The lack of fresh water pouring into the Gulf, by diverting the Mississippi, would cause more problems than the addition of fresh water to the southwest US would solve.
Best intentions produce horrible results.
If it makes the OP feel better, he’s not the first to envision a pipeline from the midwest to the southwest. The Great Lakes Basin Compact, requires that water not be pumped out of the Great Lakes basin area – any water removed from the Lakes for drinking, industry, etc has to remain close enough that it eventually seeps back into the Lakes.
This legislature was partially driven by assorted voices in Nevada & Arizona starting to say “Hey, those guys have lots of water and what if we could run some of that down this way?” Supposedly, Bush even broached the topic of Canada piping water to Texas back in 2001 but was firmly rebuffed.
As Archimedes once said, “Give me a bagful of money big enough and a Madison Avenue advertising company, and I’ll convince people that I can do anything no matter how outrageous or technically infeasible.”
Stranger
Any discussion of long canal or water pumping projects deserves a reference to the Great Manmade River in Libya. The Wikipedia article glosses over the giant engineering problems it overcame and those it is still trying to overcome.
And yes, either pumping water over the Rockies or tunneling it under them would be a monumental feat. That would be far and away the longest manmade tunnel in history- the current record holder is the Delaware Aqueduct, a mere 85 miles long. And pumping any serious volume of water over the Rockies would probably require the construction of several nuclear power plants to power the pumps.
EDIT: I see that Stranger On A Train touched on the Great Manmade River Project. Point still stands.
It’s easier and cheaper to move people than some natural resources.
The coming water shortages will move people out of the water-starved areas of the country much faster and cheaper than attempting to import water from other areas.
Oh, perhaps not. If California, for example, had the will and the incentives not to demand, beg, or buy water form others, they could supply their own needs with deslinzation plants, run either by solar or nuclear power. But… they’ve been wasting money on a lot of other things over the years.
Back to the broader point of the Great Lakes Basin Compact, folks in the Midwest are well aware that there’s a lot of water here. However, of those who have an opinion, I’d bet that most feel that the people in the Southwest can go pound sand. Especially from a political perspective, migration from the Midwest to the sunny Southwest costs Midwestern states jobs, tax revenue and even Congressional representation. Politically, “Hey, let’s dig a big canal so the ex-Midwesterners who expected Phoenix to look like Ohio can have our water” is an immediate nonstarter.
This is a huge one. Yes, the mid-west has lots of water. But we are also rather leery of what happens if you start pumping that water someplace else. The whole ecology here developed based on that water. Lakes, streams, wet lands, rivers etc. So assuming that the technical and financial difficulties could be overcome, how much wate would have to be shipped, and what would that do to the area? And does it make sense to damage the environment in the mid-west, so that Phoenix can have golf courses, the deserts of California can raise strawberries, and yet more people can live in LA?
As Sam Kinison told the people starving in Ethiopia, “Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it’s gonna be 100 years from now? IT’S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A F***ING DESERT!” I do not believe there are many tears wept around here for the plight of those who didn’t think about water or the price of air conditioning nine months of the year before moving to a desert.
The Great Lakes Compact is to ensure that some groups don’t export the Great Lakes water. It will be for sale when we get $4 a gallon at the pump not at the end of the pipeline.
Well. (no pun intended) you could divert it from river to river, ending with Colorado, but damn! They’ve all been dammed already!
Not hard to pipe the water far from the Canal - how do you think everything west of the Rockies and south of Oregon gets water now?
My town in the Central Valley, like all towns and spaces in between is nothing if not gridded by water distribution canals.
This is the current translation of “It’s far too expensive for any sane person even to consider.”
We have near-empty reservoirs if you have the water 
Better approach might be to pubp the water into the ground in the midwest - it is not as though you guys haven’t been draining your underwater aquifer for the last 170 years or so…really, only the Eastern third of this country has sufficient water to maintain itself, the midwest doesn’t really either.
Not even the Eastern third, as indicated by the near universal drought conditions existing across most of the South, including the Carolinas. :smack:
Well, water is politics, that is true, but California doesn’t just raise strawberries, we feed the nation. I lie in the 2nd most productive ag county in the country (maybe the world). We are surrounded by the 1st, 3rd, and 4th. There are probably about 20 more ag counties in California too.
And that is just the food you get from here, there is plenty else the country can’t or won’t live without.
Growth is an issue, sure, but with a fixed amount of water, CA can only produce so much food, and then that limits the rest of the country too.
I think the funniest thing is that we currently do the exact opposite than the OP has recomended.
Much of Colorado’s water supply lies to the West of the Continental divide, while most of its population resides on the East. So over the past 70 years we have been drilling holes in the mountains to grab the water from mountain lakes and pump it up, over, under and through the divide to Denver. Once we get done with it, it all ends up in the Platte and on downstream. And if they ever resolve the technical and political difficulties with CARP/Big Straw we’ll be doing it to a lot more water.
So we are taking water that would end up in the Southwest and eventually puting it into the Midwest. Just a drop in the bucket comparitively but there you go.
Just to add, and I am no expert on this, but my understanding is that there is a very complex set of riparian water rights under law to virtually every drop of water in the US. Divert water as proposed, and someone will need to be paid for the rights to it, and to allow transport of it. Probably who would get each drop is already decided under law too.
4th stage water purification plants are cheaper and reduce ocean polution also.
Actually, CA is OK water-wise.
Really?
Been to California lately?
From my window, the Sierras look more than a little less white than they should this time of year. And that is not going to change in future years, thanks to global warming.
No snow, no water.
No water, no goodness from California that everyone else likes so much
I live in CA.
Rainfall and snowpack was abot 90% of aveage this year.
They have no idea of what Global Warming will do to rainfall in CA- overall, GW increases rainfall.
And 80% of the water in CA goes to agriculture. The equivilant of fixing the dripping faucets and other wasteful practices caused by super-cheap subsidized ag water would solve the water worries in CA for some time.