Older article (from 2021) but it’s even more relevant today. The eastern seaboard is getting pummeled with heavy rainfall. Especially the northeast.
A NYT investigation found that many communities are using up their groundwater at dangerous rates. Why not use the excess water the East gets to replenish what is in short supply on the other side of the Mississippi?
Now what would be really sick is finding a way to pipe in water from the sea and have a way of desalinating it along the pipeline as it gets closer and closer to its various destinations. That would be a boon for the southwest US, south Saharan Africa, and Australia, but that’s a bigger project than simply finding ways to pipe large amounts of fresh water westward in a country that already has a track record of large-scale infrastructure projects.
I see this come up every now and then, but I still don’t see how it will solve the real problem which is the American West has more people than its environment can naturally support. While the opposite is true of the east of the Mississippi, pumping water thousands of miles to where it doesn’t naturally fall sounds like it could further exacerbate the problem later. Granted, I am no environmental scientist or meteorologist, but it sounds like it could create more problems down the line.
Also:
The Great Lakes are another possible source.
The Great Lakes States and Canada would blow a gasket if this happened. There is also the Great Lakes Compact which is a Treaty with Canada preventing this exact scenario from happening; it stipulates that water from the Great Lakes must stay within the Great Lakes Basin.
Yeah it would only work as intended if it was coupled with restrictions on more development. The NYT article about fading ground water supplies is a doomsday scenario for the country so at the very least, a theoretical IWS would serve to maintain and not encourage more growth
It takes a lot of infrastructure and power to pump water over small ranges, much less the continental divide. You’d be far better off using a small fraction of the money for more desalination plants on the coast. The largest share of the Colorado river’s water is consumed near the coast California, with a lot being expended to maintain the brackish marshes. While desalination is energy intensive, it’s nowhere near what pumping a river that high would be.
You could also cut down on agricultural subsidies and use. A lot of the water is used for growing crops in the desert, and while there are reasons for this based on which types of crops are grown, they are largely luxury crops like almonds, and spending so much money and water to keep the price of such foods low seems rather odd.
