: Boring a tunnel through the mountains is well beyond what's currently doable. Doing it on the surface would require lifting the water a few km up in order to let it flow down on the other side, and would be the largest engineering project ever, expensive to build and equally expensive to operate. Total water use (including farming and industry) may well be well over 1000kg per person and day even if it's restricted because the water is expensive, lifting that weight several km requires a lot of energy and expense.
Sorry about the word effective, it should have been efficient. I used the word because the pumps may be compared to other means of transport in terms of water moved per joule spent.
“We have dried up the Colorado, and fairness now requires us to begin draining the Mississippi. This is our God-given right and responsibility.”
Good grief. What a bloated sense of entitlement. The hubris of the past 200 years is catching up to us and these people think the answer is “double down on the same strategies that caused this crisis in the first place.”
Jesus, California and Nevada draining the "flyover" states? Can't get much more dystopian than that.
How about this -- build some desalination plants on the vast Californian coast. Nevada and Arizona can pitch in and share.
If you want the whole dystopia in novel form, read The Water Knife. First half is incredibly enjoyable world building. Second half is a fairly mediocre action mystery plot, which you can skip.
> California and Nevada draining the "flyover" states
You want to start Civil War 2? Because this is how you do it.