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Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

Those of us by the Great Lakes would prefer that our water not get sold to other places, thanks.

Not all of us. I'm totally fine with water pipelines in exchange for long distance transmission lines for solar power and other such infrastructure like gas pipelines from areas that produce stuff we do not.

Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.

Long term, fresh water as a resource is in decline [0].

[0] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/global-fres...

DCs could desal all of their cooling water from saltwater and it would still pencil. (So could residential water, for that matter.)

They could but that’s more expensive and location dependent. Much cheaper to put the externalities on tax payers and use their potable drinking water at a nice discount. Best: you don’t even have to report usage.

In my corner of the Great Lakes, we have so much excess natural gas that it is actually being sold for negative prices. So a pipeline to ship natural gas out would be good, but we certainly don't need any pipelines to ship it in.

There is also an excess of electricity (thanks to gas peaker plants), so there are lots of transmission lines being built. (My property has an old transmission line on it, and then a new one perpendicular to that, solely built to try to do something with all the excess gas and then excess electricity being generated.)

So with that in mind... we'd probably rather our lake doesn't get drained, thanks, and is just left the way it is.

Thankfully the Great Lakes Compact prohibits water from being diverted outside the great lakes drainage basin, with very limited exceptions.

https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/program-areas/water-diver...

Why? We have 27 quadrillion gallons in lake michigan alone. You could pump millions of gallons a day out and if it just stopped raining it would take 3 million years to drain it. Stop listening to Charlie Berens.

For reference, Yuma uses around 100 billion gallons of water a year for irrigation. The whole state uses around 2.2 trillion gallons per year.

That's 6 billion gallons a day. And if there were a supply of lots of fresh water, you could expect the consumption by agriculture in desert areas to go way up, so yes, it is entirely possible for lakes to get drained by schemes like thus, such as the Aral Sea disaster. Lake Chad and Lake Poopó are examples from two other continents of the same level of destruction.

Sorry but that isn’t your water. Do you own the Great Lakes?

The Great Lakes are part of the United States and Canada. If the United States or Canada would like to repurpose the water within them for some better use then that sucks for you

You’d have to convince a majority of the members of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact. Good luck with that.

I one of those people that think that natural resources should belong to the people who customarily reside in an area and have an investment in its long-term health, both of the people in the area and also of the environment.

Draining the Great Lakes is not a good idea.

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