Have you seen a map of the US Drought Monitor recently? That’s not good. Especially for half the country.
Over 98% of the western United States are experiencing drought. In the northeast, only about 15% of the land under the drought. Even lower in the southeast, at 8%.
So, if there is a lot of water in the eastern reservoir, why not just move around the resources and share the goods as one big happy country?California Governor Recall Candidate Recently proposed Build a Golden State pipeline from the Mississippi River. I asked two drought experts. It turned out to be ridiculously complicated.
First problem: Our country is very, very big.
“It’s really far,” says Stephanie Pinsetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute for Environment and Sustainability. “There are mountains, deserts, swamps, everything. It costs a lot to build that infrastructure. I mean trillions of dollars.”
Logistics is complicated, even if cost is not a factor. Water needs to be transported by some kind of huge pipe.
“If it wasn’t in the pipe, you would lose a lot of water due to evaporation-it couldn’t have been an open canal,” explains Pinsetl. “But pipes are more energy-intensive and have more infrastructure, probably because they need to be filled, or because they need to be slack when on the ground.”
To put a pipe underground, you need to dig into thousands of miles of land, many of which are probably private land.
“We already have a very complex, costly and energy-intensive water transportation infrastructure that moves hundreds of miles of water within the western United States,” said UCLA’s Center for Climate Sciences. Alex Hall says. “If you’re talking about moving 3,000 miles of water, it’s an even more expensive scale of water transport.
Now let’s say money and logistics are not obstacles. It still has no environmental significance.
“It takes a lot of energy to move that water, a mass of energy,” says Pinsetl.
“You have to ask a question, what does it support?” Add a hole. “Looking at Southern California, half of our water is used here to maintain plants for life support that doesn’t grow naturally. You not only destroy the environment, but also locally. We are proposing something that supports really bad environmental practices. ”
Hall says it’s much better to find a way to save the water we have and use it wisely.
Do you want to move cross-country water? “That’s not very realistic,” Pincetl summarizes.
The hall is not so subtle. “That’s very unrealistic …. We need to think about resource addiction, which we take for granted.”
Why can’t I move the water to resolve the drought?
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