This go-round seeks to divert Great Lakes water, rather than Mississippi river, to water the Central Valley of California. Which valley is said to produce 25% of USofA's agriculture. I suspect the midwest cereal farmers might dispute that, but that's another episode. The Central Valley is mostly truck farms. Some big, but not staple foods.
The author points to, among other crops, almonds. It turns out that almonds (mentioned before in these essays) require a prodigious amount of water. Hard to see where it goes, given that almonds are more like rocks than tomatoes. So, an alternative to shipping Great Lakes water to CA, is to cut down all those fucking almond trees. It isn't as if almonds are a staple food, now are they? They are, by and large, an upper-class candy. We need a one-day dictator to raze those almond farms! You can have more people or more almond trees; ya caint have both. In due time, neither more.
If you look closely, the author is in one of those Desert States that covet thy neighbors' water. I guess all that sun, and no shade, turns people Red. These thoroughly Red States are always taking from the Blue States, since they are 'growing' and deserve others' resources. Not that it ever made sense to populate deserts and haul water in from great distances in the first place. I saw "Chinatown". Did you? FDR might have done the country a better long-term solid by killing Hoover Dam and the stupidity of building cities and farms in goddamn Deserts. It gets tiring after a while.
For comparison, the Colonial Pipeline runs from Houston, TX to Linden, NJ. I can't find the end-to-end distance, only system pipe total length of 5,500 miles. But map programs show that to be ~1,600 miles. So, that's the current state of the art.
So, let's spitball the problem. The easiest way to move the Great Lakes to the Central Valley is to backfill the Colorado; just use the river's right-of-way. The straightline distance from Chicago (not that we'd start the pipeline along Lake Shore Dr., of course) to the headwater is 989 miles in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not that we could go like a flying bird. The current driving distance (which is a decent surrogate, since the highway folks had to work around messy spots, first) is ~1,000 miles. Since, I'll guess, the map programs use Interstates as much as feasible, we might speculate that this pipeline could be built, largely, in the median of said Interstates on stanchions just like oil pipelines.
Mother Nature does offer up a problem: hydrocarbons don't freeze at 32°, but water does. The oil pipes are heated and massively insulted, since crude does slow down a bit if it cools. So, we'll need the engineers to optimize speed (moving water doesn't freeze at 32°, but somewhat lower depending on thermodynamics) versus heating the water. This assumes, of course, that the pipeline is above ground. Burying such a large pipe below the frost line the whole way is another option; cost and time difference are likely to the moon. And, of course, the engineers will take into account the properies of water vs. oil.
Now for something completely different. Who pays? The pipeline itself will be Socialist just as Hoover Dam (and most, if not all, of the many other dams on the Colorado) was. But how much should the Blue states soak the Red state fools to water their lawns and golf courses and swimming pools? Lots o Bongo Bucks is my suggestion. Enough to force them to choose among golf courses and almond trees and more houses for more rednecks.
The author belies an ignorance: all surface water is groundwater. Those rivers and lakes and streams and ponds are fed by groundwater. It's called a "headwater" for a reason. Yes, intelligent states (mostly Blue) have reservoirs supported by watersheds, which do what the word implies: send rain into the reservoir. But that's just a faster way to claim the water. Absent the watershed structure, rain percolates down to the watertable and, voila, groundwater.
There's one final issue. Not all underground water is equal. Some (many? most?) aquifers store what's called paleo-water. The most well known is the Ogallala. Such water sources aren't easily, or at all, replenished in real time, due to the geologic cap on the aquifer.
The aquifer is composed of unconsolidated alluvial deposits. Groundwater in this aquifer has been dated to have been deposited in the humid time following the last glacial maximum. In much of the aquifer's area, an impermeable layer of calcrete prevents precipitation from infiltrating. In other regions of the aquifer, some relatively small rates of recharge have been measured.You don't miss your water until the well's run dry.
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