It's your old neighbor the Midwest. Haven't seen you for a while. Not since you moved out to the sunny desert. Made fun of us for our high taxes and our unions and our dying manufacturing. Har har.
Anyway, how's retirement going? Taken in a lot of Ted talks? Good. For. You. Anyway, enough small talk. We got your letter asking for a favor and here's our reply:
We warned you decades ago not to build large population centers in an arid desert. We warned you to shepherd your meager water resources carefully. To landscape with something other than green lawns. To not build suburbs full of private pools and sprawling, car-dependent development. To not grow alfalfa and other water intensive crops.
You ignored us and you prospered. Until now when you hit the brick wall we told you was coming. We even told you when it was coming. You have been greedy and you have been arrogant. And so we quietly protected our water with laws. As one does from fools.
If you want us to share it, we are happy to. All you have to do is move here. I took the liberty of pricing some flights. Turns out it's a lot easier to ship you here than to ship water to you. I know it's gonna be rough starting over after losing all the equity in your house. Hope you see the humor in so many mortgages underwater as the result of a drought. It's important to laugh in tough times.
I bet you are ready for some good news? There are tons of jobs available here. Turns out all the businesses you created when you disrupted Midwest industry & Midwest labor are hiring. You can work at an Amazon warehouse. Or drive a car for Uber. Have your tips stolen by Instacart. The opportunities are as endless as the medical debt you'll be in should you ever become sick.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing you at a cookout real soon. Hope you remember how to make potato salad. Or figure out how to make desalinization work on a massive scale. 'Cause no moving back if you don't bring potato salad. The spicy kind with the miracle whip please.
Sincerely, The Great Lakes basin and Missouri / Mississipi watershed.
I worked as an intern at NIH and buying fancy office furniture & computers was a thing to maintain budgets. There's a hoard of "farmers" using "water rights" to grow incredibly water ineffective crops (pistaccios, almonds) and just wasting water in general that far outstrip residential demand. Society owes these people, these leeches, nothing.
The idea of buying this illegitemate system out is disgraceful; none of this has ever been reasonable or fair. Change the California constitution that protects this horrific abomination & just end this world-killing pact.
So call the folks living in Incline Village on the North side of the lake and discuss your plans.
Hurry now, let's get on with it. .
And, when someone proposes that a grand "we" need to do something that will benefit them personally, that makes me a lot more skeptical. You want a water pipeline? You go build it. Don't look at me; don't even look at my tax dollars. But if you want it, feel free to get right on it.
They can drive the farmers away, that is an option - then they'll have high food prices _and_ drought.
You can move, you are mobile. Move to where the water is.
Plus, sun is good for people and crops. Transferring water to where it will be useful seems like the kind of thing a government should do.
The advocacy group NRDC has a much better explanation of the general concept and specific Mississippi/Ogallala proposal: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/Water-Pipelines-rep...
Two things become clear. The mississippi/ogallala project would have to be an aqueduct project and not a pipeline if it wants to move a helpful amount of water to justify itself and it would require an exorbitant amount of energy to pump water from, say, Omaha to Denver. It doesn't seem like it has a chance of happening before many smaller projects are attempted first local to the southwest.
People can literally just start walking east for free.
> Plus, sun is good for people and crops
We've got plenty of sunlight in the Midwest, I assure you. We don't need any of yours.
You'd have to move very approximately one tanker full of water for each person every week, for the rest of that person's life. You can think of much more effective ways to do it than with tankers, but can you think of any that are more effective than moving the person to the water?
Good grief. What a bloated sense of entitlement. The hubris of the past 200 years is catching up to us and these people think the answer is “double down on the same strategies that caused this crisis in the first place.”
How about this -- build some desalination plants on the vast Californian coast. Nevada and Arizona can pitch in and share.
You want to start Civil War 2? Because this is how you do it.
