Water can be piped around cheaply. Worst case they pump it in from nearby states
The problem isn't the pipes, obviously.
It's the fact that the 1922 agreement that divided up the water in the Colorado River (upon which Arizona depends) incorrectly calculated the amount of water available in the river every year.
The Colorado River Compact divides up 20 million acre-feet of water. Modern analyses show that the Colorado river's average flow is about 15.5 million acre feet, and has been less than 13 million acre-feet during the last decade or so. These reductions curtail who gets what water.
https://www.5280.com/how-the-100-year-old-colorado-river-com...
People have a fetishization with hyping up disappearing water sources as leading to mass forced desertions of population centers, which is not rooted in any kind of reality.
We can already pipe oil from texas to Canada with ease, we can do the same from Canada to Arizona with water. Or wherever else. The economics and viability of it is obvious and clear.
Residents of water scarce areas would pay marginally higher taxes to support this
I have never heard this. Where are you reading that?
Disappearing water sources are a reality. Time and time again, long pipelines like what you suggest just aren't viable.
I'd suggest you enjoy some fact-based reporting on the topic: https://grist.org/agriculture/drought-water-pipeline-cost-we...
The near- and medium-term solutions we need are solely in use reduction. Period.
The choice of abandoning trillions of real estate vs a 10s of billions infrastructure project is obvious.
Article cites the cost as $14B which is effectively nothing vs the alternative. Even $100B is nothing. These two TSMC fabs are $40B alone
So much fearmongering from economically illiterate people. Use your brain
Your comparison to oil pipelines is nonsense. Where to start: privatization, a global commodity market, relative scarcity, massive extractive capex.... Sure, we built oil pipelines easily in the past. How difficult has it become? Surely the capital exists. Why don't we build more?
Nobody is talking about abandoning real estate.
The tragedy of people like you is that you provide a half-compelling distraction. People (cities/farmers/industry) need to use less water.
The longer it takes to get people to realize this, the harder it is to fix.
Thats why they are economically illiterate. The obvious and more cost effective choice will win in the end, and it doesn’t involve austerity and suffering and repentance for high water use
The folks who wrote the Colorado River Compact thought they were solving the problem of dividing the river's water permanently, too. They made it worse.
I don't disagree that economics are a critical part of this conversation. But I don't understand how you're making the argument that enabling more water use, not less, is cost effective.
Even amortized across 50 years, $30B is more than the $0B required if we just use less water.
None of this even comes anywhere near discussing the potential deleterious ecological (and economic!) impacts of draining water-rich ecosystems by piping their water elsewhere. Look to the phase-out of leaded gasoline as a great example of how externalities matter.
Generally speaking, substantial alterations to hydrological regimes can cause deleterious cascading ecological effects. Just look toward the literature on the hydrological (and consequential ecological) effects of dams (necessary to divert water) for examples.
One of particular interest is dams' tendency to reduce the frequency and severity of flooding events, which are characteristically necessary for much of the functioning of floodplain ecosystems such as those you're describing.
Such reductions can wreak havoc on biodiversity in these regions.
Water is not usually created/destroyed it is moved around and contaminated.
Humans need water. We don't need to use less of it. We need more of it and there is plenty of it. For example, farms need water to grow food. Humans need food (and water) or we die. And water isn't going anywhere. It doesn't get destroyed. As you probably know, there is a water cycle. It falls out of the sky, bubbles up from the ground, and can be found by drilling for it, just like our most critical energy sources.
For oil. Water has far lower value density.
Which is vastly cheap enough and sufficient to solve this problem. Much cheaper than alternatives
Just the lack of understanding of like 15 different aspects of the problem with that idea and the confidence to defend regardless is kind of amazing.
What's really sad is that so many people are brainless enough to believe that this is not possible to solve, and easily so, once incentives drive it forward.
Your comment does remind me of many of the 0.1-0.5x engineers I've worked with though. We need hundreds of people to maintain a mobile client, it's not possible to do it with a handful!
For comparison, the Phoenix metro area uses 2.3 million acre feet of water per year (40% of which is used in agriculture).[2] So a bit over 1% of the Columbia's annual flow.
Another comparison: the Colorado "in its natural state" averaged just 22,500 cfs, less than 10% of the Columbia.[3]
I'm not saying that piping water from Oregon to the southwest is a good idea, but it's not as if we don't have water in the west. It's just a lot further north than most of the population centers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River#Discharge [2] https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/how-much-water-are-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River#Discharge
Oil and gas are far more value dense than water. Pipeline transport adds somewhere around $5-20 per barrel of oil, or $0.03/L. Some quick googling suggests Phoenix residents pay around $0.00022/L. That's a factor of 142x.
True scarcity would drive prices up and increase cost viability of transport, obviously. The reason its not done right now is because its not an imminent problem