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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

"They hold more than a fifth of Earth’s unfrozen fresh water"

I read quite a few stories about the horrible drought in the west, and here I am sitting on a good part of all the usable water in the entire world. I can't help but think at some point a bunch of people are going to come for that water, in one way or another. Either by moving here, or trying to move it there. Some ideas have been floating around about that for a while

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/04/10/g...

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Water from the Great Lakes cannot leave the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes Compact prevents construction of any water withdrawal that will move water outside of the watershed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

...According to current US law.

Reading your comment, I wasn't sure if "compact" was a legal term or a geological one. Laws change much more quickly than geology.

And Canadian law. The Great Lakes Compact is an international treaty.

By act of Congress, not Constitutional amendment.

It could be repealed in a matter of weeks if Congress saw fit.

I know many people who would oppose removal of water from the region with weaponry. People deeply care about them, more than outsiders know

And that's all well and good so long as the law backs you up. When it doesn't, that then falls somewhere on a spectrum from felony to treason.

Yeah. I was just thinking that. I mean if the rest of the country decides that georgia and florida need our water, which is one of the more serious current proposals, then that's democracy. I'm from Wisconsin. Born and raised right on the shores of Lake Michigan. But the law is the law.

Our best bet is to do our utmost to ensure that the law stays the way it is despite whatever pressures there are from other areas of the country.

It’s not really worth it nor likely. Plenty of places in the US with excess water closer to the dry regions. Ie desalination in California makes more sense.

Do they also fight the Atlantic Alliance - a network of global seas whose task is to suck the land dry? In jest. A large part of runoff leads to the Arctic oceans = warm water = melts ice. Southern diversion would help the southwest. Since it is political, it will be delayed ad infinitum until there is only dry dust to pump.

We will desalinate in CA before we’ll come for the Great Lakes but if we came (and the United States must have ended) then that would be a petty resistance. Pipelines can’t be defended but canals are harder to break and then, once the pipeline is over friendly soil, breaking it will still only shed water into the West.

If you want to build the midwest a new sewer system, go ahead.

Or sell a poop-derivative from your midwest sewer for $17 a bag. Honestly, it's amazing fertilizer.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milorganite-32-lbs-Slow-Release-...

There's a "I drank your milkshake" situation with this. Find the area with people willing to sell out, and build there.

Politically brighter Congressmen might see such a repeal not as a one-off special event, but instead as a precedent for further "inter-state resource raids". Some of which raids could target their own states.

So - support for that repeal might prove scarcer than you'd think, from just looking at a map of drought-plagued areas of the U.S.

Also - burning needs for water tend to be sudden & immediate things. Vs. designing, approving, funding, and building the infrastructure to actually move large quantities of water long distances is more of a "decade-plus time scale" thing.

The great lakes water is simply channelled to the Atlantic. It would take an engineering project to divert 10-20% to the west. No hard tasks, just the creation of a sloped canal. In desert areas you could cover it with solar cells - also land based ones, to provide the pump energy over hills/mountains etc. Tunnels can be drilled where mounts are high. This water added to the west would revive it from the death spiral it is now in,

When you say "No hard tasks" I assume you mean that the engineering is relatively straightforward.

The surface of Lake Michigan is around 650 feet above sea level. Go 50 miles due west and you are at 800-900 feet elevation. The average elevation in Kansas is around 2000 feet above sea level! If you go southwest, it is naturally downhill - the existing rivers prove that - but you run into the problem that the water is heading south more than it is heading west.

It's a serious uphill climb to get that water out west. You don't need a sloped canal, you need a sloped tunnel thousands of feet below the surface!

We are familiar with pipes, pumps, siphons, canals. etc. It is engineering of a routine, but massive scale to perform a major shift like this. The question is cost? Water can be pumped with solar/wind energy. With major area on their way to become parched deserts - except for water. What is the Value of all California crops every year - that can go to zero every year versus the one time cost of a major water project = a spend once, plus maintain = get a permanent 'annual California crop every year' Water project, by their nature are long lived and low maintenance.

With how quickly, on-time, and within-budget California is managing to build the few-hundred miles of its touted High-Speed Rail system - that "no hard tasks" engineering project might take a century or few to become operational.

Also, you note "water added to the west would revive it from the death spiral it is now in". Ah... 100% of the average discharge rate from the entire Great Lakes system - including Lake Ontario, elevation ~400' below the other lakes - is only about 2/3 of the discharge capacity of just the Hoover Dam spillway. I'm thinking you'll need to divert the Amazon River (~25X the discharge of the Great Lakes) to meet the need.

I am not sure of your Hoover discharge figures. St Lawrence is about 17,000 cubic meters per second. Hoover is far far smaller about 3,300 cubic meters per second. St Lawrence is over 5 times as large. You may have mixed up cubic meters/feet?

At least from Wikipedia's numbers, 17K m3/sec. average flow in the St. Lawrence is only found below the mouth of the Saguenay River - far downstream from the Great Lakes, effectively at sea level (vs. even Lake Ontario is ~70m higher), and (from other sources) well downstream of the point where substantial tides and salt water intrude from the Atlantic.

I used the spillway capacity of Hoover Dam, rather than try to add up the total (diverted & un-diverted) flows of the Colorado, Columbia, Missouri, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Red, Sacramento, etc., etc. The point being that 10-20% of the Great Lakes water flow would be far, far too little to revive the west from its death spiral (to paraphrase user aurizon).

Well, the flow varies as you reach the source, being about 7,000 M3/sec as it exits Lake Ontario. In any event, my intent is to have a tolerable degree of outflow diverted from the great lakes, esp in flood years during the melt, when many downstream areas are flooded when the melt is compressed in time by 2 hot spring weeks. Aquifers can be recharged at many permeable perimeters points and the Ogallala aquifer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer Has a number of places in it's East and North East that can be used as recharge areas. As you see from the wiki, it has been drawn down for decades. Canadians are full of 'not one drop' fanatics - who would prefer to see it go to the Atlantic - flooding each spring, along the way - instead of helping the US drought. My feeling is the peak snow melt could be diverted to the South and West towards suitable recharge points to mitigate this drawdown - it will take years to build and years to work, but in the end it needs to be done. The forces of warming climates over the next 50 years could make the great plains into the Great US central desert - where nothing either lives or grow. It is a bleak prospect, but we screwed the earth and we must live through it - one way or another - wetter is better.

> Politically brighter Congressmen might see such a repeal not as a one-off special event, but instead as a precedent for further "inter-state resource raids".

You could say the same about Texas's abortion private bounty hunting bill. Doesn't seem to have stopped them.

That's because no other state has yet passed a law allowing that kind of bounty hunting of Texas political bodies.

Right, but despite that being the obvious response - California's already talking about doing the same approach against guns - it didn't stop Texas from doing the stupid thing in the first place.

The same may be true for water wars.

State vs Federal laws, though. Totally different game. States are much more limited in their ability to pass laws that affect residents of other states.

The fundamental point is "legislators of all levels make short-sighted decisions that will bite them in the ass later".

Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and New York have 97 votes in the house and 12 votes in the Senate. Good luck passing any legislation that sees major diversion of water out of these states.

You're forgetting Pennsylvania and Indiana.

Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Oklahoma (all in drought) have 12 votes in the Senate and 117 members in the House.

It would be a battle for sure.

It could certainly be changed, but it's actually an international treaty with Canada so it's a bit more complicated than that.

Things are going to get desperate enough that any legislation today will be but a distant and comical memory.

The attempted construction of that Foxconn factory in Wisconsin would have permanently diverted water out of Lake Michigan. It wasn't stopped by the Compact, just the horrible mismanagement of the project and political corruption.

While cute, interstate anything is the realm of the federal government. The moment water from the Great Lakes is needed elsewhere, it'll be sent there.

If you follow the case of the Parker dam, the conclusion of the Supreme Court was that it required congressional approval. It did not have that, but Arizona eventually allowed it anyways.

The full text of the decision is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/295/174

You can get around this and export it from the great lakes if your business is called Nestle and your pipeline from the lake to the bottling facility is called the groundwater table. Its still lake water they are drawing and selling.

Not really a deal breaker.

Due to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Illinois, the State of Illinois is not subject to certain provisions of the compact pertaining to new or increased withdrawals or diversions from the Great Lakes.[4]

Would the energy used pumping the water from the quite low lakes, over the Rocky Mountains and Sierras to the west coast be less than a desalination plant?

Another option is just moving the water usage closer to the usable water.

Most likely only a little bit would actually be piped. You’d just stop water from entering one watershed and send it into another and let gravity do its work. You would lose more to evaporation; but that happens to water in pipes too if they’re above ground.

Would love to see the numbers.

It’s fun looking at rivers from the Rocky Mountains in California that don’t make it to the ocean anymore.

I recently proposed a transatlantic natural gas pipeline and people thought I was insane, but it would only be ~5x longer than the longest existing underwater natgas pipeline, which doesn’t sound impossibly viable.

Good point about the river re-direction.

> I recently proposed a transatlantic natural gas pipeline and people thought I was insane, but it would only be ~5x longer than the longest existing underwater natgas pipeline, which doesn’t sound impossibly viable.

Nordstream is 759 Miles. Newfoundland to Ireland is 1900 Miles!

Only problem is you gotta get the gas to the east coast on the americas, and that’s where a lot of the demand is already.

Though it makes you wonder what kind of gas fields might exist along the way. As it goes, we exploit the oil and flare the gas. Pffft.

I feel the transatlantic gas pipe wouldnt be viable just for the fact that Russian subs/ships would have a field day "accidentally" setting anchor on it and breaking it to keep their economy relevant.

The Aral Sea might act as a warning. It was used for agricultural irrigation without concern for if the water could be replaced, and now barely even exists (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dan-Shaw-3/publication/...).

I live in Arizona. Most of our Colorado River water goes to agricultural irrigation. The drought is bad, but bringing in even more water from out of state wouldn't be an actual solution.

> Either by moving here

That's one of the reasons I'm staying where I am.

> trying to move it there

Being that they straddle the US / Canadian border, it's legally much more difficult to mass pump water out of them. Probably the main reason it hasn't happened yet.

There's an agreement not to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

It's legally forbidden by treaty of all the states and provinces that border them.

For now.

There's also little reason for it. There's plenty of rich farmland here to grow on. Agriculture should move back to this region, and growing practices and crops adapt for the colder climate. Growing heavily irrigated crops in the desert or semi-arid regions has many advantages but makes little sense in a water constrained world.

Right now the rich well watered soils of the midwest and great lakes region are being wasted on cash crop soy/corn rotation. Chipping away at the rich top soils for animal feed etc. There's a lot more that could be done here. This land is good for so many things... growing almonds in California? Grow hardy hybrid hazelnuts in the east. Cold hardy, disease resistant grapes make exotic regional wines with a unique eastern terroir and a long history, mostly forgotten. Bring back the apples orchards. The peaches and apricots. Re-open the canning and juicing plants. It's a shorter, mostly single season for most annual vegetable crops, but so much fertile land and water. And greenhouses add a lot of value.

We live in an age of profit pollution. Any farm doing this would be bought out by soy/corn growers, because the latter will be more profitable than the former. The same pollution is why your mailbox is full of wasteful garbage and your telephone line is harassed by scam calls until you stop picking up.

In large part farms doing this don't get so much bought out but destroyed with herbicide drift from cash crop farms next door. Not everywhere, but in major parts. And when you complain, the locals pitchfork you, because what are you even doing here if you're not growing corn?

I grew up in West Michigan in the farming country of Michigan, more specifically apple orchard/fruit orchard country. Michigan is the third largest producer of apples after Washington and NY. Also further up near Traverse city they produce a lot of grapes and cherries, and have some very good wineries. I think a big part of why there is not as much farming as the west is simply a matter of space, Michigan is large but nothing like the plains states.

> Agriculture should move back to this region

It never left, Illinois and Minnesota are the 3rd and 5th largest producers of staple crops (the other being California, Iowa, and Texas, respectively, and CA and TX are only slightly larger in production but massively larger in size). West of the Mississippi, ranching dominates agriculture due to the poor soil and dry climate.

Largely that corn and soy in the Great Lakes region is being used as animal feed for the ranches out west. They already have massive utilization of land area for the production of these crops.

I should have clarified. It never left, but it became much less diverse.

And in the more northeast states, it actually left.

The region adjacent to the lakes is not immune to drought. There were widespread crop failures a few years ago.

Some day I will convince 16 million people to each dig a tiny bit of a canal on the northern border of South Africa. I hope that by simply plotting the perfect route for the water to travel, the natural erosion will finish my work for me.

That way the entire Northern Cape (deserty region) and the Southern Namibia (deserty region) will have a massive amount of water suddenly closeby, eventually changing the surrounding environment naturally.

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