Reply #143: "States like Wisconsin are awash in water"

[malakai2]

Little nuggets like that (see also, "water delivery" and "water production"), viewed through the prism of the chronic water shortages in southwestern states, lead people to believe that he has designs on transporting water from those states that are "awash" to those states that aren't. And what then? Every time we remove a ceiling on growth in an area, growth resumes until it hits a new ceiling...so where will New Mexico be in a few decades when, after they've broken through a previous ceiling and become thoroughly dependent on someone else's water, that someone else suddenly has none to spare? Disaster, more than likely, and on multiple scales. Why create a population dependent on a long supply chain for an item as essential as water, when it would be much simpler and vastly more cost effective to just encourage those folks to settle where the water already is?

If he wants a workable solution, as workable as possible while maintaining the status quo to the extent possible, then we can start by revisiting the water pacts between the southwestern states to more accurately reflect climate realities, criminalizing waste of the water he covets on such things as fountains and lawns and golf courses, and using water shortages as a much greater disincentive to population growth in arid states. Agricultural water rights laws and customs are doing us no favors, are they too much of a sacred cow to expect revisions? How about halting depletion of aquifers down there...those might be more important as emergency drought mitigation sources (to say nothing of their ecological value) than as lockboxes to be raided anytime a governor wants to avoid asking people to make an unpopular sacrifice.

If he would confine his statements to things like water conservation, water reuse, and water availability as a limiting factor for regional population size, he'd probably get far less immediate resistance from people in the Great Lakes region. People in the southwest might bristle at the idea of a cap on water availability, but then again most reasonable people associate terrestrial deserts with a shortage of water.