Anyone else read The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi? It's a near future SF novel about water shortages in the American southwest.
It definitely made me sure I'd never want to move to Arizona or New Mexico.
It definitely made me sure I'd never want to move to Arizona or New Mexico.
It's a little unclear to me how realistic the scenario painted there is, for the simple reason that the main problem with water in the US southwest is commercial agriculture, which uses 75% or more of all the water in these areas. This is the result of ideas promulgated in the first 3-4 decades of the 20th century (the Bureau of Reclamation) which touted the idea of a garden paradise, based largely on the unusually wet couple of decades that had just happened.
If you eliminated commercial agriculture in the US southwest (let's conveniently pretend that this doesn't cover the Central Valley of CA), there's plenty of water for everything else, even in the middle of the worst drought in 1200 years.
The book doesn't appear to deal with this very well. Still, great story and very imaginative.
[ EDIT: one idea I did really like in the book was the part about the federal government allowing states to ban inter-state migration, so that the "Zoners" (people from AZ) could not move, and would effectively become refugees within their own state and nation ]
Now, maybe if the snowpack is gone and the rivers are dry someone could set up a gigantic solar desalination plant on the California coast and start producing water to be piped to Nevada and Arizona... which would need more gigantic solar plants to produce the electricity to power the pumps. Someone will have to pay for that, and the costs will be pretty high. Probably higher than the revenue from the tourism or agriculture in the region. What happens then? People leave the region.
To your point, the book specifically floats a "vision" of a new kind of housing development in Las Vegas and Phoenix that the book calls "arcologies" but you might think of them as high-end earthships for the ultra-wealthy. They use very little outside water, endlessly internally recycling almost every drop of moisture within them. Accessible only to the ultra rich. I personally find this a much more believable idea and much less sci-fi than the notion that Nevada, Arizona etc. will receive water via a multi-thousand mile long, multi-thousand foot elevation spanning pipeline.
I think you may be underestimating the challenge of bringing water to the US southwest. Also, as I've mentioned several times in this thread, without commercial agriculture, there essentially would be no water issues here. When 77% of your water is being used to irrigate crops, most of which are exported from your region ... you've got a different kind of problem.
Wallace Stegner, quoted from:
https://bensonian.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/you-have-to-get-o...
Also worth reading:
https://aarondenham.com/2021/09/04/getting-over-the-color-gr...