Water crisis in West has prompted desperate ideas: Drain the Great Lakes, desalinate ocean water

[Utilitarian Governance]

I never thought of this but this is an interesting proposal. However I’m not sure what type of economic toll it could have on the Midwest.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/03/04/whats-solution-wests-water-crisis-desperate-ideas-explained/11274700002/

[7,052,770]

The United States and Canada will need to merge (with Canada becoming 10-30 states) in order for one national government to have control over the Great Lakes water.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I don't think it would be possible to drain the great lake. It litearly has 20x volume of water than was in the Aral Sea

[Comrade Luanne Platter]

I don't think it would be possible to drain the great lake. It litearly has 20x volume of water than was in the Aral Sea

I highly doubt the plan is to completely drain the lakes. Bad title imo.

[Utilitarian Governance]

I don't think it would be possible to drain the great lake. It litearly has 20x volume of water than was in the Aral Sea

I highly doubt the plan is to completely drain the lakes. Bad title imo.

I just copied the title from the article

[Comrade Luanne Platter]

I don't think it would be possible to drain the great lake. It litearly has 20x volume of water than was in the Aral Sea

I highly doubt the plan is to completely drain the lakes. Bad title imo.

I just copied the title from the article

Oh I know that, I wasn't blaming you personally.

[Yoda]

I never thought of this but this is an interesting proposal. However I’m not sure what type of economic toll it could have on the Midwest.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/03/04/whats-solution-wests-water-crisis-desperate-ideas-explained/11274700002/

A pipeline from the Great Lakes will never, ever, ever, ever happen. Ever. The Southwest needs to conserve, conserve, conserve, and then conserve some more. They are still wasting tons of it. To be brutally honest, people who are still moving to Phoenix (or SoCal) are kidding themselves that that is sustainable long-term. Do yourself a favor and move to the Midwest before you are forced to move to the midwest b/c there's nothing coming out of your faucet and your house is now worth nothing.

[Joe Kakistocracy]

Neither of these are particularly new ideas, but they are very expensive.  And even accounting for that aspect, some people elsewhere seem to get extremely angry about the whole idea for some reason.

[Trump Is A Maoist]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

[Stockdale for Veep]

Desalinization is too simple. Eventually, future people will never know that water doesn't have to taste so bland.

[Yoda]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

It's not a USA mindset to do this, it's some people in the Southwest proposing it. The Great Lakes Compact makes it fairly impossible this could ever happen. Too many parties would have to agree to this and they have no reason to do so. Also the infrastructure project required to pump all that water over mountains would involve building sooo many new power plants, at the cost of likely hundreds of billions of dollars. I listened to an interview where a water engineer professor at UM talked about what it would take to do this. It's simply not feasible. SoCal and AZ need to start doing as good of a job at conservation as Las Vegas does, simple as that.

[Gass3268]

It was controversial when Waukesha County, Wisconsin recently got approved to access water from Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes states + Ontario would never allow the Southwest to take their water, nor should they.

[7,052,770]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

When Toronto is the capital of the US state of South Ontario (or maybe just Ontario, with the rest of the province making up the states of Erie, Huron, and Superior?), they can and they will have a say in this.

[Wrong about 2024 Ghost]

I don't think it would be possible to drain the great lake. It litearly has 20x volume of water than was in the Aral Sea

Don't see America short. I'm sure we can do 20x more damage now than the Soviets could in the 1960s.

And it wouldn't take that much more to start the Great Lakes going the wrong direction - the lakes' volume is vast compared to their inflow and outflow. Inflow in about 50 cubic miles annually. That's a lot of water, but it's only about 4 times what the Soviets were diverting from the Aral when they killed it. Making up the difference in annual flow between Colorado at peak and in recent years would take someone around 5 cubic miles annually by my napkin math.

It doesn't sound like a lot relative to the total volume of the Great Lakes (over 5000 cubic miles of water, something like 20% of the planet's freshwater), but like with climate change, little things add up. The Great Lakes under the current compact are balanced now. Divert 10% of the annual inflow, and in just a single decade, you've reduced the total volume of the Great Lakes system by 1%... and have no good way to get additional water into the lakes.

But 1% doesn't seem that bad, so you go another decade, and you can't just stop - think of the people, think of the industry! So there's a commission and a panel and an official study, and it takes them a decade to come up with results, and then everyone fights about the results for a while.

And now (bad) positive feedback effects have kicked in, and the damage to the Lake ecosystems and economics is out of control and costing a trillion dollars a year, but there's no way to fix it. Its nobody's fault, though, because who could have known?

Humans actually are smarter than this - that's why things like the Great Lakes Compact exist. What destroys us is the powerful but oh-so-stupid institutions we create, particularly corporations.

[Raccoon]

I have thought for a very long time that along with conservation, the simplest solution would be to encourage more desalination in California so that the interior western states can use more of the Colorado River.

There is a major problem with using great lakes water and transporting to the interior west. Look at a topographic map of the United States and you shall see why!

[Yoda]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

When Toronto is the capital of the US state of South Ontario (or maybe just Ontario, with the rest of the province making up the states of Erie, Huron, and Superior?), they can and they will have a say in this.

They already have not just a say in this, but effectively a veto, as they should. The US does not own the Great Lakes alone, nor should we.

[7,052,770]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

When Toronto is the capital of the US state of South Ontario (or maybe just Ontario, with the rest of the province making up the states of Erie, Huron, and Superior?), they can and they will have a say in this.

They already have not just a say in this, but effectively a veto, as they should. The US does not own the Great Lakes alone, nor should we.

It's one of the many thousands of good reasons why the United States and Canada should merge into a single country.

[Yoda]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

When Toronto is the capital of the US state of South Ontario (or maybe just Ontario, with the rest of the province making up the states of Erie, Huron, and Superior?), they can and they will have a say in this.

They already have not just a say in this, but effectively a veto, as they should. The US does not own the Great Lakes alone, nor should we.

It's one of the many thousands of good reasons why the United States and Canada should merge into a single country.

Merging with Canada would be awesome, I agree, but doing so wouldn't lessen or strengthen their power over Great Lakes water. The current situation with the Compact isn't going to change in any kind of deal, b/c any current partner in that deal would never cede their role in it.

[Trump Is A Maoist]

They already have not just a say in this, but effectively a veto, as they should. The US does not own the Great Lakes alone, nor should we.

It's one of the many thousands of good reasons why the United States and Canada should merge into a single country.

Never happening until the USA is borderline ready to invade us for our freshwater lakes. Before that, keep dreaming. We have no interest at all.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

There's also the Columbia River as a crazy possibility.

[ibagli]

If you're going to build some huge boondoggle to shuttle water to the west instead of growing less alfalfa or almonds or rice, there's more water flowing through the lower Mississippi River than there is through the Detroit River.

[dead0man]

This is a dumber idea than using moon dust to block the Sun so the planet cools, and that idea is very very stupid.  Anyone that seriously suggests it is dumb.


Also, desalinization is horrible for the environment.



The SW is using too much water, use less dummies!

[Crumpets]

Ahem. Southwest. PNWers know how to get, store, and use water properly.

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

The Great Lakes don't belong to the USA, they are shared with Canada. Very arrogant USA mindset to assume you could just drain them without ruining the Canada-USA relationship. To drain the water away and remove all the water from Toronto's shores is absolutely unacceptable.

Very arrogant Canadian mindset to think Canadian-US relationship matters anything to us when you were begging like a dog for our help just to shoot down a balloon.

[MasterJedi]

No Midwest water for the west. First thing that needs to happen is the water rights need to be redone. They were put in place at all time water highs, not practical now.