Letters to the Editor
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@ Douglas Moran
Mr. Moran decided to threaten the north with this:
"You don't want to ship your water south? That's okay. We can stop allowing oil to be shipped and trans-shipped from Houston up the Missouri-Pacific. How do you reckon on living out those cold winters without that oil? Or what about all those goods flowing through our ports and up our railways and carried by our trucks?"
The largest foreign supplier of oil and petroleum to the United States is... Canada. I think the north will do just fine without your southern oil.
I think that Canada even has some of those ports, railways and trucks you mentioned. I'm sure they would be happy to take the jobs from the southern states and distribute cheap Asian goods through Vancouver and Montreal. In fact, if global warming continues to open up the Northwest Passage Canada will probably possess the shortest shipping routes in the world.
However, one thing's for damn sure, Canada will not give you their water.
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OK have a laugh at our expense. Your sweet progressive bigotry doesn't shock anymore.
We'll sell our food to someone else. Go have a nice moist famine, you assholes.
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Water: you really can conserve it
When I was a grad student -- oh, about 25 years ago -- I spent a couple of years doing research in a little town in Mexico where the electricity and water went off pretty regularly. When the water was out, I had to hike down to a spring about a quarter of a mile away (I was lucky, lived near the spring) and haul any water I wanted to use up to my rented room, bucket by bucket. When you have to carry all the water you use by hand, believe me, you learn to conserve it pretty fast! I could easily make a three-gallon bucket last a day or more. Q: if the 4 million people in Atlanta did the same, could they find a sustainable local source for 12 million gallons of water a day? My guess is, yes...
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That's the spirit...
Anonymous Coward writes:
"And Canada objecting? Please, give me a break. If it gets bad enough, we'll roll right over Canada. What'll Canada do? Declare war? Hardly. By then we'll have bled Canada dry of all her energy resources. Canada will end up a vassal state."
Riiiight.
As if now, in the current state of American cultural and economic decline, would be a good time to piss off the biggest trading partner the US has - the one country that shares the worlds longest undefended border, general values and a population that actually has some shred of sympathy for the US. Plus, we all know how good the yankees are at occupying foreign countries. C'mon in...ya'll.
Riiiight.
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How to solve America's water problems
It's not just the Great Lakes area that has plenty of water. We in the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades, also have plenty of water. However, we really don't want you to move here. We might be willing to pipe some water to you if you just stay where you are.
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@ Nulla
It's unclear from your comment who you are aiming your invective towards. I suspect it might be me but I just wanted to clarify.
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Remembering the denizens of the oil patch
Greetings
Living in a freakin' desert and you're surprised it don't rain. The unreality is stunning
But more to the point:
Remember a few years ago during the big energy crisis, all those bumper stickers down Texas way : "Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark"
Well guess what, we all remember too!
Texas and energy rich states don't want to share their lovely black gold, so now drink up kids that water aint going south...
Karma is a bitch they say
Enjoy the journey
WarLord
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Hey Doug M from Austin, TX
Greetings
FYI, Minnesota's biggest refinery gets its sweet crude from Canada by pipeline.
Drink that black gold or water your lawn with it, makes no never mind to us on the tundra
BTW, I spent a bit of time down around Canyon Lake resevoir and the dam just north of San Antonio. The politics of Texas water are a snakepit...
Enjoy the journey
WarLord
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Another north-south divide
When New York State was worried about deforestation lowering water levels in the Erie Canal, they created Adirondack Park, a forest preserve roughly the acreage of Vermont, to protect the canal's water supply.
And Georgia has done what, exactly, to protect Atlanta's watershed? I'm not getting the impression it's very much, outside of complaining when someone south of them wants some water too.
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Thawing out in the southwest
One reason the southwest is dull is that it's full of people whose main goal in life is not to be cold.
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The future of water...
My own suspicion is that the line to dynamite any pipeline taking water south and west from the Great Lakes will begin forming long before the welds have cooled. And the line will be longer than the pipeline itself.
Human beings are a wonderfully creative and adaptive species. We can learn to live without just about anything...with the possible exception of water.
There is a future lesson here for the rest of the world also, and it's quite simple. There are too many people, and most of them are in the wrong places. And life is going to get a lot worse for most of them in the coming decades, mostly through actions of our own. Coastal inundation doesn't just flood cities, it turns fresh water brackish or saline. Glaciers melting turn off the taps at the bottom of the hill. Lakes drying, well, that one's pretty obvious.
Gonna get ugly, and in not too long a time.
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it's who we are
Piping water from the Great Lakes is not like pumping oil. It's like pumping sunny days or fertile soil. That's what the angry letter posters here don't understand. Drain (and sell) the oil from Texas and you'd have the same Texas, only with richer inhabitants. Drain any significant portion of the Great Lakes, and you cripple the environment, economy and identity of an entire region. (It would be grievously inefficient, too: could it really be worth it to move water all the way across the Rockies?)
I liked the article and, as a Michigander, appreciate it. I do think a more thorough discussion of the politics and economics of water use in agriculture would be helpful: it's not all golf courses and lawn care, y'know.