Californians are desperate for water, so you can’t blame them for greedily eyeing the storm-sodden east. Look at all that snow! That’s just frozen water, right? But seriously, trucking snow from Boston over the Rockies is a pipe dream. Or…not the right kind of pipe, anyway.
But what about Alaska? The state is weeping snowmelt into the North Pacific. Nobody’s using it. It’s close to California, relatively speaking. And a pipe wouldn’t have to cross over any continental divides. It’s so crazy it just might work!
Or is it? Hare-brained schemes to bring out-of-state water to California are nothing new, and this idea doesn’t come from nowhere. It was born in the late 1980s by Alaskan governor Wally Hickel, who was always exuberant about selling his state’s resources.
So yeah, this wouldn’t be a cheap fix. The Office of Technology Assessment calculated that each one of those gallons of water would cost at least ten times as much as other options—in 1991 dollars. These alternatives included desalination, waste water reclamation, and plain ole’ conservation. But the current drought is the worst in the state’s history, and doesn’t look likely to let up soon.
So how does this idea sound now? Unfortunately: Still crazy. “It’s just not something we’re even looking at,” says Nancy Vogel, a spokesperson for the California Department of Water Resources.
Even with the extended drought and the expanded tax base, the cost of Alaskan water is too great. Partly that’s because most of the water would go to crops, not cities, so the costs would be passed on to food markets.
“Having water that is this expensive go to agricultural crops is the kind of thing that would cause economists hair to go white,” says Kash. And even though advances in pipe laying logistics and materials have driven the engineering costs of the project down, it’s probable that modern environmental permitting would more than make up for those cuts in cost.
Via WIRED
