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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

Instead of oil pipelines, let's build water pipelines. And let's start pricing water to reflect its real value.

California is full of them. But it’s better to live within the means of the area you live. Not growing things that need a lot of water in a desert is a good start.

That’s silly. If you have a ton of water in one place and can move it to a more useful place you should do it.

A desert is by definition not a useful place where agriculture is concerned.

It's not that simple. Semi-arid areas where water can be provided consistently, can have agricultural advantages like more sunlight and fewer pests.

I don't think people understand that large rivers can flow through deserts and provide water.

Not only am I aware of this fact, I have actually been to a river in a desert!

And there's still a reason not much grows there. You start piping the water from that river into the desert and grow tropical fruit orchards you wind up with problems, such as those we see in southern california, which you might be surprised to find out is what we are actually discussing, water shortages caused by trying to grow tropical fruit orchards in a desert with rivers flowing through it.

That's not universally true though the Nile river delta and the Columbia basin have tons of agriculture and I'm not aware of water shortages, although large dams can cause issues.

But water can't be provided consistently, hence them being arid. And when men try to engineer that problem away, you wind up with problems such as depleted aquifers...

Oh, generally I agree.

I live in Australia. We, like much of the developed world, have built our cities and suburbs on the fertile parts of the country and drain our rivers to irrigate semi-arid farmlands.

We only have one long river system, and we have nearly killed it outright via this behavior.

Tell that to the Columbia River basin.

To what end and when that runs out, what do you do? Also, there is an ocean's worth of water right there.

To what end? Growing food?

And one should use it in a sustainable way, so hopefully it doesn't run out.

And yeah, the ocean has water, but you can't use it unless you desalinate. Seems smarter to use water that's already useable and readily available?

I thought the point of a water pipeline was to even out floods and droughts across an area or allow for superior planting locations to be utilized for more systemic efficiency than just local growth, heretical as the last notion may be.

In California they doo'd it. Something around 70% of the water that flows in rivers and streams is spoken for.

> California's farmers probably will pump an additional six to seven million acre-feet of water from their wells this year, above what they normally use

Compare that volume to the historic/nominal annual flow of the Colorado River at 16.5 million acre feet (per a 100 year old compact). That would be a big pipeline or canal to build or pump. Electric, heat, and carbon costs for desalinization plants would be equally infeasible.

Yes, price water at market values, drive aquifer mining done to zero, and beyond to replenish, and let the market decide if almonds or pistachios are more valuable than other choices.

An interesting second opinion -- https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/an-interstate-wat...

It posits that 10GW would be required to move the water (and I guess a fair amount of power could be recovered as hydro power). If a large land turbine can do 4MW, then 2500 such turbines would do the trick.

Of course this wouldn't be cheap, but it would be a worthy investment in the future of the country. Much better than the $2T we set on fire in Afghanistan.

Todays market is already artificially skewed by prior collective interventions (damming, canals, etc) -- let's do the next round a bit differently.

What benefit does it bring to support unbounded growth?

California is reaching the limits of population and agriculture it can support. People and farms are free to relocate

The alternative to oil pipelines is moving oil in tank cars by rail to ships burning bunker fuel, which is a huge negative net impact on the environment.

Demonizing pipelines does nothing on the demand side.

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