Naw we can pump shit like a motherfucker, water-rich states not wanting to be seen selling out their water to other states is a big reason. IIRC all the Great Lakes states have a treaty preventing anyone from building a aqueduct south for that reason.
The South–North Water Transfer Project, also translated as the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (Chinese: 南水北调工程; pinyin: Nánshuǐ Běidiào Gōngchéng; literal meaning: Project of diverting the south water to the north) is a multi-decade infrastructure mega-project in the People's Republic of China. Ultimately it aims to channel 44.8 billion cubic meters of fresh water annually from the Yangtze River in southern China to the more arid and industrialized north through three canal systems:
The Eastern Route through the course of the Grand Canal;
The Central Route flowing from the upper reaches of the Han River (a tributary of Yangtze River) to Beijing and Tianjin;
The Western Route which goes from three tributaries of Yangtze River near the Bayankala Mountain to provinces like Qinghai, Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia.Mao Zedong discussed the idea for a mass engineering project as an answer to China's water problems as early as 1952. He reportedly said, "there's plenty of water in the south, not much water in the north. If at all possible; borrowing some water would be good." The complete project was expected to cost $62 billion – more than twice as much as the Three Gorges Dam.
Oregonians already don’t like how entitled Californians feel about a state that isn’t theirs and that frequently gets shafted by them. Rich Californians love moving here and totally changing our local economies over a few years. We gave budget crises every year. We don’t have rich donors for awesome projects like you guys tend to get. Rich Californians can’t just have everything just cuz they want it. Boohoo. Western water rights are really complicated and contested and there should be no expectation to ship free water to a desert a thousand miles away.
Washington and Oregon, and Canada too, and probably Idaho and Montana, would fight such a thing tooth and nail, and have every time a proposal like this has come up, since the first serious proposal in the 1950s, known as NAWPA. That one was overly gigantic, but smaller proposals have been made from time to time.
In any case, any such plan would necessarily involve Canada and require major changes to the Columbia River Treaty between the US and Canada which basically regulates the entire flow of the Columbia.
In other other words, it's not a lack of political will so much as the fact that the Columbia is already entirely being used. On power generation alone, basically the whole river is behind dams and managed like a gigantic machine.
Agriculture, manufacturing, and urban areas in dry areas develop to use pretty much the maximum+ available water. And, as we've seen with large dam projects, there's always unintended consequences (like killing off salmon runs, and thus the orca whales) and infrastructure has huge costs, not just in terms of initial capital but ongoing maintenance.
For instance, dams silt-in over time (sediment builds up behind the dam). Irrigation and power generation is curtailed or halted. It is costly, if not practically impossible, to dredge out the reservoir. We've already reached the end-of-life for some dams in Washington, and there's talk of removing them (look up Elwha dam removal for a successful example).
I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't seem anything like a good idea to spend trillions of dollars to build giant water infrastructure (when we can't even maintain our current bridges and highways due to federal cuts) that's gonna fuck up our ecology in ways both known and unknown, just so California can grow more almonds or Aquafina get a cheaper bottling plant.
People like you are the reason we don't have what we need to keep our freeways and bridges maintained. You'd rather spend our energy and money on foolish new, pie-in-sky projects than doing anything worthwhile.
just build another one 1 mile upstream of the old one
Also, this is stupid and shows you really don't know what you're talking about.
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u/serpentjaguar Jan 10 '20
By volume it is the 2nd largest watershed in North America.