When I look at a map I see a very large body of water just west of California.
Why is the answer to getting water to the southwest to plunder the Great Lakes and not desalination?
Desalinization has always gotten a bad rap because of the energy-intensive nature of most of the technologies used. You’d have to overcome decades of prejudice to develop in at any meaningful scale.
“I bought some powdered water but I don’t know what to add”
- Steven Wright
I’d love to see some number crunching about the cost of building a desalination plant to get the first gallon of potable water from the ocean vs. the cost of building a pipeline and pumping stations from Wisconsin, across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, to get the first gallon of water to California.
And you’d have to overcome the Midwestern prejudice of having those damn Californians sucking the Great Lakes dry.
Desalination is very energy intensive, thus contributing to more greenhouse gases, and it also produces a LOT of hypersaline brine that has to go somewhere. Dump it in the nearby ocean where it came from and it’ll dramatically change the ecosystem in that area, killing off a lot of aquatic life. Dump it on nearby land and you’ve just made a new salt desert.
Not if you use nuclear power.
Seriously, we HAVE to get over our fear of nuclear power. Nothing elae will come close to fixing climate change or even slowing it substantially without destroying the economies of the developed nations. Nothing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/nuclear-desalination
We keep wringing our hands over problems for which there is a solution that is safe, cost-effective, been in use for decades elsewhere - and is completely ignored. It’s time for us to stop being stupid.
For the water shortage: There has long been a proposal floating around to tow some big icebergs down to Los Angeles and use the melting water from them.
We could expand on this idea. Why not hack off a piece of the sun and tow it back into Earth orbit to capture the solar energy from that?
Even if it was totally feasible and everybody loved the idea and was willing to do it, why is the fantasy always about taking water from the Great Lakes and not the Mississippi River, which has more water flowing through it? The Great Lakes have a bunch of old water stored up, but the Mississippi has more to take on an ongoing basis (which makes sense if you look at how much bigger its watershed is). But if we’re talking about draining lakes…Lake Tahoe is sitting right there, at a nice high altitude so that gravity could do some of the work.
True, but it still leaves the larger problem of what to do with all the salt.
If most of the desalinated water soon returns to the ocean, why is that a problem? You aren’t significantly increasing the salinity of the ocean by borrowing a minuscule amount of its water, desalinating it, and returning both the water and the salt back into it. Of course one would have to avoid creating high concentrations of salinity in local areas.
And that’s the problem. Pouring it back in to the ocean locally creates a hypersaline environment which will trash the flora and fauna for tens to hundreds of miles in the vicinity, depending on the size of the plant. Creating a dispersal system large enough to avoid that problem will make the cost too high to make it feasible.
These plants have been most utilized in areas like Saudi Arabia where they’re not concerned about turning sand deserts into saline deserts.
Maybe not. Remember that large expanses of the northern US and Canada salt their highways over the winter, using mined rock salt. Perhaps another mining operation that should be shut down, along with coal mining.
Wouldn’t it be cool if highways all over the northern latitudes were salted with what is currently considered to be a gourmet cooking ingredient – sea salt? 
The aquarium industry will use some for aquarium salt water. How about charging electric trucks from solar or the nuclear reactor suggested, and carry it off to the Bonneville salt flats?
These are Fightin’ Words, right here, Buddy!
Wouldn’t it be easier to push the clouds to the right spot so that it finally rains where it should? It surely is not against the rules to push with both hands at the same time, the clouds won’t mind.
Exactly. The Great Lakes are fossil water. The rate of replenishment is barely enough to maintain current lake levels. Redirecting the Missouri River to flow west instead of east would be more practical than pumping water from the Great Lakes. (That is a very low bar of “practical”–not very.)
What “we” are you talking about here?
North Ameeica.
Lake Mead went below 1065 feet today.
Saw this on the AP:
December 1 marks a turning point for Lake Mead every year; you can see the water level starts to go back up as snowfall begins to impact the Colorado River.
I’ve felt that this year that was not going to happen. So far, it isn’t.