An Idea That's All Wet

The heat dome that has persisted in the West coincides with an unprecedented drought in that region of the country that is drying up ranches in states like Nevada and Arizona and no doubt doing a number on pools all over southern California.  Meanwhile, thanks to tropical systems in the East, such as Claudette (did I happen to mention there could be a hurricane in the Northeast in six weeks?), the eastern third of the country is getting way too much rain.  Some folks have inevitably asked the obvious question - why not build a transcontinental aqueduct to send water where there's too much of it to those who need it?

I have your answer in two words - Continental Divide.

Like building a skyscraper from the top down or building a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean, building a transcontinental aqueduct is a palpably unsound idea, mainly because transporting water from the East to the other side of the Rocky Mountains (and they're called that for a reason) would have to defy gravity to let the water flow westward.  Even if the engineering could be worked out (again, I don't think it can be), the cost would be so astronomical it would bankrupt us.

Consider the shortest distance across the North Atlantic Ocean between North America and Europe - approximately 2,117 miles.  No one would seriously consider building a bridge that long, and yet some folks think an aqueduct could be built from the rain-prone Southeast to California - a distance of approximately 2,174 miles.  And not only across the Rockies but also against punishing deserts at that.  Even the Romans never built an aqueduct that long.  

Also, even a more modest aqueduct proposal - an aqueduct from California from the Pacific Northwest - would cost too much, not to mention involve a lot of land use and water rights negotiations.  The biggest argument against any sort of long-distance aqueduct to being water from thousands of miles away to the West is this - actor William Shatner thinks it's doable.

Maybe we should just just plain admit that the West is overpopulated and that metropolitan areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which are in the middle of the desert, should never, ever have been allowed to get big enough to have major-league sports teams.  There's an irony here; the West is in dire need of water, and the reason people moved there in the first place is because it almost never rains.  That's the price you pay for perpetual blue skies. 

California, meanwhile, doesn't need to get water from distant reservoirs.  It already has the biggest reservoir in the world - the Pacific Ocean.  I say, build more desalination plants and get more water from the Pacific. Its not the solution to the West's water crisis - it's a solution.  But if the Western states are going to adapt to create a sustainable civilization in the era of climate change, it means that they're going to have to contract . . . and become considerably depopulated.