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Comment by tony_cannistra | Hacker News Reader

Arizona actually already does this, in profound quantities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project

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...

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And the Colorado River is the only water source in North America right?

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

> 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.

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.

Oil pipelines have already proven the economic viability.

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

I hate to break it to you, but your "economically illiterate people" might actually understand some fundamental social and political realities that you've not yet had the chance to reckon with. Not to mention the physical realities of water resources.

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.

Why would we practice conservation when we can spend $30-50B in capex amortized over 50 years via marginally higher taxes on the populace with minimal opex to solve the problem permanently?

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

Because it wouldn't solve the problem permanently.

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.

I don't think you appreciate just how much water the northern part of the continent has.

Actually, I do. I've lived there.

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.

I only meant that the region which has an abundance of water which largely goes to waste can sell their excess via pipelines to the lower 48 wherever there is a dire need.

water problems are actually energy problems. With cheap energy, you can clean all water from residential areas and you can pipe water in from where it is plentiful.

Water is not usually created/destroyed it is moved around and contaminated.

Over the years, I've learned that "fundamental social and political realities" are often salesmanship driven solely by agendas. There is the reality and there is fantasy. The reality is we walk over more water (1000x) than there is in all of our rivers and lakes.

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.

>>Oil pipelines have already proven the economic viability.

For oil. Water has far lower value density.

For water. Its proven we can build many thousand miles of pipeline for 10s of billions.

Which is vastly cheap enough and sufficient to solve this problem. Much cheaper than alternatives

I love how arm chair engineers have solved the water crises in the south by suggesting people "just build pipelines!".

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.

You're right, piping water from point A to B is perhaps one of humanity's most challenging problems.

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!

I'm sure those "0.1x" engineers found you a treat to work with. One of the more impressive combinations of abject ignorance and misplaced confidence I've seen in a long time. Believe it or not, but there are indeed people who've designed large volume water piping systems on Hackernews..

Where is the water coming from? It’s not coming from the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River. Where are these enormous volumes of untapped water that we can pump over the Rocky Mountains?

How about the Columbia? Average discharge is 265,000 cfs, which has been pretty consistent over the past 100+ years.[1] That's approximately 200 million acre feet just flowing into the Pacific every year.

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

> 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.

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.

If they pay $0.00022/L then its really not that scarce after all huh?

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

it’s an essential for life and the consumer price reflects heavy subsidies

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