Would reducing 5% of water from this point in Louisiana not also have a noticeable impact and that state's environment? I could see a significant legal battle here, much bigger than we've seen in cases where other states down stream feel as though they are wronged by states upstream. Louisiana will ask itself, "to what extent will we be forced to give water to the entire US Southwest?".
States like Colorado are already “giving” most of “their” water to other states. Louisiana could probably be convinced to do the same.
Reducing the flow of water in Louisiana by 5% would not have noticeable impact on the state’s environment when you consider that annual variability of water flow must be far higher than 5% for such a vast and dynamic watershed. If that kind of annual variability is not often creating headlines, outside of flooding - for which this kind of project could only help, then it’s difficult to imagine how a far smaller variance would have meaningful impact.
The army corps of engineers killed Louisiana’s ability to create land by taming the mighty Mississippi River. The river used to change direction and spew sediment into the barrier islands. For the past 100 years the barrier island have been shrinking due to sediment loss.[1]
I saw a documentary recently about canals that will be used to direct sediment into the barrier islands before it reaches the Gulf.
>Until this USGS study was undertaken, environmental managers thought that the principal cause of barrier island erosion was rising sea level. Now, we know that both the longshore movement of sediment and the general absence of sand-sized sediment is the principal cause of the islands' instability. The sediments underlying coastal Louisiana are made up mostly of silts and muds which do not contribute to the building of beaches, dunes, and spits—geomorphic features associated with healthy barrier islands. In addition, long-shore currents redistribute the available sand from headland areas to embayments, depriving shorelines of much needed sand.
Agreed. I’m in California and it is pretty obvious our water problems are due to outflows exceeding inflows. They are draining the reservoirs faster than ever. They were full three years ago and are supposed to last five to seven years of drought, by design.
Meanwhile, natural reservoirs like Tahoe do not even recognize there in a drought.
Lake Tahoe has dropped from it's most recent peak in 2019 and inflows do appear to be lower than normal, though perhaps normal should just be thought of as having changed
ETA: although only optics, very bad look for the richest state to “buy” water from one of the poorest states in what would almost 100% be a poor long term deal for Louisiana.
> Consider the difference between stealing and buying water, and that often, in the Mississippi watershed, there is too much water.
Tapping into the Mississippi is the more sensible megaproject than the great lakes. Prevent the great floods by redirecting that water to the reservoirs out west.
It’s mostly used by agriculture. A large portion of the food you’re eating come from CA. I think there are some major crops that need to be rethought, but a broad crop failure would be pretty devastating to a lot of people in the US
The Great Lakes area is unable to produce food for about 6 months out of the year. So as long as people in the Great Lakes are eating preserved foods only during that time. I am fine with that trade.
I am the “person above”, and my family and I have been farming in California the last 23 years. I absolutely would not complain about that; we have been raising our own produce rates in order to keep up with both supply and demand. We do trade our food for water: what resource do you think makes food?
Actually, it is a literal monopoly on many things. For example:
> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on).
Those other states are monocultures of federal subsidies like wheat, cotton or corn.
The monopoly exists because they pay artificially low prices for water. Those crops grow just fine in many locations and even controlled environments. If ag left the Central Valley, we would find a way. Likely not even a difficult problem and certainly not a problem if the money was used to decentralize Central Valley production.
Why should you be guaranteed water if you live in CA? It’s an arid ecosystem that naturally has fires (chapparal) and low rainfall. It can only support so much life. Just because there are great views and great climate, the fatal flaw is lack of fresh water.
Just about every region requires some human intervention for comfortable living. Would you say the “fatal flaw” of living in CO is the lack of heat? Or the lack of AC in Texas?
Certain luxury foods or at least less necessary foods take a large percentage of water that could be reallocated to more critical needs. Meat also takes 10x the water needed for many crops. There are many ways to reduce water usage.
This is true. But, some places like native grasslands have no other viable economic use other than raising cattle/beef. These grasslands are fed by rainfall so the displacement cost is zero.
Different story when there are competeing interests for the land and inefficient uses (I.e growing alfalfa in a desert) are adapted and cemented into law. It’s complicated no doubt.
You are correct most beef is grain fed or at least grain finished. I believe that can be changed easily enough though. It’s an economic choice they make to grain finish, not necessarily an ecological one.
80% of water in California is used by agriculture, we’ll stop “stealing” water when you all stop “stealing” Cattle and Dairy, Almonds, Grapes, Lettuce, Strawberries, Tomatoes, and more a that we grow with water. Unless you’d rather buy that all shipped in from South America instead….
Sure, we'll just grow it in the midwest, ie, the rest of the country. Only reason we grow mostly corn is because of subsidies. That can be easily changed. If you're suggesting CA is the only viable farmland in the country, you are mistaken.
I don't think that's the only reason, and it is not by choice either. California weather is more temperate than the rest of the US and it is more suitable for many types of crops compared to the rest of the US.
We can engineer the crops (plant breeding) or engineer the water (current system). Eastern geographies that are rain fed could replace CA production no problem
No. Firstly because California doesn't grow crops, it grows fruit and nuts, that grow on trees. Secondly because look, flavor and shelf-life all matter for these far more than crops, one cannot simply conjure up the desired properties. It's hard enough to create decent commercial fruit varietals as it is - a vast amount of effort and research has gone into creating the fruit and veg you see in the supermarket and there's already plenty of money to be had if you can, say, improve the self-life of an avocado without making it taste lousy. This work takes decades.
Appreciate your comments but your simply wrong or misunderstanding what biologists can do.
Also, those nuts and fruits and avacados you currently like weren’t bred for taste. Likely bred for transportability and shelf life. That’s why export markets exist is the produce can withstand long journeys with variable parameters and arrive “fresh”.
Thirdly, to another comment you make saying engineering acres is science fiction while building a water canal is less so. We can build retractable roofs and keep heat and light in pretty easy. Glass houses and/or greenhouses can likely be scaled up to replace whatever CA crop you seem to think is untouchable. Those crops can and do grow just fine in other places. Maybe not year round but there exists options to fix that and remove CA from equation
Lastly, i see many people chiding the subsidies of corn and soy and wheat. What do they think the water in the Central Valley is if not a subsidy? Farmers most certainly are not paying a fair market price. Artificially low. But it’s ok. We need food. No point in bashing subsidies without proper context.
You can't grow any of the mediterranean/mid-east fruit or nut trees in the midwest as they are killed by frost. That rules out most of the stuff that California is famous for exporting - almonds, pistachios, citrus. Many of the ones that do grow won't be commercially competitive - the seasons can be short. And of course, unlike corn, you're going to have to find people to pick all this fruit.
Respectfully disagree. We can engineer the 150k nuts acres to grow just fine. Or
Modify the plants to be cold tolerant. We know a lot about
Plant genetics and physiology. Just haven’t had the incentive.
California exports $5bn worth of almonds a year. That's plenty of incentive. What you are talking about is science fiction - it literally doesn't exist. Humanity has been growing almonds for 5000 years and they're still killed by frost. The trees take five years to reach maturity - this is research that takes decades, if not lifetimes.
> We know a lot about Plant genetics and physiology.
lol, no we don't. We can't even make grocery store food that doesn't taste like crap. Sometimes fruit trees skip a season - why? Nobody knows. Sure, we've gotten pretty good at messing around with corn, but it's simple, forgiving, not eaten fresh, and planted from seed every year. It's basically a model organism.
Not true. Nuts that can be grown in Iowa include black walnuts, Persian (so-called “English”) walnuts, heartnuts, pecans and other hickory nuts, hazels, almonds, chestnuts, and perhaps a few other minor species. [0]
The water consumed per calorie of almond is well within the range of other crops. And I do think it's important to measure on a per calorie basis rather than weight, because otherwise all you're doing is proxying water.
Get Iowa to grow your almonds which alone would solve the water problem. Almonds are by far the top crop in California in terms of both acres harvested and production value. The most recent data shows there were about 1.25 million acres of almond trees, the production value for which is more than $5.6 billion. [0]. Almonds make up almost 13 percent of the California's total irrigated farmland using 9 percent of the state's ag water.
But then how would I get all my vegetables out of season ? I don't want to know what season it is. I don't want to have to know what season it is. Don't make me think about cycles of nature or cycles of astrophysics. I live in a timeless, seasonless, natureless intellectual vacuum. I want avocados. Period.
This seems like the correct thing to do. There was at one point in time a more popular push in India to “connect all the rivers”. I was too young to fully understand what that meant, and also it’s not always easy to know whether something that’s proposed is truly feasible.
But infrastructure to move water around your country especially when a large chunk is a desert makes perfect sense. I originally imagined this would mean somehow exploiting the Great Lakes but the argument suggested here seems quite practical.
Not saying wasteful agriculture on export crops shouldn’t be banned (it should) and perhaps people should stop having so many golf courses, but free flowing water is a true mark of advanced Civilization and it’s not unfair for a country to build the infra to guarantee it.
California being the 5th largest world GDP if it were its own country, I think it may come out on top pretty easily. Also the home of things we bomb the shit out of people with…
I was trying to imply once water sourcing becomes a major issues, basic needs for residents will become hard. Agriculture is small % but if water is a problem, there will be some exodus of people/corps. That’s where the big gdp hits would likely come from
> Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban, although the percentage of water use by sector varies dramatically across regions and between wet and dry years.
(it looks, based on their graphs, like agricultural usage is sticker, in the sense that it doesn't go down nearly as much in dry years).
Since agricultural use takes up a ton of water and produces a fairly small % of the overall GDP, I'd expect them to shift usage toward whatever the high-productivity sectors want before they allow an exodus.
The Midwest states or the states of the Boston-DC corridor, or the gulf coast states are all similarly large economic blocks. The "muh fifth largest economy" trope is just a reflection of state borders that really have little impact at the federal political level. Furthermore, CA stands of a lot of stuff a lot of people hate. Indiana and Ohio will gladly put aside their hatred for each other if CA is trying to screw them both.
> Indiana and Ohio will gladly put aside their hatred for each other
I think you might harbor some odd ideas about the existing relationships between Midwestern states, or perhaps you’re taking a football rivalry too seriously.
What exactly is greedy about ”westerners” than those in the east?
People just set their homes wherever they felt convenient assuming their taxes would get them the water they need. Sounds like you’re just bringing in prejudiced politics into a discussion about getting water to everyone in your country. Also, inconsistent? Pretty sure the biggest water guzzlers everywhere, the farmers vote republican.
What has really surprised me about this topic is not the regional flamewar stuff in comment threads like this.
It's that newspapers have been running passive-aggressive opeds of the same tone, thinking it's worthwhile. You can guess what kind of opeds are getting run in which regions.
The eastern United States has no shortage of water and presumably the states providing water would benefit economically from providing it to the areas that do.
No, it's the stupid status quo thing to do. People need to move where resources are, not shift resources across an entire fucking continent doing god knows what to the ecosystems in between.
This godlike arrogance thinking we can just rearrange the earth on a whim for our needs is the fucking problem. This is why humanity is a cancer.
Should... should. So. Should they move the canneries, ports, flat land, abundant sun and all the skilled labor and their families? Mechanics, installers, fabricators, etc.
It's not like it's a small operation. There are canneries almost a mile long. There are small mountains of peach pits that form when they're processed (these are used for other purposes by the way!).
What about mature orchards?
I'm not sure why people hate California so much. It's got a lot of problems, like most places... But it's pretty amazing how much shit goes on there.
I don't hate California at all, I'm a Washington Liberal.
But the agriculture in California in the face of climate change is completely unsustainable. It is up there with the coal mining and fracking in Pennsylvania.
We need to properly manage the crisis and reduce the amount of human suffering involved because uprooting people in painful.
The alternative seems like we could wind up having literal water wars at some point. This proposal caps the diversion at 5% but that seems the same as building more freeways to me, which just causes more traffic. Give California more water and the agricultural industry will expand and you'll kick the can down the road again.
I hate california because out of hubris they create their own huge problems, ignore the obvious but slightly detrimental to the elite there solutions, claim the actual solution is some huge overengineered, overthought, magic bullet solution that is pretty much impossible to actually happen, and then that all allows Republicans to point and laugh and pretend the rest of the Democrat led states aren't perfectly functional and doing very well.
Is there any region that “lives within its means” for all resources? Why is exporting or importing water so different from electricity, or food, or clothes, or iPhones?
> Is there any region that “lives within its means” for all resources? Why is exporting or importing water so different from electricity, or food, or clothes, or iPhones?
Changing the water supply changes the environment of the entire region. It's needed for human survival. Surely you can see how that's different that exporting more or fewer iPhones, right?
The article doesn't mention pumping water to California at all. The Colorado River is at the CA SE border, so potentially it could be used, but its a long way from the central valley.
We can do without the water. If the country could do without the crops.
As a Californian, I don't mind. But I have ran across some people who simultaneously think we need to keep growing, but, refuse to consider the idea of helping us with our water problem.
It isn't a California problem. One way or another, it's a USA problem. Food or water. Pick your poison.
"our water" -- this is exactly how Northern Californians talk about water. "We don't want to send it to LA so they can water their lawns & wash their cars!"
This is the worst take that I can't avoid hearing about.
How does one build a canal that moves water uphill for 1500 miles across the continental divide in these quantities? If not a canal, then how do we do it? Pipes?
We're talking a million cubic feet per second in the Colorado river during high times, which has been completely drained and diverted by communities downstream.
The keystone pipeline carries 50 cubic feet per second. The largest pipeline in the world carries 1.5x that. Nowhere close to what a functional river provides.
So, either antigravity so the Mississippi flows uphill, or 20,000 keystone pipelines.
Desalination plus local pumping is much, much less science fiction.
Tunnels, alternate locations,using solar and wind to generate pump power and once operational, using a dam to supplement the pump with hydroelectric power.
I mean, this is one challenging area where the best and brightest should be well funded to come up with a solution instead of writing them off.
Desalination is not a dream either.
People are fine to talk about colonizing other planets but are so dismissive of acheivable goals like this.
Trillions are spent on wars, a fraction of that can be used to desalinate water or create artificial rivers and tunnels to fill up artificial lakes.
My idea personally has been to build in parallel to the interstar highways and complement it with high speed railways and artificial rivers. The resulting econominc boom will pay for the cost and you don't need to print money, it can be bonded because you charge for the infrasteucture usage (train,power,car charger and water fees).
Bonds are a way of printing money, debt in general is how money is printed weirdly enough. And look, maybe our big ideas could focus on something that isn't solvable by just not trying to grow food in the desert or if we absolutely must doing it in a place that doesn't have plenty of land that isn't desert
The problem is places that aren't deserts are national parks, what you call the deserts are multiple entire states! I keep hearing your argument, what is this place that isn't a desert people should be farming and building on? Any place west if the missisipi that hasn't already been incorporated, what is it?
Why do you insist it isn't solvable?the tech is there, the money is there, the will is there. Do you have a better solution that acheives the dam goal or is your idea "someone else should figure it out?" Not being dismissive, I would like to know what it is. Population will grow and areas that are already occupied will become less and less habitable. Where else should people live in Nevada? In California, it is already filled with people to the brim in and out of the dessert.
Nothing here isn't solvable, but we have a lot of problems and is this the best use of our limited resources? There are places in the continental us with plenty of water and land that could be used for agriculture. Lots of states like Ohio have returned to forests and probably many other states as well. I like forests, they're cool, but we could totally have less of them. It's also not like we'd need to move all the farms. The west does have water, just not quite enough.
I'm also just very unimpressed by this particular letter to the editor. Maybe it's a good idea, but it definitely doesn't sell it
The problem is with forests you destroy existing wildlife and climate change is a big deal. You want more trees not less. Transofrming the west adds more trees (good for climate), economic growth, less food shortage, homelessness and indirectly less social unrest and instability as well. It will solve many problems because it addresses a root cause of many problems: lack of resources and opportunity. Water+Space+renewable power is the answer.
The root cause of homelessness in the west is lack of dense housing construction. Water is overwhelmingly used by agriculture. I'm not going to say it will never make sense to launch a massive project like this, but certainly it wouldn't be free of ecological impacts either
People don't want to live in apartments and the agriculture not only feeds the whole country by a non-negligible amount but also powers the local economy. You are right about ecological impact, would you rather cut down more trees or grow new ones though?
Well yeah, but we don’t let apartments get built across huge swaths of cities, that might be contributing. If apartments were nice, new, and cheap people might feel differently, or maybe not idk. And yeah trees are great, but we’ve used most of that land for agriculture before, we just stopped because it was slightly cheaper in the west when we pretended that there was enough water out there. Where as, idk that there is any clear idea what turning Arizona green would do to the rest of the climate of the US
Research isn't magic. The first step of research for problem solving is to establish a trade space and go with the most viable route first.
If you want research into how to divert the Mississippi River to Arizona, you've started off backwards.
The problem is lack of renewable water in socal, AZ, CO, Las Vegas, etc, and the solution might be just to reduce demand, increase reclamation, and add in some new renewable water sources like desalination. That seems insanely more viable. Let's see that study first.
You are trying to solve the problem of lack of water to existing people who live there. The problem at the core is the area is arid and infertile. You are trying to solve the immediate problem instead of the root cause.
Fundamentally altering these areas will not only solve the immediate problem but cause economic growth and solve a myriad of other problems like food shortages, homelessness,etc... you are talking about the equivalent of repairing roads, I am suggesting building the equivalent of the interstate highways which were until recently the biggest spending ever and resulted in the biggest economic growth ever.
> Yes, this would require massive pumping stations to lift the water up the Continental Divide at some point (the lowest lift would be 4,000 feet in Campbell, New Mexico, close to Albuquerque), but then it would be all downhill using gravity to Lake Powell or somewhere else on the Colorado above the Glen Canyon Dam.
I understand that this is mostly for agriculture, but maybe let's stop building and expanding big cities in the desert. Golf courses in Phoenix, for example, seem like an irresponsible use of water.
Counterpoint: I grew up in the Midwest along the Kankakee river, and most infrastructure is built for flooding, as it can happen year round. Fresh water is not only abundant, there is often too much, and flooded fields and towns are a real problem. I am all for finding ways to move it west where people say they need it and are willing to pay a premium. Cities in the deserts of earth are more feasible than ever with ingenuity and engineering, and will probably always be much easier than building cities on Mars, for example.
The great lakes watershed can't be touched. In any case, the solution to floods in a flood plain is to not live in a flood plain or build elevated structures.
Only because of a treaty. If there was monetary compensation for the water I think you would get the states and provinces on board in a hurry.
I’d be more concerned about the insane water rights problems being shoved upstream to people in the great lakes basins.
Telling me I can’t collect rain water to water my garden so somebody who lives in a dessert 2,000 miles away can be guaranteed the ability to water their lawn is insanity.
Rain barrels are legal in all states bordering the lakes. It isn't like you're stealing water that will disappear from the local environment. It's just a time delay.
First, that water would be used for other things if it wasn’t used for golf courses. There are lots of other potential uses for reclaimed water. Second, less than 20% of golf course water is actually from reclaimed sources.
Is this essential agriculture that can't take place in another state?
Is this water frugal agriculture appropriate for the climate and actual supply, or is it water exuberant agriculture (avocados, sugar beets, applies, apricots, walnuts, cherries, peaches, nectarines, pears, plums, prunes, figs, kiwis, etc)?
> Is this essential agriculture that can't take place in another state?
Of course not.
But if you own some land which is worth $x00,000,000 when irrigated with subsidised water and only $x,000,000 when it's not, and you can give $x0,000 for lobbying to "protect farming jobs and keep food prices low" by giving you your subsidy? Paying $x0,000 a year is good business sense.
I'm probably just uninformed about this, but can anyone explain why there are so many comments about California here? The article seems to be about:
> Lake Powell (Glen Canyon dam on the Utah/Colorado border) and then downstream to Lake Mead (Hoover Dam/Las Vegas) and on through Arizona and beyond.
The article seems to use California as an example in a couple places, for example
> Water conservation on the part of everyone living in the Southwest is certainly important, but conservation simply can’t do the job. Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest are in the same boat. Their future survival depends upon finding large amounts of new water.
but I think, at least, the main beneficiaries would be the Southwest states. (?)
Ah, ok. So the idea is pretty fanciful in the first place, but on top of that the author is also being disingenuous by focusing on southwestern states, then?
Think of California as the furthest west extent of the Southwest for the purposes of this conversation because the colloquial usage here doesn’t really matter.
There are a handful of States that contribute to the Colorado River including Mexican States and that river (or what’s left of it by the time it gets that far) discharges into the Gulf of California.
Changing supply anywhere in that basin effectively increases water supply in the whole basin but uh, much like extra RAM and highway lanes, it’ll probably just get used up. So the question is really whether Mississippi River consumers and US taxpayers subsidize our lives out here in the American West? I suppose sucking the government teat is a time honored American tradition, just not one I’m fond of.
And Los Angeles also gets some water by another gigantic water system coming all the way from northern California collecting the melting snow from the high Sierras.
"Los Angeles" is a bit of the loose term because the central valley is connected to the same system for agricultural needs.
I think it's really the bleak future to look at as an example, Phoenix is still small enough that it doesn't yet use more than its alotment of the Colorado river. But clearly the article is looking at artificially propping up Phoenix in the future the way Los Angles is right now.
Edit: and in the terminator 2 movie, this is not a rain ditch, it’s supposed to be an actual river.
I feel like this is a very unserious proposal. I'm all for massive engineering projects, but well, I feel like this response which I think like the linked article is basically just a letter to the editor type situation does a good job describing some problems https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/contributors/valley-.... But yeah it's a tremendous construction project, a huge amount of water to lift up into the mountains, and all instead of just growing the food somewhere else and then shipping that.
A couple of nuke plants powering desalination and California could be exporting water to the east. Of course, that assumes a willingness to take their water issues seriously - it's not like they haven't seen it coming for several decades and could have all this in operation already.
For the record, California has an estimated 5.8 GW of wind turbine generation, and in the year 2019 alone, California ADDED 3.1 GW of solar generation capacity. This doesn't require a Nuclear plant or crazy economics or giant nationwide plan. The actual building, machinery, and pipework for desalinating would be a larger infrastructure project than the extra power generation to power it.
The only thing this requires is for Californian government to get their head out of their asses, and stop expecting everyone else to just bend over backwards for them.
I think the problem is that desalinating water (ignoring the environmental impact of the resulting brine) will produce water that costs at a minimum many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot. This is fine for urban use, but makes many of the current agricultural uses uneconomical. Nobody will pay $5,000/acre for water so they can sell their crop for $1,000/acre. All of these discussions dance around the fact that irrigation farmers are largely turning X dollars of water into 0.25X worth of crops, and the taxpayers are making up the difference. This is true of farmers in pretty much every state that uses colorado river water - if we erased 'water rights' and allowed the water to be competitively bid on, many farmers would either leave their land fallow or switch to less water intensive crops. We're basically giving away extremely valuable water at way below market rates, we're practically guaranteed to have a 'shortage.' It doesn't make sense to add enormously expensive infrastructure just so we can turn around and keep giving the water away.
So 1500 miles of imminent domain confiscation of property. Impractical engineering. Enormous state, local and federal spending to accommodate this new, man-made river. And no discussion of addressing the absurd laws and abuses that drive much if California's water woes...
Bear in mind that solar power is the future of energy - and the Western half of the USA will be the best place for that. Perhaps electricity for water is a fair swap?
I dont like in general enabling people to live wasteful lives, but at the same time I feel like we've given up on big engineering projects. Most of the infrastructure we enjoy using in the US and other countries was built 100 years ago. Railway lines, bridges, hydro dams, motorways nothing new is being built any more.
Linked article is talking about transferring water farther though. We can pipe desal water west to east instead of fresh water east to west. Either way, AZ needs it from somewhere
Rather, there's a lot of ways that modern industrial farming isn't as efficient as it could be. A lot of farms farm by brute force: Plant a ton of seeds, spray a ton of fertilizer, blow a ton of water on the fields and hope for the best.
It's how we end up with huge numbers of algal blooms in the waterways - fertilizer runoff is massive in most areas.
As a reference, China has been doing this a similar project to interconnect the North (think Beijing etc) and South (think Shanghai) water system. Heck, they have been doing it since hundreds of year ago [2]. So I guess there is a precedent.
Based on this thread, I would guess that a large amount of the problem will not be an engineering one, but political and social one. Constructing such a large mega project to divert would require a national unity and tremendous will to 'sculpt' nature.
But [0] seems to mostly be gravity fed so doesn't need the construction of 4+ new nuclear power plant equivalent generators and as far as I can tell shorter. [1] is much shorter and proposes to move much less water
While not exactly similar to North America continental divide, traversing from the Yangtze river to the North would require traversing some hilly or mountainous area. [0] mentions that there is some uphill location that required pumps.
At this point, there is no feasibility studies on the NA East-West water canal. There is no idea on how efficient it is vs desalination (in terms of energy), its ecological impact, and the required cost for the design and construction.
My main idea is that we should not dismiss the idea and that the Army Engineering Corps should at least do feasibility studies on it*. A proper feasibility studies could unveil the true challenge, benefits, and disadvantage (rather than anecdotal guess) of the water canal.
I am not exactly familiar with the NA Southwest and Southeast but the canal could possibility bring other benefits, such as reducing the heat in the region and opening up new land for farming and irrigation. It could have a trigger a new economic growth while at the same time, reducing flood risk at the Southeast. There is also a possibility that the this could trigger a transfer of wealth (in terms of payment for water, technical skills etc) from the relatively prosperous south West Coast to the Southeast, reducing inequality. Of course, I am not eliminating the possibility that the canal could be a white elephant and trigger untold ecological and natural disaster, but unless a feasibility studies is conducted, we never know.
*US Government, or at least the Federal Entity, are already doing multiple kind of planning and research for dizzying array of contingency. Why should the same mindset is not applied for possible infrastructure development?
Why the Army Corps of Engineers? We already a bureau that looks at this kind of stuff.
> The Waterways Journal noted talks to tap the Mississippi River for western states goes back decades. "The Bureau of Reclamation did a thorough study of the idea of pumping Mississippi River water to Arizona in 2012, concluding that the project would cost $14 billion (in 2012 dollars) and take 30 years to complete. As recently as 2021, the Arizona state legislature urged Congress to fund a technological and feasibility study of a diversion dam and pipeline scheme to harvest floodwater from the Mississippi River to replenish the Colorado River."
I've taken too much of a deep dive on this. But I can't find any source for that study. The article does link to a study of a canal across Kansas, but that study notes that the unit costs of water, for that much shorter route would be too high for farming to support. It would need to be subsidized by cities and industry and its price tag for a division of half of what this fanciful article puts as the lower bound was 28,276,000,000.
We need to price water properly first, then we can see if it even makes sense to farm in the desert or to ship water out there. At the moment it seems not to, not while we have better places
It seems, in my subjective opinion based on reading the Wikipedia article, the engineering standards employed by the Soviets in the Aral project is subpar. Furthermore, the 'destruction' of the Aral sea, based on my reading of the article, is considered as an acceptable to the Soviets (they know that the Aral will shrunk). T
The letter proposed in this thread seems to understand the danger of the taking too much water and thus propose a reasonable limits of 2.5-5%. The limits could change based on a more detailed feasibility studies (which is the main point of the author, let's think about it.)
US engineering and attention to detail are, I agree, vastly different to the Soviet ones.
But concern for quality of environment for others vs corporate profit? Hmm not sure. The initial overuse of water resources in the West, endless stories of top soil and water table irreversible pollution with one chemical or other, or the reports that gas and oil companies had a full perspective in global warming in 1990s...
I'd agree, there possibly is an amount of water you could safely divert, and it is this kind of study that would determine it, but I'm not sure if the end result would reflect a sustainable solution.
That's a very good point! The feasibility studies could solve the engineering question but social/economic (not as in cost-benefit, but in which group/organization/corporation will have more priority) is much more harder to solve.
But in my personal guess, a strong NGO/political activism by CA could influence the canal for the better. After all, construction of such canal, aside from having the support of the Federal Government, would requires an interstate compact/agreement. California would probably impose a decent environmental standard. Furthermore, Southeast states would also impose a strong limitation on the waters they will agree to divert. Unlike China, US States has strong sovereignty on matter like this and it would probably lead to some kind of equilibrium on the 'sustainable' water diversion rate.
This just makes me shake my head. I'm not in the industry, but I'm guessing there's a least a bunch of things that could destroy the ecosystem out west by introducing a different ph, foreign mineral content, or lack of natural bacterial content. So instead I have a bunch of better ideas that don't result in ecological disasters:
* How about people stop living the desert? Somehow, unexpectedly, there's not a lot of water there.
* How about we don't grow baby spinach 365 days a year? We can eat other things in the winter.
* How about we reexamine the scientifically unsound pact around the Colorado river?
I must disagree, people need space and while conservatism has its place people should live along side nature not outside of it. There is no reason to keep an arid and infertile land the way it is for the sake of novelty alone.
How about we turn the deserts into habitable and fertile lands. People are suffering and climate change will only make water and food shortage worse and lack of resources always results in wars and famines.
This is what people should be doing before colonizing mars.
New fertile lands and sustainable cities built with the lessons of the past 200 years in mind. Instead of continuing to ruin and deplete existing resources, migrate to newer artificially formed areas to allow previously looted areas to recover.
Homeless camps in the desert and drying lakes is all that needs to be considered. People will keep living in these areas and other areas will become and less and less habitable.
And millions more will inhabit them with water and trees. You can declare state and national parks to conserve desert environment. For example in Cali Joshua Tree national park is a great example.
Why? These are states that are literally deserts yet continue to waste water. Take Phoenix, something like 50% of their residential water use is watering lawns. The state also just got a brand new TSMC fab, presumably with a bunch of tax breaks and guaranteed water - given that the large fabs use around as much water each day as 3-400k homes, it’s rich to turn around and say you need federal aid to get more water.
Residential and industrial use combined is still less than 1/2 of agricultural use of water in Arizona... Agriculture that still uses flood irrigation , where they flood a field with water.. instead of sprinklers or more efficient means..
https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
but yeah.. it's people and industry.
As someone who moved to LA in the early 70s, and left LA in the late 80s, and spent some time to visit Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, I can say with full confidence that anyone with a lick of sense knew there was not enough water to sustain that growth that started back then, but that didn't stop anyone from building or buying those homes. They all knew it, but didn't care.
It was, and still is, plain old stupid to build those giant cities in those barren deserts. The idea that we'd all have to pay for pipelines to push that water all those miles feels a bit painful to me now, and the complete lack of any discussion about the environmental impact of doing this very bothersome too.
There are many other issues to consider, like the quality of that Mississippi water. They don't call that river "The Big Muddy" for nothing. And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries.
The total driving distance from New Orleans to Las Vegas is 1,722 miles. I doubt you can route a pipeline in a way that reduces that much. The cost and environmental impact of building one would be enormous.
This plan feels like it was concocted by someone who's never driven from Las Vegas to New Orleans, or spent anytime on or around the Mississippi River. It gets low on water too. There are droughts in the mid-west too.
Truth is there is no good sustainable solution to this problem as it exist. The only reasonable solution is to stop building new homes right now, and look into how to reduce the number that exists because it's obvious they've already overbuilt.
It's hard for me to imagine anyone with a lick of sense taking this seriously, but that's a shortcoming of mine I am well aware of nowadays.
> And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries.
Sounds like an opportunity to clean the water and bill the polluters for the cost. If only…
It's not near as polluted as it was in the `40s-`70s but it's still polluted and will always be muddy.
I get the feeling the person who wrote that has never actually seen the Mississippi River. It's far from a clear mountain stream you'd walk up to and sip water from. It's not something you'd even want to swim in on a hot day.
> The only reasonable solution is to stop building new homes right now, and look into how to reduce the number that exists because it's obvious they've already overbuilt.
Yep, reduce housing, don’t build more. Nobody wants to admit it because it doesn’t sound nice.
A planning issue that would be better addressed with goals at the large scale and fine implementation details generally left to the local scale unless issues arose.
“TedShiller” is calling for depopulating large parts of America (California specifically in another comment). Edit-depopulation is the scalpel of war, world war in this case.
It’s this kind of content that screams propaganda of the worst kind.
Don't build on coasts susceptible to hurricanes and sea level rise, don't build in the north susceptible to mega blizzards, and don't build in the Midwest susceptible to tornados.
You've lived and traveled in Califoria and the west but have you tried to grow anything here? There's a reason we've built vast megaprojects to pump water around the West: our deserts have been the terminus for the biological nutrient cycle for millions of years through multiple climate cycles resulting in an incredibly fertile ecosystem, despite its desolate appearance. Combined with the heat, it creates the perfect conditions for an industry that has dominated the nation's agricultural production in foods that humans want to eat. It's a lot easier to move water than to increase the carrying capacity of an ecosystem.
At this scale, regional sustainability is an illusion. Even the Amazon rainforest is not sustainable without _transcontinental_ winds that carry massive amounts of nutrients from African dry lake beds to South America [1]. Make no mistake, we're not just talking about the sustainibility of cities in the western US but food security and quality of life for the entire United States.
From what I gathered this is not about the San Joaquin Valley farms, it's about Vegas, Phoenix, Palm Springs & Desert Hot Springs (Riverside County) and water for people living there.
Vegas went from 230,000 in 1970 to over 2.5 million residents in those years.
Phoenix from 870,000 to 4,652,000.
Riverside County from 44,579 to 2,544,820
So now we've got over 10 Million people living in the desert in just 3 those areas.
Aside from that, I lived in Sylmar, Ca in the `70s on the last parcel of ag zoned land there, so yeah, we did grow there.
When we bought our place there was a small 2 bedroon home on it, an orchard of fruit trees, a large garden, and we raised chickens and rabbits and a few cows (one at a time) there.
Our home was the oldest house in Sylmar at the time and it was akin to an oasis compared to most of the homes there. Because of the ag zoning we had two water lines, one for the home and one for the orchard & garden and we got a huge discount on the ag water line.
I'm talking about the entire southwest, not just San Joaquin Valley.
In agriculture, Riverside County is the 13th most productive county in the state in planted crops with $1.2 billion in cash receipts on about 210,000 acres [1]. That's more than any single county in Florida [2] based on crop value and the entire state of Florida produces 5-6 times more agricultural products than Riverside County on ten times the acreage. Most of that is in the Coachella Valley that is adjacent to Palm Springs/Desert Hot Springs and this productivity is despite the massive environmental disaster that is the Salton Sea [3].
I don't have an agricultural report on hand for Maricopa County (Phoenix) but based off a cursory search it produces about a third of the agricultural output of Arizona, which as a whole totals half the cash receipts of Florida's industry, despite a third of the population (though I believe AZ is a lot less productive per acre than FL because it's a lot of pasture).
Now, don't get me wrong: analyzing agricultural productivity - let alone the sustainability of entire metropolises - in dollars per anything is a fool's errand that obliterates all nuance. I'm just trying to illustrate that most [4] of these cities weren't dropped in the middle of desolate wastelands by hopeless fools that kept on attracting more fools. They were founded because the deserts of the southwest provide an ideal environment and all we needed to do was bring a single ingredient. Just take a look at Phoenix in 1885 [5]: farmland as far as the eye can see, half a century before pumping mass amounts of groundwater for agriculture was even an option.
When it comes to the food people want to eat, each [4] of these regions more than pull their own weight [6]. Unless we plan on transitioning the entire country to a wheat/corn/beef/pork/chicken-only diet or significantly decreasing food security or quality of life for everyone, we have to come to terms with the fact that the entire country is not sustainable without the Southwest, which means the region's water supply a national concern. We could completely depopulate all the big cities in Arizona, Nevada, and California without saving as much as a fifth of the water we currently use because the rest is used to feed the nation.
[2] Florida was first wet state that came to mind and it's top third to middle of the pack nationally in agriculture depending on the specific food group so I think it's representative. 2017 numbers: https://www.fdacs.gov/Agriculture-Industry/Florida-Agricultu...
[3] More precisely, farmers caused that disaster to begin with, but the area is recovering and they are are adopting more sustainable techniques.
[4] I'm ignoring Vegas because it's an outlier that started out as a supply stop for the United Pacific railroad. It only grew to its current ridiculous size when Nevada legalized gambling and the economic activity from the construction of the Hoover dam let the gambling industry develop a permanent foothold that sustained the city.
[6] We'd actually need to look at export numbers to get a more accurate picture but i.e. nearly half of Arizona's agriculture is exported if I'm understanding the ag department correctly.
"When it comes to the food people want to eat, each [4] of these regions more than pull their own weight [6]."
I don't have a problem with moving water to support agriculture in those State. That's something that was fairly well solved in the San Joaquin Valley long ago.
But that is not what this opinion piece purposes. They summed that up with "Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest are in the same boat. Their future survival depends upon finding large amounts of new water."
That is an entirely different issue. In all of Arizona there are approximately 138,000 people that work in agriculture. That's not even in the top 10 industries in Phoenix. About 40% of the water used in Phoenix is used for farming. Phoenix-area residents use over 50% of the water they get from city water supplies for watering lawns and maintaining swimming pools. [1]
When you look at the growth of metro areas there it seems pretty clear to me that growth is not sustainable.
> About 40% of the water used in Phoenix is used for farming. Phoenix-area residents use over 50% of the water they get from city water supplies for watering lawns and maintaining swimming pools.
Granted, maintaining lawns and outdoor swimming pools in a desert is really stupid but you're zooming in on an urban (as much as you're going to get in Arizona) city where land is too valuable to make most farming worth while. If you zoom out to Maricopa county [1], despite the concentrated population of Phoenix, the numbers flip around and about 60% of the water goes to agriculture with another 10% or so industrial with the remaining 30% municipal (though to be honest, I thought those figures would look more like California with an 80-20 split at most).
Maybe if manifest destiny had played out differently and we had planned our westward expansion better all those people in Phoenix and LA would be living in the PNW or the swamps of the south and they'd still have access to Arizona lettuce and California avacados, but that ship has sailed. We can't, as a nation, have our cake by depopulating the west and eat it too by depending on all the agriculture the region produces. When push comes to shove, metro areas will get priority over agriculture and environmental concerns so the entire country is going to have to sacrifice regardless.
"but that ship has sailed" is a perfect summary of the situation because that ship is now the size of the Titanic in shallow water that will most certainly strand it and the only way to avoid that is to turn it around.
"Ten Civilizations or Nations That Collapsed From Drought":
> As someone who moved to LA in the early 70s, and left LA in the late 80s, and spent some time to visit Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, I can say with full confidence that anyone with a lick of sense knew there was not enough water to sustain that growth that started back then, but that didn't stop anyone from building or buying those homes. They all knew it, but didn't care.
But Las Vegas is treating almost all of the water it uses and ends up being very close to water neutral.
Actually, building people structures where the world doesn’t support something else disrupts the world less than clearing otherwise usable land. LV is approximately cleared gravel because it is so dry. Opportunity costs, etc etc.
This is clearly an area to think at a larger, national level like the thinking which led to the Hoover Dam and national highway systems. Anything less is shrinking away from the problem.
Sad that not reading the article before commenting has so obviously come to hacker news. So many comments on here moaning about harming the east to give to a greedy west when what something like this would almost certainly do is help the east flood less while helping the west at least partly solve a water shortage. The concerns about contamination are real but probably manageable though.
I've pretty much stopped commenting after finding better forums for discussion now. So many of the comments are from angry people with nothing constructive to offer. I have a lot to say about this subject, but it's not worth the effort to deal with all the drive-by shitposts.
In terms of where the water comes from, sourcing at Old River Control makes a lot of sense. From there the water really does pretty much run into the Gulf of Mexico, and there is no downstream irrigation, power generation, or shipping impact from a 5% diversion. But the writer makes the engineering sound trivial, when it's really not. The first thousand miles are all uphill, so you're not talking about a canal, as the author implies, but rather a pipe. And not a small pipe either. If you move the water at a velocity of a meter per second through a single pipe, you're looking at a pipe 40 meters in diameter. And you have to push that against a head of 4000 ft net. Obviously, you'd want to pump at multiple points with intermediate reservoirs to stage the pressure gradient - otherwise you'd have a static pressure of 1800 psi in the pipe at the source. But when you roll up the pipe, the reservoirs, the pumps, and the multiple power plants to run it all, you're talking about a lot more than the garden hose across Texas the author wants to make this sound like.
And much of this is across already arid, water starved land. I'm guessing West Texas and New Mexico will want their own cut of water in return for permitting the project to cut their states in two. You might need to double your total take to satisfy everybody.
I was curious, so some rough estimates: About 1m kg of water per second, lifted about 1km implies about 10GW of continuous power, or about 86 TWh annually assuming the scheme runs continuously, which is about 2% of annual generation. So enormous, but on the scale of feasible, a bit to my surprise.
Could the pumping uphill also be turned in reverse to serve as a battery? Like, you don’t want to power this with coal, but solar. Maybe this could produce a lot of energy storage potential (albeit in the “wrong” place—but if you have local water, energy and job, it could create some new places!)
Those sound like big numbers but unless my napkin math is very wrong it's not even an order of magnitude more than existing Californian water projects like the California Aqueduct [1]. 1 m/s flow through a 40 m diameter pipe is 1256 m^3/s which is less than four times that of the CA aqueduct at 370 m^3/s and the distance is five to six times depending on how you measure it at 2000-2400 miles compared to 440 miles. Just one of the pumping stations along the CA aqueduct pumps that water up about 2,000 feet at 2,000 PSI so the elevation change is barely a factor of two more.
The California Aqueduct was a megaproject that started over 70 years ago and the aforementioned Edmonston Pumping Station was turned on in 1973. At this point, the biggest challenge would be the right of way and litigation since the engineering has long been a solved problem. Those in California can go see the aqueduct exit the Sierra Nevada mountains at the edge of Bakersfield [2] and hiking trails around Lake Isabella intersect with open parts of the aqueduct where you can see all the water rushing by (don't fall in!). Imagine that, but like five or six times bigger.
I don't doubt it's doable. But I don't think "barely an order of magnitude" quite captures the scale of the engineering. The Edmonston pumps, e.g., while they do raise water nearly 2000 feet, only move it a couple of miles, and have a capacity roughly 1/8 of what this proposal requires. Most of the California project can be gravity "pumped" canals. But there isn't much of the route from Louisiana to NE New Mexico that is or can be made to be downhill. There is way more than an order of magnitude more pipe and pumping to be built and provisioned in this proposal.
> the biggest challenge would be the right of way and litigation
I totally agree. I live in SoCal and there are some infrastructure projects that took forever (ie creating the I105 and finish connecting the I210), or will probably never get completed (ie. finish connecting the I710 and California High Speed Rail) all because of right of way issues and lots of law suits.
The I710 extension has been officially dead for almost a decade - CalTrans has probably finished selling off all the property they bought by now. I grew up in South Pasadena, the little 25k pop town that killed it, and it was a big deal because tons of money finally became available to repair our shitty roads and stop the hemorrhaging of the school district.
Yes and no. The middle/high school had more great teachers than I can remember and many of the students came from families that placed great importance on education but the legal battle to stop the I710 extension was a disaster for the city budget. My freshman year in high school we didn't even have a history class and by sophomore year the elementary schools completely cut their arts and music programs as part of a $3 million district budget cut. Can you imagine elementary school without art!? Meanwhile, the booster club raised $4 million to replace the grass with fake turf on the football and baseball fields (also a disaster that cost the school money down the road).
Granted, this was during the great financial crisis so they may be doing better now.
Most water use is for agriculture. Most agricultural water use is for meat. Beef is by far the least efficient way to turn water (and other stuff) into protein. I propose we tax meat nationwide according to its water use, instead of dreaming up unrealistic and unnecessary megaprojects.
This is a great idea. People need to connect all the big problems with animal husbandry to their immediate lives so they have impetus to stop eating meat. Most people have virtually no knowledge of how bad meat really is. They just see a product on the shelf that they strongly desire.
Taper down the subsidies over time rather than implementing them over night.
"If we intentionally implement this policy change in the dumbest, bluntest way possible, it will be disruptive" is an argument for never making any policy change.
So people would just stop eating meat and that's the end of it? Or might it be that you'd then "activate" a sizable chunk of 92%+ of Americans who eat meat to vote for the next candidate who runs on a pro-meat platform. That's a sizable enough influence that the next election would likely look like one big beef industry commercial.
If being vegetarian or vegan is an important value to you then the real way to make real lasting progress is by trying to persuade and convince people, not by trying to force or otherwise coerce them into agreeing with you. The same as on any topic.
This is backwards. Most people don't appreciate how important hoofed animals are for the ecology and how efficient they are in terms of caloric production. There are some issues with mass industrial animal husbandry as currently practiced, but if you want long-term sustainability, the mass industrial farming of the Midwest with soybeans and corn has to stop and be replaced with bison or cattle grazing before soil depletion is too far advanced.
Trying to end meat consumption is going to result in a Great Leap Forward-type disaster. We need to be looking at the ecology holistically and try to work with nature and the sustainable processes that generated what we have now, not burn it all down we can grow more of what's short-term efficient on spreadsheets for one single dimension.
If you want go to this route, then you might find the cost of your cereal going up. More than 98% [1] of the water usage attributed to beef/cattle (and other animals) is an indirect measurement - it's from the estimated water usage in the production of the feed that's given to them. Cattle themselves directly use next to no water. So you'd need to add your water tax to grains and other such products.
Another interesting datum is that the average head of cattle has a water footprint of 2056 (m^3/year), while it's 2842 [2] for the average American, and 1071 for the average Chinese. There are 94 million cattle in the US, and 332 million people.
Yes most of the water use to produce beef is indirect, in growing the feed. If beef is taxed to consumers it will reduce demand, which will reduce the demand for feed, which will reduce the consumption of water. Decreasing the demand for cereal will decrease its cost, not increase it.
You're somewhat shifting the goal posts here. The OP was suggesting taxing meat in proportion to their water usage, which would then presumably be spent on water reclamation projects or whatever. But the direct water usage of meat is completely negligible, which leaves you in this weird scenario where you're trying to tax somebody for water that they didn't use. So you're left to tax water usage at the source, and that's going to hit plants far harder than meat.
I know you said protein, but calories are really the metric we want to use here.
TL;DR: 2.1 calories/gallon for almonds, 5.3 c/g for tofu, 1,558 c/g for beef.
Almonds consume 3.2 gallons of water each for just shy of 7 calories. 2.18 calories per gallon.
Cows consume ~3,200 gallons of water from birth to slaughter, where they produce about 6 million calories. 1,875 calories per gallon.
An additional 50 bales of hay to feed it over its lifetime (really hay is half the diet but its late and I'm just doubling it). Approximately 1,300 gallons per acre, which produces 100 bales - 13 gallons per bale - 650 gallons to grow the food. That is still 1,558 calories per gallon of water.
I found a recipe online that used about a gallon of water (rinsing and as an ingredient) for 1 pound of tofu. 10,000 gallons to produce one bushel (or 60 pounds) of soybeans. 166 gallons per pound. A pound is 2.6 cups, recipe wants 1 cup. 63 gallons per cup. 64 gallons made into tofu. 344 calories per pound of tofu. 5.3 calories per gallon of water consumed.
Your numbers for beef are absurdly wrong. Reality is closer to 2000 gallons per pound, or roughly 0.5 calories per gallon. Chicken is about 4x less. Grains are roughly an order of magnitude less. As a country the USA consumes dramatically more meat than necessary, cutting even a little would have a massive impact on water consumption.
What are your sources for the cow info? I'm getting more like 30 kcal/gallon.
A cow drinks 9-12 gallons per day [1] (assuming not lactating, which takes a lot more water; let's just say these are cows being raised purely for slaughter). Call it 10 gallons/day on average.
Cows raised for slaughter live 4-6 years [2]. Call it 5 years on average.
Having raised cows and some Googling. Your numbers are for dairy cows and not meat cows. Dairy cows consume a ton of water because they are intended to produce a liquid nearly non-stop, and while they are eventually slaughtered for meat it mostly ends up in dog food.
Cows are actually extremely efficient at turning water into calories. Almonds, alfalfa, and soy consume 2.5 orders of magnitude more water to generate an equivalent amount of calories as a cow.
This was common practice throughout history. The Egyptians built canals, lakes, and basins to divert water from the Nile and vastly expand the amount of livable area and farmland. People think the Great Pyramids are a wonder of the world, but the irrigation projects were potentially more impressive and impactful.
More recently, the Libyan government built the Great Man-Made Project, which was thousands of kilometers of pipes pumping water from desert aquifers in the south to the cities in the north, which sounds like one of those crazy dictator megalomaniac ego projects but actually had a tremendous amount of impact (assuming there's as much water in the aquifers they're draining as they think).
346 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadReducing the flow of water in Louisiana by 5% would not have noticeable impact on the state’s environment when you consider that annual variability of water flow must be far higher than 5% for such a vast and dynamic watershed. If that kind of annual variability is not often creating headlines, outside of flooding - for which this kind of project could only help, then it’s difficult to imagine how a far smaller variance would have meaningful impact.
I saw a documentary recently about canals that will be used to direct sediment into the barrier islands before it reaches the Gulf.
>Until this USGS study was undertaken, environmental managers thought that the principal cause of barrier island erosion was rising sea level. Now, we know that both the longshore movement of sediment and the general absence of sand-sized sediment is the principal cause of the islands' instability. The sediments underlying coastal Louisiana are made up mostly of silts and muds which do not contribute to the building of beaches, dunes, and spits—geomorphic features associated with healthy barrier islands. In addition, long-shore currents redistribute the available sand from headland areas to embayments, depriving shorelines of much needed sand.
[1]https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/barrier-islands/
Cadallic desert is a good Book
ETA: to westerners- You have enough water to maintain first class lifestyles. Allocate/ration it better or cap population. Stop stealing from others.
Meanwhile, natural reservoirs like Tahoe do not even recognize there in a drought.
Selling water you don't need or want and getting paid for it doesn't seem like a bad thing? Although, a lot depends on the price.
How did the owens valley owners make out after selling there water?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
ETA: although only optics, very bad look for the richest state to “buy” water from one of the poorest states in what would almost 100% be a poor long term deal for Louisiana.
Tapping into the Mississippi is the more sensible megaproject than the great lakes. Prevent the great floods by redirecting that water to the reservoirs out west.
It's still a mad plan. Don't get me wrong.
I frequently see this sentiment, yet have never once seen any detail made as to how it’s possible. Please explain.
How about CA trades food for water.
I’m fine not eating salad in December if you give all the water back from the Colorado river.
> California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on).
Those other states are monocultures of federal subsidies like wheat, cotton or corn.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/california-grows-all-of...
Better analogy would be like shipping beach sand from FL to Wyoming because they want beaches and FL has a lot of sand.
Different story when there are competeing interests for the land and inefficient uses (I.e growing alfalfa in a desert) are adapted and cemented into law. It’s complicated no doubt.
Yes, very complicated. The issue is definitely going to come to a head when the authorities have no option but to start pulling water rights.
Also, those nuts and fruits and avacados you currently like weren’t bred for taste. Likely bred for transportability and shelf life. That’s why export markets exist is the produce can withstand long journeys with variable parameters and arrive “fresh”.
Thirdly, to another comment you make saying engineering acres is science fiction while building a water canal is less so. We can build retractable roofs and keep heat and light in pretty easy. Glass houses and/or greenhouses can likely be scaled up to replace whatever CA crop you seem to think is untouchable. Those crops can and do grow just fine in other places. Maybe not year round but there exists options to fix that and remove CA from equation
Lastly, i see many people chiding the subsidies of corn and soy and wheat. What do they think the water in the Central Valley is if not a subsidy? Farmers most certainly are not paying a fair market price. Artificially low. But it’s ok. We need food. No point in bashing subsidies without proper context.
> We know a lot about Plant genetics and physiology.
lol, no we don't. We can't even make grocery store food that doesn't taste like crap. Sometimes fruit trees skip a season - why? Nobody knows. Sure, we've gotten pretty good at messing around with corn, but it's simple, forgiving, not eaten fresh, and planted from seed every year. It's basically a model organism.
[0] https://practicalfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Tom-...
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Less-rice-more-n...
But infrastructure to move water around your country especially when a large chunk is a desert makes perfect sense. I originally imagined this would mean somehow exploiting the Great Lakes but the argument suggested here seems quite practical.
Not saying wasteful agriculture on export crops shouldn’t be banned (it should) and perhaps people should stop having so many golf courses, but free flowing water is a true mark of advanced Civilization and it’s not unfair for a country to build the infra to guarantee it.
Unless desalination becomes more efficient, CA is thirsty.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-g...
(it looks, based on their graphs, like agricultural usage is sticker, in the sense that it doesn't go down nearly as much in dry years).
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
Since agricultural use takes up a ton of water and produces a fairly small % of the overall GDP, I'd expect them to shift usage toward whatever the high-productivity sectors want before they allow an exodus.
I think you might harbor some odd ideas about the existing relationships between Midwestern states, or perhaps you’re taking a football rivalry too seriously.
People just set their homes wherever they felt convenient assuming their taxes would get them the water they need. Sounds like you’re just bringing in prejudiced politics into a discussion about getting water to everyone in your country. Also, inconsistent? Pretty sure the biggest water guzzlers everywhere, the farmers vote republican.
Tell me how CA hasn’t been greedy in their pursuit of water
It's that newspapers have been running passive-aggressive opeds of the same tone, thinking it's worthwhile. You can guess what kind of opeds are getting run in which regions.
That said, I do think water “wars” will be a thing in the not so distant future. Gonna get nasty IRL. Not meant to incite, just a prediction
On the other hand, the engineering to elevate that much water will be interesting.
This godlike arrogance thinking we can just rearrange the earth on a whim for our needs is the fucking problem. This is why humanity is a cancer.
It's not like it's a small operation. There are canneries almost a mile long. There are small mountains of peach pits that form when they're processed (these are used for other purposes by the way!).
What about mature orchards?
I'm not sure why people hate California so much. It's got a lot of problems, like most places... But it's pretty amazing how much shit goes on there.
But the agriculture in California in the face of climate change is completely unsustainable. It is up there with the coal mining and fracking in Pennsylvania.
We need to properly manage the crisis and reduce the amount of human suffering involved because uprooting people in painful.
The alternative seems like we could wind up having literal water wars at some point. This proposal caps the diversion at 5% but that seems the same as building more freeways to me, which just causes more traffic. Give California more water and the agricultural industry will expand and you'll kick the can down the road again.
Changing the water supply changes the environment of the entire region. It's needed for human survival. Surely you can see how that's different that exporting more or fewer iPhones, right?
As a Californian, I don't mind. But I have ran across some people who simultaneously think we need to keep growing, but, refuse to consider the idea of helping us with our water problem.
It isn't a California problem. One way or another, it's a USA problem. Food or water. Pick your poison.
I suppose some of that water could also be diverted for use in California, but that’s not what the author is asking for.
Guess how that turned out.
It seems awfully threatening.
How does one build a canal that moves water uphill for 1500 miles across the continental divide in these quantities? If not a canal, then how do we do it? Pipes?
We're talking a million cubic feet per second in the Colorado river during high times, which has been completely drained and diverted by communities downstream.
The keystone pipeline carries 50 cubic feet per second. The largest pipeline in the world carries 1.5x that. Nowhere close to what a functional river provides.
So, either antigravity so the Mississippi flows uphill, or 20,000 keystone pipelines.
Desalination plus local pumping is much, much less science fiction.
Tunnels, alternate locations,using solar and wind to generate pump power and once operational, using a dam to supplement the pump with hydroelectric power.
I mean, this is one challenging area where the best and brightest should be well funded to come up with a solution instead of writing them off.
Desalination is not a dream either.
People are fine to talk about colonizing other planets but are so dismissive of acheivable goals like this.
Trillions are spent on wars, a fraction of that can be used to desalinate water or create artificial rivers and tunnels to fill up artificial lakes.
My idea personally has been to build in parallel to the interstar highways and complement it with high speed railways and artificial rivers. The resulting econominc boom will pay for the cost and you don't need to print money, it can be bonded because you charge for the infrasteucture usage (train,power,car charger and water fees).
Why do you insist it isn't solvable?the tech is there, the money is there, the will is there. Do you have a better solution that acheives the dam goal or is your idea "someone else should figure it out?" Not being dismissive, I would like to know what it is. Population will grow and areas that are already occupied will become less and less habitable. Where else should people live in Nevada? In California, it is already filled with people to the brim in and out of the dessert.
I'm also just very unimpressed by this particular letter to the editor. Maybe it's a good idea, but it definitely doesn't sell it
If you want research into how to divert the Mississippi River to Arizona, you've started off backwards.
The problem is lack of renewable water in socal, AZ, CO, Las Vegas, etc, and the solution might be just to reduce demand, increase reclamation, and add in some new renewable water sources like desalination. That seems insanely more viable. Let's see that study first.
Fundamentally altering these areas will not only solve the immediate problem but cause economic growth and solve a myriad of other problems like food shortages, homelessness,etc... you are talking about the equivalent of repairing roads, I am suggesting building the equivalent of the interstate highways which were until recently the biggest spending ever and resulted in the biggest economic growth ever.
Note that the premium amount they would be willing to pay is approximately $0.0017 per litre, delivered treated to their doorstep.
[1] https://www.phoenix.gov/rates# says ~$5/unit, with each unit being ~750 gallons, or ~2850 litres
I’d be more concerned about the insane water rights problems being shoved upstream to people in the great lakes basins.
Telling me I can’t collect rain water to water my garden so somebody who lives in a dessert 2,000 miles away can be guaranteed the ability to water their lawn is insanity.
First, that water would be used for other things if it wasn’t used for golf courses. There are lots of other potential uses for reclaimed water. Second, less than 20% of golf course water is actually from reclaimed sources.
[0] http://www.swellmfg.com/
Is this water frugal agriculture appropriate for the climate and actual supply, or is it water exuberant agriculture (avocados, sugar beets, applies, apricots, walnuts, cherries, peaches, nectarines, pears, plums, prunes, figs, kiwis, etc)?
Percentages alone don't tell the whole story.
Of course not.
But if you own some land which is worth $x00,000,000 when irrigated with subsidised water and only $x,000,000 when it's not, and you can give $x0,000 for lobbying to "protect farming jobs and keep food prices low" by giving you your subsidy? Paying $x0,000 a year is good business sense.
The only thing you need water for is the green. Not that I see golf going back to that.
> Lake Powell (Glen Canyon dam on the Utah/Colorado border) and then downstream to Lake Mead (Hoover Dam/Las Vegas) and on through Arizona and beyond.
The article seems to use California as an example in a couple places, for example
> Water conservation on the part of everyone living in the Southwest is certainly important, but conservation simply can’t do the job. Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest are in the same boat. Their future survival depends upon finding large amounts of new water.
but I think, at least, the main beneficiaries would be the Southwest states. (?)
There are a handful of States that contribute to the Colorado River including Mexican States and that river (or what’s left of it by the time it gets that far) discharges into the Gulf of California.
Changing supply anywhere in that basin effectively increases water supply in the whole basin but uh, much like extra RAM and highway lanes, it’ll probably just get used up. So the question is really whether Mississippi River consumers and US taxpayers subsidize our lives out here in the American West? I suppose sucking the government teat is a time honored American tradition, just not one I’m fond of.
And Los Angeles also gets some water by another gigantic water system coming all the way from northern California collecting the melting snow from the high Sierras. "Los Angeles" is a bit of the loose term because the central valley is connected to the same system for agricultural needs.
I think it's really the bleak future to look at as an example, Phoenix is still small enough that it doesn't yet use more than its alotment of the Colorado river. But clearly the article is looking at artificially propping up Phoenix in the future the way Los Angles is right now.
Edit: and in the terminator 2 movie, this is not a rain ditch, it’s supposed to be an actual river.
Los Angles takes 1.2 million acre feet of water from the Colorado. Replace that with desalinization, no heep big canal needed.
The only thing this requires is for Californian government to get their head out of their asses, and stop expecting everyone else to just bend over backwards for them.
I dont like in general enabling people to live wasteful lives, but at the same time I feel like we've given up on big engineering projects. Most of the infrastructure we enjoy using in the US and other countries was built 100 years ago. Railway lines, bridges, hydro dams, motorways nothing new is being built any more.
Those wasteful people in California only use 20% of the water.
The other 80% is agriculture.
I am sure there's a great many ways to get farmers to use less water.
Rather, there's a lot of ways that modern industrial farming isn't as efficient as it could be. A lot of farms farm by brute force: Plant a ton of seeds, spray a ton of fertilizer, blow a ton of water on the fields and hope for the best.
It's how we end up with huge numbers of algal blooms in the waterways - fertilizer runoff is massive in most areas.
Based on this thread, I would guess that a large amount of the problem will not be an engineering one, but political and social one. Constructing such a large mega project to divert would require a national unity and tremendous will to 'sculpt' nature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Yunnan_Water_Diversion... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)
At this point, there is no feasibility studies on the NA East-West water canal. There is no idea on how efficient it is vs desalination (in terms of energy), its ecological impact, and the required cost for the design and construction.
My main idea is that we should not dismiss the idea and that the Army Engineering Corps should at least do feasibility studies on it*. A proper feasibility studies could unveil the true challenge, benefits, and disadvantage (rather than anecdotal guess) of the water canal.
I am not exactly familiar with the NA Southwest and Southeast but the canal could possibility bring other benefits, such as reducing the heat in the region and opening up new land for farming and irrigation. It could have a trigger a new economic growth while at the same time, reducing flood risk at the Southeast. There is also a possibility that the this could trigger a transfer of wealth (in terms of payment for water, technical skills etc) from the relatively prosperous south West Coast to the Southeast, reducing inequality. Of course, I am not eliminating the possibility that the canal could be a white elephant and trigger untold ecological and natural disaster, but unless a feasibility studies is conducted, we never know.
*US Government, or at least the Federal Entity, are already doing multiple kind of planning and research for dizzying array of contingency. Why should the same mindset is not applied for possible infrastructure development?
> The Waterways Journal noted talks to tap the Mississippi River for western states goes back decades. "The Bureau of Reclamation did a thorough study of the idea of pumping Mississippi River water to Arizona in 2012, concluding that the project would cost $14 billion (in 2012 dollars) and take 30 years to complete. As recently as 2021, the Arizona state legislature urged Congress to fund a technological and feasibility study of a diversion dam and pipeline scheme to harvest floodwater from the Mississippi River to replenish the Colorado River."
https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/blogs/ag-policy-blo...
We need to price water properly first, then we can see if it even makes sense to farm in the desert or to ship water out there. At the moment it seems not to, not while we have better places
So much water in that lake, right? But it went from 4th largest in the world to no lake.
The letter proposed in this thread seems to understand the danger of the taking too much water and thus propose a reasonable limits of 2.5-5%. The limits could change based on a more detailed feasibility studies (which is the main point of the author, let's think about it.)
But concern for quality of environment for others vs corporate profit? Hmm not sure. The initial overuse of water resources in the West, endless stories of top soil and water table irreversible pollution with one chemical or other, or the reports that gas and oil companies had a full perspective in global warming in 1990s...
I'd agree, there possibly is an amount of water you could safely divert, and it is this kind of study that would determine it, but I'm not sure if the end result would reflect a sustainable solution.
But in my personal guess, a strong NGO/political activism by CA could influence the canal for the better. After all, construction of such canal, aside from having the support of the Federal Government, would requires an interstate compact/agreement. California would probably impose a decent environmental standard. Furthermore, Southeast states would also impose a strong limitation on the waters they will agree to divert. Unlike China, US States has strong sovereignty on matter like this and it would probably lead to some kind of equilibrium on the 'sustainable' water diversion rate.
What happens when that becomes not enough?
* How about people stop living the desert? Somehow, unexpectedly, there's not a lot of water there.
* How about we don't grow baby spinach 365 days a year? We can eat other things in the winter.
* How about we reexamine the scientifically unsound pact around the Colorado river?
How about we turn the deserts into habitable and fertile lands. People are suffering and climate change will only make water and food shortage worse and lack of resources always results in wars and famines.
This is what people should be doing before colonizing mars.
New fertile lands and sustainable cities built with the lessons of the past 200 years in mind. Instead of continuing to ruin and deplete existing resources, migrate to newer artificially formed areas to allow previously looted areas to recover.
Homeless camps in the desert and drying lakes is all that needs to be considered. People will keep living in these areas and other areas will become and less and less habitable.
It was, and still is, plain old stupid to build those giant cities in those barren deserts. The idea that we'd all have to pay for pipelines to push that water all those miles feels a bit painful to me now, and the complete lack of any discussion about the environmental impact of doing this very bothersome too.
There are many other issues to consider, like the quality of that Mississippi water. They don't call that river "The Big Muddy" for nothing. And there is still a lot of industry that use and dumped used water into it, and farms that have runoff of pesticides all along it and it's tributaries.
The total driving distance from New Orleans to Las Vegas is 1,722 miles. I doubt you can route a pipeline in a way that reduces that much. The cost and environmental impact of building one would be enormous.
This plan feels like it was concocted by someone who's never driven from Las Vegas to New Orleans, or spent anytime on or around the Mississippi River. It gets low on water too. There are droughts in the mid-west too.
Truth is there is no good sustainable solution to this problem as it exist. The only reasonable solution is to stop building new homes right now, and look into how to reduce the number that exists because it's obvious they've already overbuilt.
It's hard for me to imagine anyone with a lick of sense taking this seriously, but that's a shortcoming of mine I am well aware of nowadays.
Sounds like an opportunity to clean the water and bill the polluters for the cost. If only…
I get the feeling the person who wrote that has never actually seen the Mississippi River. It's far from a clear mountain stream you'd walk up to and sip water from. It's not something you'd even want to swim in on a hot day.
I don't know what the state of soil is in California but adding more can only be a good thing.
Yep, reduce housing, don’t build more. Nobody wants to admit it because it doesn’t sound nice.
It’s this kind of content that screams propaganda of the worst kind.
It sounds crazy that we're even talking about this.
Problem solved/s
those are not comparable.
You might as well compare Chernobyl to a place that has bad restaurants.
they're exactly the same.thing!
At this scale, regional sustainability is an illusion. Even the Amazon rainforest is not sustainable without _transcontinental_ winds that carry massive amounts of nutrients from African dry lake beds to South America [1]. Make no mistake, we're not just talking about the sustainibility of cities in the western US but food security and quality of life for the entire United States.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-satellite-reveals-...
Let the desert return to being a desert.
Vegas went from 230,000 in 1970 to over 2.5 million residents in those years.
Phoenix from 870,000 to 4,652,000.
Riverside County from 44,579 to 2,544,820
So now we've got over 10 Million people living in the desert in just 3 those areas.
Aside from that, I lived in Sylmar, Ca in the `70s on the last parcel of ag zoned land there, so yeah, we did grow there.
When we bought our place there was a small 2 bedroon home on it, an orchard of fruit trees, a large garden, and we raised chickens and rabbits and a few cows (one at a time) there.
Our home was the oldest house in Sylmar at the time and it was akin to an oasis compared to most of the homes there. Because of the ag zoning we had two water lines, one for the home and one for the orchard & garden and we got a huge discount on the ag water line.
In agriculture, Riverside County is the 13th most productive county in the state in planted crops with $1.2 billion in cash receipts on about 210,000 acres [1]. That's more than any single county in Florida [2] based on crop value and the entire state of Florida produces 5-6 times more agricultural products than Riverside County on ten times the acreage. Most of that is in the Coachella Valley that is adjacent to Palm Springs/Desert Hot Springs and this productivity is despite the massive environmental disaster that is the Salton Sea [3].
I don't have an agricultural report on hand for Maricopa County (Phoenix) but based off a cursory search it produces about a third of the agricultural output of Arizona, which as a whole totals half the cash receipts of Florida's industry, despite a third of the population (though I believe AZ is a lot less productive per acre than FL because it's a lot of pasture).
Now, don't get me wrong: analyzing agricultural productivity - let alone the sustainability of entire metropolises - in dollars per anything is a fool's errand that obliterates all nuance. I'm just trying to illustrate that most [4] of these cities weren't dropped in the middle of desolate wastelands by hopeless fools that kept on attracting more fools. They were founded because the deserts of the southwest provide an ideal environment and all we needed to do was bring a single ingredient. Just take a look at Phoenix in 1885 [5]: farmland as far as the eye can see, half a century before pumping mass amounts of groundwater for agriculture was even an option.
When it comes to the food people want to eat, each [4] of these regions more than pull their own weight [6]. Unless we plan on transitioning the entire country to a wheat/corn/beef/pork/chicken-only diet or significantly decreasing food security or quality of life for everyone, we have to come to terms with the fact that the entire country is not sustainable without the Southwest, which means the region's water supply a national concern. We could completely depopulate all the big cities in Arizona, Nevada, and California without saving as much as a fifth of the water we currently use because the rest is used to feed the nation.
[1] 2020 numbers: http://www.rivcoawm.org/Portals/0/PDF/2020-Crop%20Report.pdf
[2] Florida was first wet state that came to mind and it's top third to middle of the pack nationally in agriculture depending on the specific food group so I think it's representative. 2017 numbers: https://www.fdacs.gov/Agriculture-Industry/Florida-Agricultu...
[3] More precisely, farmers caused that disaster to begin with, but the area is recovering and they are are adopting more sustainable techniques.
[4] I'm ignoring Vegas because it's an outlier that started out as a supply stop for the United Pacific railroad. It only grew to its current ridiculous size when Nevada legalized gambling and the economic activity from the construction of the Hoover dam let the gambling industry develop a permanent foothold that sustained the city.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Phoenix,_Arizona#/m...
[6] We'd actually need to look at export numbers to get a more accurate picture but i.e. nearly half of Arizona's agriculture is exported if I'm understanding the ag department correctly.
I don't have a problem with moving water to support agriculture in those State. That's something that was fairly well solved in the San Joaquin Valley long ago.
But that is not what this opinion piece purposes. They summed that up with "Los Angeles couldn’t exist without the California Aqueduct. Phoenix and other cities in the Southwest are in the same boat. Their future survival depends upon finding large amounts of new water."
That is an entirely different issue. In all of Arizona there are approximately 138,000 people that work in agriculture. That's not even in the top 10 industries in Phoenix. About 40% of the water used in Phoenix is used for farming. Phoenix-area residents use over 50% of the water they get from city water supplies for watering lawns and maintaining swimming pools. [1]
When you look at the growth of metro areas there it seems pretty clear to me that growth is not sustainable.
1: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/how-much-water-are-w...
Granted, maintaining lawns and outdoor swimming pools in a desert is really stupid but you're zooming in on an urban (as much as you're going to get in Arizona) city where land is too valuable to make most farming worth while. If you zoom out to Maricopa county [1], despite the concentrated population of Phoenix, the numbers flip around and about 60% of the water goes to agriculture with another 10% or so industrial with the remaining 30% municipal (though to be honest, I thought those figures would look more like California with an 80-20 split at most).
Maybe if manifest destiny had played out differently and we had planned our westward expansion better all those people in Phoenix and LA would be living in the PNW or the swamps of the south and they'd still have access to Arizona lettuce and California avacados, but that ship has sailed. We can't, as a nation, have our cake by depopulating the west and eat it too by depending on all the agriculture the region produces. When push comes to shove, metro areas will get priority over agriculture and environmental concerns so the entire country is going to have to sacrifice regardless.
[1] https://www.maricopa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/73858/Maricopa-...
"Ten Civilizations or Nations That Collapsed From Drought":
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/ten-civilizati...
But Las Vegas is treating almost all of the water it uses and ends up being very close to water neutral.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/las-vegas-declares-emergency-50-da...
This is clearly an area to think at a larger, national level like the thinking which led to the Hoover Dam and national highway systems. Anything less is shrinking away from the problem.
And much of this is across already arid, water starved land. I'm guessing West Texas and New Mexico will want their own cut of water in return for permitting the project to cut their states in two. You might need to double your total take to satisfy everybody.
I was curious, so some rough estimates: About 1m kg of water per second, lifted about 1km implies about 10GW of continuous power, or about 86 TWh annually assuming the scheme runs continuously, which is about 2% of annual generation. So enormous, but on the scale of feasible, a bit to my surprise.
The California Aqueduct was a megaproject that started over 70 years ago and the aforementioned Edmonston Pumping Station was turned on in 1973. At this point, the biggest challenge would be the right of way and litigation since the engineering has long been a solved problem. Those in California can go see the aqueduct exit the Sierra Nevada mountains at the edge of Bakersfield [2] and hiking trails around Lake Isabella intersect with open parts of the aqueduct where you can see all the water rushing by (don't fall in!). Imagine that, but like five or six times bigger.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
[2] https://a.scpr.org/69978_86cbed2aa8b2e426383678de0f659072_or...
I totally agree. I live in SoCal and there are some infrastructure projects that took forever (ie creating the I105 and finish connecting the I210), or will probably never get completed (ie. finish connecting the I710 and California High Speed Rail) all because of right of way issues and lots of law suits.
Granted, this was during the great financial crisis so they may be doing better now.
Taper down the subsidies over time rather than implementing them over night.
"If we intentionally implement this policy change in the dumbest, bluntest way possible, it will be disruptive" is an argument for never making any policy change.
If being vegetarian or vegan is an important value to you then the real way to make real lasting progress is by trying to persuade and convince people, not by trying to force or otherwise coerce them into agreeing with you. The same as on any topic.
Trying to end meat consumption is going to result in a Great Leap Forward-type disaster. We need to be looking at the ecology holistically and try to work with nature and the sustainable processes that generated what we have now, not burn it all down we can grow more of what's short-term efficient on spreadsheets for one single dimension.
Another interesting datum is that the average head of cattle has a water footprint of 2056 (m^3/year), while it's 2842 [2] for the average American, and 1071 for the average Chinese. There are 94 million cattle in the US, and 332 million people.
[1] - https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
[2] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221830102_The_Water...
TL;DR: 2.1 calories/gallon for almonds, 5.3 c/g for tofu, 1,558 c/g for beef.
Almonds consume 3.2 gallons of water each for just shy of 7 calories. 2.18 calories per gallon.
Cows consume ~3,200 gallons of water from birth to slaughter, where they produce about 6 million calories. 1,875 calories per gallon.
An additional 50 bales of hay to feed it over its lifetime (really hay is half the diet but its late and I'm just doubling it). Approximately 1,300 gallons per acre, which produces 100 bales - 13 gallons per bale - 650 gallons to grow the food. That is still 1,558 calories per gallon of water.
I found a recipe online that used about a gallon of water (rinsing and as an ingredient) for 1 pound of tofu. 10,000 gallons to produce one bushel (or 60 pounds) of soybeans. 166 gallons per pound. A pound is 2.6 cups, recipe wants 1 cup. 63 gallons per cup. 64 gallons made into tofu. 344 calories per pound of tofu. 5.3 calories per gallon of water consumed.
A cow drinks 9-12 gallons per day [1] (assuming not lactating, which takes a lot more water; let's just say these are cows being raised purely for slaughter). Call it 10 gallons/day on average.
Cows raised for slaughter live 4-6 years [2]. Call it 5 years on average.
10 gallons/day * 355 days/year * 5 years/cow ≈ 17750 gallons/cow.
Finally, the amount of energy in a cow as sold in retail stores is about 500,000 kcal [3]. That works out to about 30 kcal/gallon.
[1] https://www.amelicor.com/blog/how-much-water-should-a-cow-dr...
[2] https://thehumaneleague.org/article/dairy-cows
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/theydidthemonstermath/comments/a8ha...
Having raised cows and some Googling. Your numbers are for dairy cows and not meat cows. Dairy cows consume a ton of water because they are intended to produce a liquid nearly non-stop, and while they are eventually slaughtered for meat it mostly ends up in dog food.
More recently, the Libyan government built the Great Man-Made Project, which was thousands of kilometers of pipes pumping water from desert aquifers in the south to the cities in the north, which sounds like one of those crazy dictator megalomaniac ego projects but actually had a tremendous amount of impact (assuming there's as much water in the aquifers they're draining as they think).