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Comment by tehaugmenter | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the project being super expensive, I think this would be a good idea. I don't know why conservationists are so stingy sometimes. If they really cared they'd stop the siphoning from the dead sea.

Adding a hydro electric option on top of it all could increase electricity stability in the region. For the longevity of the people there I think it would be a good move.

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Don't ask for much, do you? As it happens they quite agree:

“I think that the best way to conserve the Dead Sea would be to reintroduce the natural flow from the Jordan River and decrease the pumping of water from the lake to the factories,”

The problem is that doesn't work the water section in the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan gives the Jordanians quite a bit of water rights, and they've been pumping more and more from it especially since they are not getting as much water from Syria as they used too these days. On top of that Jordan has been pumping quite a bit of water from the Dead Sea it self for commercial uses mostly to be dried not even 100 meters away in salt farms which is excessively wasteful. Israel has stopped pumping from Jordan river 35 years ago, and it has also mostly stopped pumping from the Sea of Galilee. Israel for quite a few years now has moved to desalination which currently provides about 40% (and on track to reach the 70-80% goal in the next 10-15 years) of it's drinking water needs, the rest pumped from natural underground reservoirs and man made reservoirs basins or reclaimed water. The new plan as it seems is actually to abandon the "peace canal" and to pump desalinated water into the dead sea from the med as it's much closer to it than the red sea, which although not as flashy and hip will be some what at least cost effective.

>The Dead Sea was subject to drastic climate changes in the past. “It was once much lower than today,” Lazar said. Yet over the centuries, natural processes prevented the sea from drying up. “At some point, an equilibrium will be reached between natural evaporation and what little water enters the lake through groundwater springs, rain, and runoff,” he adds. “So I don’t know what people mean when they talk about saving the Dead Sea.”

I'm amused by the conservationist here adopting the arguments usually used by global warming skeptics. If you just replace the XX liters/hour of the Jordan River flow that they want restored with XX liters/hour of Red Sea water, it's hard to see how things are not made better.

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