Neither is a farm crop something that can readily be decided at the last moment depending on the price of water. Even for annual crops, planning and field work needs to be done well before planting which needs to be done well before harvest; for many varieties of strawberries planting needs to be the year before harvest, asparagus planting needs to be two years ahead of first harvest, for grapes at least three, for orchards quite possibly longer. The investment in necessary equipment and land needs to be made based on the possibility of multiple-year returns; both cost way too much to be worth buying for a year or two’s time, and even aside from the question of the work that may or may not have gone into long-term maintenance or the fact that the land may also be home, neither are readily salable for a decent price in a year when water’s not available and easy to purchase again for the same or less money when water’s affordable.
The speculator would have the farmers over a barrel.
Allocations need to be cut; but they need to be cut in a fashion that doesn’t let people only interested in the cash and not in the water get their hands on it.
The Pacific Northwest and California just aren’t comparable here. The wet halves of Washington and Oregon (generally the western halves) have little agriculture, but have the population centers. There is no model that shows any significant problem for water supply for us in the 21st century.
For the dry halves of the states, they’ve long had semi-arid-to-arid climates, and irrigate using runoff from the Cascade mountains. They are almost completely dependent on water that has fallen in the past twelve months - there’s little banking year-to-year, and little capability to do so. They’ve been in drought this year - that happens sometimes, and will continue to happen in the future. The long-term models seem to suggest that the Cascades will continue to receive the same - or even more - precipitation in the future. The concern is that more of it will fall as rain, especially in the lower elevations, and that which falls as snow will melt earlier. So rather than having robust stream flows into the summer, they’ll see much higher stream flows through the winter and spring. Not ideal, but nothing compared to the multi-decadal drought that a lot of people fear that California and the southwest are in for.
You hardly ever hear people talking about towing icebergs anymore. With the cracking of ice shelves and warm Greenland temperatures perhaps this is even less pragmatic than it always was.
Long pipelines of unconcentrated water do not seem practical across flat surfaces. And what is to stop diversions, as one sees in Mexican oil pipelines?
Jordan and rich coastal countries rely on expensive desalination plants. Clearly reduction of use and proper costing are a start. Likely desalination is a higher payoff than large transfers. Or importing more food from countries better equipped to grow it economically.
I worked in a small town in central Ontario not that close to the lakes or oceans. Drinking bottled water on a plane, was surprised it came from the “fresh springs” in said town, which look suspiciously like faucets, one supposes. Bottled water may become more expensive in time.
I was thinking compressibility. One can decrease the volume of water about 1.8% with enough pressure. But that takes about 6000 pounds per square inch. Tough to pipe it anywhere at that pressure.
Perhaps, but with that sort of space saving it sounds like it could be worth the hassles. Of course, if one could come up with a crystallized form of water (hexagonal close packing?) there may be further savings.
Takes a long time, though. I’m not convinced it is worth the effort.
Just wait until you have a spherical ullage tank with 12,000 psi of helium fall out of a fill fixture and bounce its way across a production floor. That sucker took forever to stop bouncing. I went
back later and calculated the energy that would have been released had it ruptured, and then felt really ill.
Just don’t create a form of water that freezes at room temperature. I prefer the oceans to be liquid.
A tangential question: Why is it always the Great Lakes - the source for discussions like this? Couldn’t the Mississippi river serve as well for SOME areas, like Texas?
As I recall, the Mississippi is overdue for a change in direction anyway.
Aren’t most droughts caused by the water being moved around by nature through snow melt, evaporation, and rivers? The solution is to keep the water where it already is. I’ve started seeing vineyards in Central California that are entirely covered by plastic tenting. My guess is that this keeps the water in a fairly closed system.
East Texas has plenty of water already including the Sabine River and the Toledo Bend Reservoir, as well as enough lakes to challenge Minnesota for a run at the title, and even Central Texas has a lot of lakes; it is West Texas that is bone dry.
The Great Lakes are the ‘obvious’ source because combined they are over 20% of the planet’s surface freshwater reserves, but of course they are that way because of geography, and moving that water elsewhere either means altering or overcoming the geography. It would literally be easier and cheaper to airship water from the Great Lakes to west of the Rockies than it would be to build a pipeline going over or through them.
Away from New Orleans and into the Atchafalaya River Basin, not 500 miles west as the crow flies.