| Why have we gotten, as a people, so atrocious when it comes to the environment? Well, one party has rejected it as an issue to be taken seriously, while people whose hearts are in the right place say stuff like this... Dan LaShof, director of the Council's Climate Center, says the costs associated with addressing water shortages through infrastructure -- pipelines, reservoirs, etc. -- are probably prohibitive. Conservation is cheaper. But when have cost considerations ever stopped the federal government from doing something? Especially something that can be sold as "creating thousands of construction jobs."
He's talking about moving millions of gallons of Great Lakes water across half the country to places where there are more people than there is water ... the desert Southwest and the southeast to be precise. While the point about mere cost not stopping the federal government from doing something thoroughly boneheaded is well taken, this isn't just a matter of cost. It's also a matter of having the energy infrastructure to do the job. Water is heavy. Millions of gallons of water is really heavy. In between here anywhere else that might want our water are elevation gains, which means at some point lifting all that water up over the course of hundreds of miles (even if, in the case of Florida, it'd eventually come down). The cost to building the network necessary to moving all that water wouldn't just include the cost to build the reservoirs and pipelines, but also power plants dedicated specifically to moving the water. The cost is prohibitive (back in the 30s, Republicans opposed our program of damming our Western rivers on the grounds of fiscal conservatism ... would they today really get behind boosting the deficit to go on another giant spending spree?), but so is the engineering. Climate change does remain the greatest existing threat to the Great Lakes (I'm not entirely convinced that the Asian carp are necessarily a death sentence to the Lakes' fisheries), but it is so because of things it would do to the lakes, like raise water temperature and lead to greater winter evaporation due to shrinkages in the amount of time the lakes are frozen over. Let's start protecting the lakes, not from bogeymen, but from real threats. |
