I don’t know when I last read a post I disagreed with as much as this one at Big Think by Joseph Schulman, John Schaefer, and Henry Miller. It opens with an untruth:
The U.S. West suffers from severe — and worsening — water shortages.
and it premised on a misconception:
America does not have a water supply problem; it has a water distribution problem.
My contrasting claims would be that the U. S. does not have a water supply problem; it has a population distribution problem and the U. S. West suffers from severe overpopulation problems. Just to provide one example, when the Spanish arrived in the area that was to become Los Angeles County the population consisted of a few thousand people. That’s what the land would support. Now it’s home to 10 million people—far more than the land can support. The ecological consequences of that overpopulation of a fragile ecology are vast.
The authors want to create an Interstate Water System analogous to the Interstate Highway System with the mission of creating pipelines to move water from where it is plentiful, e.g. the North and East to where it is scarce, i.e. the West, particularly the Southwest. I think the Interstate Highway System was a costly mistake, only justifiable for reasons of national defense. Its original empowering legislation was the Federal Aid Highways Act AKA the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. It mandated that the interstates be designed in such a way that aircraft could land on them.
There is a little book I would recommend you read: Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It is a short history of hydrological policy in the American West. A notable quote: “water moves uphill to money”. The effect of the authors’ IWS would be to waste enormous amounts of money, benefiting the few, at the expense of the many. It would destroy the very reasons that the American West is attractive to people. Any empowering legislation for such a boondoggle should be called the California Housing Developers Subsidy Act.
