Dear desert sun,<p>It's your old neighbor the Midwest. Haven't seen you for a while. Not since you moved out to the sunny desert. Made fun of us for our high taxes and our unions and our dying manufacturing. Har har.<p>Anyway, how's retirement going? Taken in a lot of Ted talks? Good. For. You. Anyway, enough small talk. We got your letter asking for a favor and here's our reply:<p>We warned you decades ago not to build large population centers in an arid desert. We warned you to shepherd your meager water resources carefully. To landscape with something other than green lawns. To not build suburbs full of private pools and sprawling, car-dependent development. To not grow alfalfa and other water intensive crops.<p>You ignored us and you prospered. Until now when you hit the brick wall we told you was coming. We even told you when it was coming. You have been greedy and you have been arrogant. And so we quietly protected our water with laws. As one does from fools.<p>If you want us to share it, we are happy to. All you have to do is move here. I took the liberty of pricing some flights. Turns out it's a lot easier to ship you here than to ship water to you. I know it's gonna be rough starting over after losing all the equity in your house. Hope you see the humor in so many mortgages underwater as the result of a drought. It's important to laugh in tough times.<p>I bet you are ready for some good news? There are tons of jobs available here. Turns out all the businesses you created when you disrupted Midwest industry & Midwest labor are hiring. You can work at an Amazon warehouse. Or drive a car for Uber. Have your tips stolen by Instacart. The opportunities are as endless as the medical debt you'll be in should you ever become sick.<p>Anyway, looking forward to seeing you at a cookout real soon. Hope you remember how to make potato salad. Or figure out how to make desalinization work on a massive scale. 'Cause no moving back if you don't bring potato salad. The spicy kind with the miracle whip please.<p>Sincerely,
The Great Lakes basin and Missouri / Mississipi watershed.
This topic would be less of a sick joke if there werent absurd "water rights" given away 100 years ago that bankrupt the system.<p>I worked as an intern at NIH and buying fancy office furniture & computers was a thing to maintain budgets. There's a hoard of "farmers" using "water rights" to grow incredibly water ineffective crops (pistaccios, almonds) and just wasting water in general that far outstrip residential demand. Society owes these people, these leeches, nothing.<p>The idea of buying this illegitemate system out is disgraceful; none of this has ever been reasonable or fair. Change the California constitution that protects this horrific abomination & just end this world-killing pact.
Great idea, but I can save you some time and money.
Lake Tahoe is nearer to you and has a volume of 36 cu mi (150 km3; 120,000,000 acre⋅ft). Since it sits at an elevation of 6,225 ft, the path would be mostly downhill.<p>So call the folks living in Incline Village on the North side of the lake and discuss your plans.<p>Hurry now, let's get on with it.
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We need to stop building massive cities in the desert and expecting that they'll have enough water. Maybe we should get on with <i>that</i>, instead?<p>And, when someone proposes that a grand "we" need to do something that will benefit them personally, that makes me a lot more skeptical. You want a water pipeline? <i>You</i> go build it. Don't look at me; don't even look at my tax dollars. But if you want it, feel free to get right on it.
“We have dried up the Colorado, and fairness now requires us to begin draining the Mississippi. This is our God-given right and responsibility.”<p>Good grief. What a bloated sense of entitlement. The hubris of the past 200 years is catching up to us and these people think the answer is “double down on the same strategies that caused this crisis in the first place.”
Jesus, California and Nevada draining the "flyover" states? Can't get much more dystopian than that.<p>How about this -- build some desalination plants on the vast Californian coast. Nevada and Arizona can pitch in and share.