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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

By act of Congress, not Constitutional amendment.

It could be repealed in a matter of weeks if Congress saw fit.

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".

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.

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.

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