This will never happen--not because of valuing the environment, but because it would be a public works project
I remember a WTYP episode on mega-projects. One project was to reverse a bunch of rivers in Canada so they flow south rather than emptying up into the north Pacific where nobody lives. The estimates they came to suggested a tripling of the fresh water reserves running through the Colorado. Also, tons of extra flooding and a huge strain on existing infrastructure, but that's sort of the price of tripling the supply of potable water so what are you complaining about?
Anyway, this idea had been floated back in the 70s, and the response was "Fuck no! Costs money!"
Now we want to move a bunch of Mississippi water several thousand miles westward, instead? Stupidest fucking country.
Would this help the south-west drought? Probably. For a little while, at least.
Would there be unforeseen consequences? Of course.
Will it be done? :michael-laugh:
There will be no preventative solution. The people in charge do not care. They will chide and warn and point to paper deadlines -- right up until people start dying of dehydration. At which point there may be a slap-dashed attempt at humanitarian aid, they may mobilize the national guard or the military. But it I kind of doubt they'll even do that. It will just be Their Fault.
Their fault for not sharing the water. Their fault for not listening to the warnings. Their fault for living in an obviously doomed city. Their fault for tolerating sodomy. Their fault for being practically Mexican anyway. Whatever it takes to keep this from being seen as Our Responsibility.
But it I kind of doubt they’ll even do that. It will just be Their Fault.
I used to know a guy that became a super chud and told me if the people of Flint, MI didn't want to live in a town with poisonous water they should sell their houses and move. Also that I should stop caring about other people. Just have to assume that kind of derangement is commonplace here in Hell World.
classic boomer mindset to think that water that flows out to the ocean, supporting life in river deltas, is wasted
"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."
Thats a no from me dawg
What's wrong with pumping 900 million gallons of water up a mountain every hour and letting it fall downhill into a series of dams built into mountain valleys?
Imagine how cool it will look when a landslide falls into one of the reservoirs and we get to see footage of a megatsunami wiping out the Colorado basin.
Hell why not just pump the Colorado River back into Lake Mead?
Maybe I’m crazy but I feel like relocating the population back east to areas that can actually support human habitation would be easier than pumping those people’s water from the fucking Mississippi
did you just suggest separating someone from their property? oooooooooh the pinkertons are gonna get you
honestly fuck moving water west but it's surprising they haven't tried to use the Mississippi for at least some kind of hydro power project. The fucking thing is literally a mile wide
edit: nvm I guess there's like 20 hydroelectric dams but combined it's only like 157 megawatts of power generation
edit 2: this was from 2011 though idk if there's more now, this thing is talking about like 100 projects that would jump it up to 6600 megawatts, but idk if any have been built link to thing
To much commerce moves through it. And when it floods it rages
turns out they do have some hydroelectric dams tho, I didn't google until after posting
There is some hydropower on the Mississippi but it's up in Minnesota where the flow rate of the river is much higher.
Why not just lift the entire antarctic ice shelf and drop it in the middle of Arizona
this is the author's entire byline description.
Don Siefkes lives in San Leandro. Email him at donsiefkes@aol.com
if you look him up, he's an ED for some advocacy/lobbying org called the "E100 Ethanol Group"
To bring about the use of E100, gasoline free ethanol, as a primary motor fuel in the United States using E100 engines optimized for ethanol and not gasoline.
the idea to do Aral Sea 2.0 in the US is about what i would expect from an AOL user pushing for goddamn ethanol in 2022.
Also the cities aren’t even the problems! If you stop doing so much insanely wasteful agriculture in the middle of the fucking desert the cities can go on just fine
What am I even supposed to eat once you take away my big bowl of almond-encrusted beef steak? :-p
I mean, even the agriculture isn't strictly an issue if more farmers would adopt drip irrigation or use cover crops or do literally anything to mitigate water consumption. But all that shit costs money, while just flooding your property with water is practically free.
Same with the huge ranches that pin all their animals into crates and build up massive cesspools of shit that they need to wash downriver. Yes, we could radically update our infrastructure in order to make it cleaner and more durable and more sustainable. But THAT SHIT COSTS MONEY! We will never spend money on something so unprofitable!
Only do business cheaply and lazily. Never let any kind of third party regulator or administrator get involved. Free Market All The Things! Otherwise we will destroy 10,000 jobs an hour until you relent.
love our water rights system that incentivizes waste by saying if you do not use it you may lose the right to use it in the future
Or at least stop doing flood irrigation in there middle of the day
I will personally put a .308 round though the skull of any person attempting to move water from the Mississippi outside the boundaries of it watershed.
