Need to figure out how to transport precipitation from the midwest/northeast to the southwest. Whether its melted snow or rain. It can easily be done.
Its crazy how fast Lake Mead is losing water - A Slow Disaster Unfolding
- Thread starter Micky Mikey
- Start date
It’s not just the two provinces of Canada that are apart of that agreement. It’s also the eight Great Lakes states. A law was signed saying that there could be no diversion of Great Lakes water outside of the Great Lakes basin with only two exceptions. A town outside of the Great Lakes Basin can apply for a diversion if all efforts to obtain a water supply has been exhausted. And that town can only apply if the county that it resides in is partially within the basin. Even with that, they have to get it signed off by all eight governors from each of the eight Great Lake states including the two Canadian provinces. The law also prohibits the federal government from enacting eminent domain.
Even towns within the Great Lakes states can’t get water diverted if they are outside of the basin, with exception to those that are in counties that are partially within the basin. With those, they have to apply and it has to be signed off by the eight governors. Waukesha, Wisconsin for example.
I know folks that work for conservation organizations for the Great Lakes and they would sue the breaks of the Federal government if they try to strong arm water being diverted outside of the Great Lakes.
Conservation is so big that Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that it didn’t empty into Lake Michigan, instead building thousands of miles of canal so that it empties into the Mississippi River.
Thanks for sharing that information
Do you think, even in an unprecedented, cataclysmic event that some of the Great Lake States will have a little grace if water scarcity becomes a real problem for the entire United States?
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Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
You mean humans right?
Unfortunately, scarcity breeds more protection. I’m not convinced that they would. At most they would divert water to areas in their states that are outside of the basin. To outside states let alone the southwest, that would probably never happen.
There were talks about creating a water pipeline from Lakes in Alaska down to the west coast. That would probably happen before a Great Lakes pipeline. The Great Lakes are massively protected.
Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
The water wars will be brutal.
OperationNumbNutts
Superstar
I don't know about that.
There is a reason why people like Bill Gates are buying up farm land in this country.
Gritsngravy
Superstar
Lowkey this is one of the reasons why I think it’s some truth to the government trying controlling weather, but I imagine there will be consequences with trying to make it rain in the southwest
No it can't. The cost and effort would be extraordinary for the volume of water necessary.
Here's a thought experiment. The Keystone Pipeline XL was supposed to cost $7 billion. It would have pumped 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to the Gulf Coast
Just to supply Arizona with its daily water needs, you would need 200 Keystone Pipelines. TWO HUNDRED. So you're talking $1.4 trillion start-up costs. And in reality you're talking a lot more than that because the Keystone XL to get through Texas was relatively flat whereas to get to the southwest you have to cross the Rocky Mountains. Not to mention the massive environmental and logistic issues that would come with 200 fukking pipelines being built across the country.
But that's not the only problem. The daily costs of pumping the oil through a pipeline are about 5 cents per gallon. Water coming out of your tap costs less than 1 cent per gallon. So even ignoring the trillions of dollars in startup costs, the mere daily transport costs would immediately increase the cost of water by 500%. You can afford 5 cents a gallon for oil because you sell that oil for a few dollars a gallon. But you can't afford 5 cents a gallon for water that only sells for less than a cent. And again, that's ignoring that you'd have to pump that up over the Rocky Mountains which would vastly increase the energy costs of getting it up there.
On top of all that....who even has a bunch of extra water like that where you can pump entire states' worth across the country? Just having rain isn't good enough, you have to have big-ass reservoirs to hold the water so that there's enough caught in place to pump every day. Where are these big-ass reservoirs at? The only thing I can think of is the Great Lakes, but that would run into massive legal issues because there are Canada/US treaties that prevent the Great Lakes water from being removed from the Great Lakes basin. On top of that, only about 1% of the water in the Great Lakes is replenished each year, so if you started draining them to water other states you'd run into the same problems Lake Mead is having.
I just can't imagine it happening on any scale necessary. Changing weather on a very small scale, like diverting the direction of a storm slightly or getting it to dump its water earlier, might be possible to some extent though it wouldn't be easy at all. But we're talking about the entire southwest being in drought. How the fukk would you change weather patterns that need to be moved thousands of miles? Weather/climate occurs with such massive forces on a such a huge scale that it's gotta be virtually impossible to manipulate on that level.
In the end I only see three directions we can go:
1. Reduce consumption. Less water waste, get rid of lawns on a large scale, probably have to vastly reduce certain kinds of water-heavy crops and even beef/dairy production in some areas.
2. Find ways to capture more water, especially in cities. Get more rain water before it runs off and reuse more water before it just disappears into stormdrains.
3. Desalination plants. It's expensive but it's not nearly as expensive as pumping. The big issue is that it takes a lot of energy and energy is our issue too. So we'd have to improve desalination tech in order to reduce the energy use, and then improve energy tech to be able to make up for all the extra energy we're using.
We'll have to really go hard on all three to make it work.
You gonna see a huge migration of West Coast liberals into the interior & suddenly states like Missouri or Kansas turn blue
More like Texas and Florida, no one in Cali wants to live in flyover states.
Nah we're gonna destroy the earth. Jesus will reign on the new earth
Not just rain, snow as well. The big piles of snow in parking lots in states from the midwest to the northeast. Dont even have to build a pipe line. Use those big tankers that run across the already existing railway system, that currently run from coast to coast transporting high fructose corn syrup. The great lakes states get a massive amount of lake affect snow, on top of snow from weather systems. Instead of plowing that snow into large piles, transport them to rail yards and transport them by rail to the east coast. Do that for a winter to see if it'll make a difference. If not, no significant amount of money was loss.
UpAndComing
Veteran
People have been talking about doomsday apocalypse of the world ending since the late 1800s
Ya'll must be bored lol
Ya'll must be bored lol
