The American Southwest has horribly mismanaged it's fresh water supply. Tulare Lake, Hoover Dam, and Las Vegas are just some examples of the American Southwest's horrible fresh water management. My suggestion is does the rest of the United States and North America have a right to the fresh water contained in the Great Lakes? Would a pipeline from Chicago to Los Angeles or Mexico City be better for the environment than a desalination plant?
The South Western US is an affront to nature, it spits in the face of God with its bourgeois decadence and waste. Destroy Vegas, Phoenix, and the California almond industry.
Look at the rich kulak with air conditioning! I hope you sincerely fucking die in a painful way!
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Any pipeline that touches the Great Lakes will get absolutely fucked by zebra mussels (there's a Russian interference joke in there somewhere)
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Californian water laws are beyond fucked and have been that way for a while. See sex pest Roman Polanski's documentary Chinatown for an example. Some California farmers trace their water allotment back to Spanish California. It is well and truly fucked. Also those fuckheads grow water-intensive crops like alfalfa and almonds and if they just... didn't? that would help a lot.
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Let’s build a pipeline that we shove boomers into that goes from Arizona to the middle of the pacific ocean. Problem solved
And what do we do with all the millennials when there is no more boomers?
What if we have to fuck up the great lakes to ensure nobody on the North American continent dies from dehydration?
The environmental impact and shipping and farmland, etc in the Midwest would be destroyed. Then you would just have a similar problems there. How would you build a pipeline all the way across the US and over the Rockies? There is a reason that places need water brought in from places like Colorado, the other places either shouldn’t exist or have grown too large to adequately allow a decent standard of living.
I don't think any pipeline water should be used in agriculture. Also nonsense that we should depopulate any states, the standards of living must go down, it's preferable to death.
You’re right we should just base it off of rain. What were ancient Egyptians thinking digging irrigation? Why couldn’t they just grow based off of the naturally occurring weather.
Yeah how dare we depopulate the states we settled and colonized and give them back to the indigenous population that lived their for thousands of years? Not like there isn’t other places for them to live since the United States is overpopulated.
Death is a preferable alternative than communism.
Lets just kill all of California so we don't have to deal with resettling the settlers. They are less than human.
The amount of water usage for personal use is a tiny fraction of the water usage in those states, and there is still far more than enough water in those states to surpass all of the personal use for as much water as you can drink, as many showers as you can take, and as many loads of low-efficiency machine laundry you could do. Let's just use California as an example. No more than about 11% of the water usage is "urban uses" which covers all the water you use in daily life plus all industrial use. Between 30 and 50 percent goes to agriculture (more than half of which is exported) and about a third of the overall water use is Pistachios, Almonds, and Alfalfa.
Alfalfa's issue is not that it's a water-inefficient plant, it's actually very water efficient, but that it's borderline useless for anything other than feeding to livestock. There are lots of issues with animal agriculture, but arguably one of the most important ones here is that farmers in the US don't actually even feed their livestock alfalfa. They feed them grass, corn, bulk skittles, whatever's cheapest, and that's not alfalfa.
Pistachios are terribly inefficient for areas like California, but are super profitable. They're also a fairly significant driver behind the "war with Iran" lobby, as Iran is the other main top producer of Pistachios (and also their native area, along with Afghanistan.) They grow in areas that have no freezes, need low humidity, and a lot of water, so they can primarily only be grown in irrigated areas which works great when you're right between the ocean and a massive freshwater(ish) sea like the Caspian with twice the combined volume of the Great Lakes and have a population of about 3 million like the Kerman Province in Iran where most pistachios are grown. It doesn't work as well when you're also trying to grow a shitton of other crops and also have a population of 40 million (6 million of which are in the growing area and competing for water) going after the same water source.
Almonds are a nightmare, and those grown in California use more water than all non-agricultural water use in California and Nevada combined.
I live a few hundred miles from the great lakes but all of the large storms I get come from there. If the great lakes lose a large quantity of water hundreds, if not thousands, of square miles will have their weather fucked up. The consequences would likely be devastating.
what about getting cali kulaks to switch to dryland crops instead of uh terraforming half a continent
You could also bring back Japanese farming techniques that were disrupted by the Internment Camps that were hundreds of magnitude more productive and conserved water a lot better.
I would like to read more about sustainable japanese american farming techniques. I know that internment camps was also a huge land grab.
https://www.sunset.com/home-garden/brief-history-of-japanese-american-farmers-in-the-west
https://www.itsyozine.com/posts/hidden-ecologists
Lake Michigan is 577 feet above sea level, and California's Central Valley is at about 400 feet, so you're not going to have much flow in that pipeline without massive pumps, probably many pumping stations. And you'll have to go over, around, or through the Rockies and Sierra Nevada.
Or just don't grow almonds in the desert.
Okay what about redirecting water towards Mexico? Elevation would be less of a problem. Texas would probably benefit from such a pipeline, and millions of Mexicans wouldn't possibly die from dehydration in the coming climate apocalypse. Let the Californians die for their hubris.
Or just open borders and let people settle where it makes sense. Pumping water thousands of miles to a desert is as bad or worse than all of the other water megaprojects in the desert. People shouldn't live where there isn't any water. There's a carrying capacity to everywhere and deserts are pretty close to zero without a ton of environment-destroying engineering.
Absolutely fucking not. All of that water would be used for growing the absolute least efficient crops, maintaining inexplicable grass lawns in the middle of the desert, or be lost during transit due to the inevitable amount of leakage in a pipeline that's 1500 miles long at a minimum. Draining the great lakes in order to grow some grass and almonds for export is a terrible idea. Also, due to the minor elevation difference and the mountains between , the amount of pumping stations required would dwarf the energy usage for enough desalination plants to meet the water needs of every person in the US and Canada west of the Mississippi River without needing any other sources.
As a person who lives in Los Angeles:
No :)
Most of our water usage is to grow fruits and vegetables especially since we have one of the longest growing seasons in the country and decently fertile soil in the Central Valley thanks to the river deposits from the Sierra Nevada. But because of the profit motive and Capitalism most of that food is stuff that is shipped thousands of miles away.
Urban usage is a drop in the bucket but its still important to conserve water wherever possible.
I think some folks has mentioned a few reasons why this specific plans is not too great, but there is some potential to the idea of a water distribution network in much the same way that high speed rail networks are pretty awesome outside the influence of capitalism
I've often wondered if it would make sense to create material corridors that would contain high speed rail, electricity grid and water pipelines. You could even add in some solar/renewable energy along the way. This would facilitate the shifting of resources in a kind of mutual aid at scale. Just one of those sci fi utopian concepts I contemplate to fall asleep.
No. All the aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, and levees in the southwest should be destroyed. Then we destroy all the roads leading out and it becomes Mad Max with American characteristics.
the easier move would probably be to move the people to the water
Don't need to fuck up one ecosystem just to help one thats already beyond repair, just do a reverse dust bowl and send the calis to oklahoma.
Better solution https://i.pinimg.com/originals/be/92/31/be92315853abfc3597036876d15725a4.gif
Yes conservatives post this gif, idgaf
