If your dam is 100 feet tall, then the reservoir created would flood half of Louisiana and make it most of the way to Memphis.
Your dam would also have to extend for hundreds of miles, pretty much from Gulfport to Houston.
A 200 foot high dam would flood pretty much all the southern gulf states.
A 762 foot high dam like Hoover Dam would flood the entire middle of the country all the way to Ohio. (It would also take quite a while to fill.)
Whereas ocean water desal in CA was something like a 7 mils/gallon premium last I heard. I don’t know if the Carlsbad plant is subsidized though.
So a win-win? 
I’ve got to go with the Drain Tahoe First group. Much easier to construct and entirely within California. I wonder how much it would cost to buy Nevada’s consent to all this?
Well, that might eliminate the air conditioning…
^ That’s the real question. This is not the first time someone from out West has shown up with the attitude that because they moved to a dessert and don’t have as much water as they’d like they’re somehow entitled to other peoples’ water. See @not_alice in this thread.
If they all did that then they’d just be using the same water that would have been piped to them. Just not using it in the desert.
Exactly. Here in the Chicago area, we have issues with flooding, nearly always due to heavy rainstorms in the summer months (and, less frequently, if a heavy snowpack winds up melting quickly). This tends to lead to lots of flooded basements when it happens, and, historically, it also led to wastewater (including sewage) being dumped into Lake Michigan, which was a health hazard.
For the past 30-plus years, the region has been building the Deep Tunnel Project, a system of stormwater tunnels and holding reservoirs, to handle this excess rainwater. But, it’s not like this is something that happens on a predictable or regular basis – some years, we get a ton of rain, even more than the Deep Tunnel reservoirs can handle; other years, like this year, it can be quite dry.
Even if, at some times, the Chicago area would love to pump that extra rainwater away to someone who needs it, that’s only the case for maybe a few weeks of time, and only in some years. The same is very likely true for any other place in the eastern half of the U.S. which encounters flooding issues from time to time.
I’m not sure that’s correct.
There are vast differences in water usage from state to state that often corresponds to their geography. Coastal states like California, Florida, and Connecticut are able to use salt water for most of their thermoelectric power needs which reduces their dependence on fresh water resources. States like Oregon and Idaho benefit from the many hydroelectric facilities throughout their region and use little water for electrical generation. The USGS considers water used to create hydroelectric energy to be in-stream flows and does not count it in its calculations.
Per capita domestic water usage also varies greatly from state to state. Maine uses the least at only 54 gallons per person per day, while Nevada uses the most at 190 gallons per person per day. According to the 2005 USGS data, every Western state except for Alaska uses more than 100 gallons of water per person per day. Some of this differential in water use can be easily explained by climate differences. For example, areas of the country with greater precipitation required less water for lawns and gardens compared to desert communities in Arizona, California and Nevada.
[bolding mine]
Walter Hickel, Alaska pioneer, hotelier, former state governor, and, briefly, Secretary of the Interior under Nixon, proposed a water pipeline from Alaska to the states a very long time ago. He was laughed at, but it turns out that he was prescient.
I wonder if it would be cheaper to build a desalinization plant in the Gulf of Mexico and pipe that water rather than try to get water from Alaska to New Mexico.
Looking at that webpage, in California, Arizona and Nevada, irrigation uses about 2/3 of the water while domestic use is only one or two percent (with “public supply”, whatever that is, using 15-30%). In other words, long showers and lawn watering aren’t the biggest offenders.
Yes.
Although people are beat up about their lawns (which are, of course, idiotic in the arid southwest), the lion’s share of the water mined in these places goes to agriculture. Take away the water and California, that agricultural goldmine, could grow wheat and grass hay, olives perhaps. Not much else. It would be range land for the most part. And the water California relies on IS going away. The aquifers are at record lows, and the snowmelt from the Sierras which feeds the great rivers and the vast irrigation system is threatened by global warming. The whole West is undergoing what is probably a permanent desertification.
Desal has major environmental consequences too. Astonishingly, EVERYTHING has environmental consequences. Who knew?
Lawns use an amazing amount of water (partly because most are over-watered). Also agriculture, manufacturing, etc.
Fair point, but I think the upshot is that a person who gets overwhelmed by guilt for living in Utah, Idaho, or Nevada probably won’t increase their personal water consumption by moving to Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama, for example.
I don’t think the individual behavior is as closely correlated to the by-state consumption as the impact of the climate issues.
If you look at the Domestic Water Use Per Capita chart on that webpage, the difference is represented by the bars for:
Much of this discussion has been about the Western United States but other places have problems as well. The Great Plains states are dependent on the Ogallala Aquifer but that’s being drawn down way faster than it’s replenished. And there are several other places worldwide that are also overusing aquifers.
I can’t imagine personal consumption would change that much if a person moved closer to the water source. Edit, just saw your reply to another poster that addressed this.
True.
But we wouldn’t have the expense of piping the water to them, and when they peed it could return to the watershed from which it came.
Exactly. You have to dump the resultant leftover hypersaline slurry somewhere, and pouring it into the ocean will create local dead zones. Dumping it onto the land will salt the earth.
I’m wondering now that if most of the water use is agricultural, and we just let them run out of water, can other areas that do have water pick up the slack? If not then the whole “this is our water” thing will turn into a “what happened to all the taters” thing.
Much of the water drawn on the Ogallala is used to grow corn, a notoriously thirsty crop. In turn, much of the corn is used to feed cattle. If the Ogallala is ever allowed to run dry, be prepared for severe shortages of beef, because the majority of beef cattle are raised and slaughtered in the Great Plains states.
I’m gratified to see that essentially all of the points about the difficulty of moving water around continental distances via pipeline and the problems with over-dependence upon ‘fossil water’ supplies is already well-explicated. It should be noted that “pipeline people” aren’t really in the business of building pipelines to ship random commodities around, but rather in the specific business of moving petroleum and natural gas despite the great expense because of the high value these commodities currently have as energy supplies. Moving the amount of water needed for irrigation of crops in Arizona and California would dwarf petroleum pipeline deliveries by orders of magnitude, although at least a leak or breach wouldn’t result in severe environmental contamination or a public health hazard.
The Libyan Great Man-Made River Project, developed under Muammar Gaddafi and promoted by him as the “Eighth Great Wonder of the World” is illustrative of the issues with trying to move massive amounts of water around (as opposed to just irrigation control and redirection projects such as the Indus Basin Irrigation System or the Mississippi Old River Control Structure); while the project did ultimately deliver water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System to northern cities in Libya, it lost an estimates 60% of the water in transit. The costs are difficult to estimate but it is estimated to exceed US$25B with annual operating costs approaching US$1B per year. While that is cheap compared to desalination of the same volume of water it is still a huge amount for agriculture in a region that will become progressively less amenable for it.
A better plan would be to promote water-conserving irrigation and industrial processes, prohibit grotesque misuse of water supplies for luxury purposes (e.g. we do not need lush golf courses in the desert), and in general discourage city growth in places where water supplies are going to be increasingly tenuous. Of course, none of this will happen because…it’s “Chinatown”, but it would make a lot more sense that trying to pipeline water over mountain ranges and to deserts to grow citrus year round.
Stranger