Since 90 percent of the west is pretty much is either going to die or burn down because of the drought why can’t the people who make things like the Keystone pipeline figure out how to take a pipeline from places that flood regularly to places that are in a permanent drought?
they wouldn’t even have to clean it much … just pipe it to the colorado, hoover dam etc that way they get rid of the floodwater and we don’t have to live on water rationing which is becoming a permanent idea … and since it would be a massive project id be jobs and votes for all involved
It is because the people who have the water are not keen on having their water piped somewhere else.
IIRC the great lakes in the Midwest have a compact with Canada about their water usage. I think only people who live in the watershed for the great lakes can access that water.
If you want to pipe great lakes water to Arizona you will need not only the local states around the great lakes to agree but Canada as well. Probably won’t happen.
If you moved to the desert for the warm climate fine. But you are in a desert. Deal with it.
I lived in Arizona for a few years (Phoenix). I have never seen more wasteful use of water. Pools everywhere. Golf courses all over the place. Fountains outside of every hotel and restaurant.
I currently live in Chicago and there is nothing like that water use here. Yes there are golf courses and fountains and pools but waaaay less than in Phoenix which has scarce water.
I have no sympathy. Drain your pools. Close the golf courses. Shut down the fountains for starters.
The Great Lakes are “fossil” water–there’s not enough rainfall to refill the lakes if they were drained. So besides political concerns, it would be an environmental disaster to pipe their water out of the watershed.
The Niagara River, and the entire Great Lakes Basin of which it is a part, is a legacy of the last Ice Age. 18,000 years ago, Southern Ontario was covered by ice sheets two to three kilometres thick. As the ice sheets advanced southward, they gouged out the basins of the Great Lakes. Then as they melted northward for the last time, they released vast quantities of melt water into these basins. Our water is “fossil water.” Less than one percent of it is renewable on an annual basis, the rest leftover from the ice sheets.
What spots are those, that flood every year? Most flooding I’m familiar with is pretty intermittent, alternating with times of drought, over many years to decades
When I was in college, twenty years ago, the head of my petroleum engineering department was actively lobbying congress to get a pipeline built from the north slope of Alaska down to western Colorado. The idea was that initially it would carry natural gas which is just burned since there was no economical way to ship natural gas. Once the gas price dropped and water price rose the pipeline would be switched from gas to water and use water that drains from sparsely populated northern Canada into the Artic Ocean. In his opinion it would have made the pipeline viable for 50 to a 100 years which would have defrayed the huge cost of building it.
Because mankind has learned the hard way that draining rivers and lakes dry is a Bad Idea. Well, some of mankind has learned that. Not everyone has gotten the message.
You live in a desert. By definition, that means very limited water resources. You probably should have been on rations all along but the ability to move water around meant that Las Vegas and other cities could dump water on grass and into fountains instead of conserving it.
Party’s over.
This isn’t a drought, it’s climate change.
Get used to less water.
You might want to ask the people whose water you plan to take if they’re on board with it first.
Get rid of your golf courses, lawns, outdoor fountains, swimming pools, and the like before you start looking at taking the water of other people.
But I will never approve of, say, draining Lake Michigan for Las Vegas. You want water? Move somewhere that isn’t a dessert.
I don’t remember his specific proposal any more. If we assume that they put in a 48" pipeline it could carry 82mm gallons per day, which is the current max volume of the trans-alaskan pipeline.
The MacKenzie River flows about 2.5mm gallons per second so the pipeline could flow at 0.03% of the river volume.
The Colorado River flows at 14,600,000,000/day so we’d be adding about 5% to the rivers volume. Not a huge benefit but better than nothing. Based on 100 gallons per person per day 820,000 people could be taken care of so not even 20% of the population of LA.
The reason for oil pipelines is that there are people in remote areas who have petro-chemical resources they want to get to markets. Pipelines are a means to that end.
There’s nobody with lots of fresh water they want to sell.
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