Obviously this wouldn’t relieve the issues caused by low snowpack and decreasing precipitation, but it could supplement the water used for everyday living or agriculture during times of drought right?
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I have a similar question: Why can’t we build ways to transport people from drier areas to wetter areas so that people who want water can move to where it is?
We would do this if it was affordable. There is plenty of water, but not at the “almost free” price people want to pay. When a pipeline is the right answer, there is just no water, because you can’t run the pumps to pump water through the pipeline for what it sells for. There are giant pipelines in CA and tunnels in NY, with prices to match.
We kind of have. California has an aqueduct that takes water from the San Joaquin/Sacramento basin to drier parts of SoCal, near Santa Barbara and LA.
It’s really expensive, and as others have noted, it’s pretty detrimental to the environment. Also, the places they’re taking from actually need it, too. Northern and Southern CA fight about water almost constantly, because the whole state is really ag-heavy, and generally pretty dry.
Also, it should be noted that “everyday living” and “agriculture” are vastly different. Ag takes a whole heckuva lot more than the average municipality uses for things like drinking water, cooking, sanitation, and yes, even the average homeowner watering their stupid useless lawn.
Where I live there are hundreds of kilometers of channels dug into the mountainside to bring fresh water from the colder and more humid north side to the hotter and drier south. Your idea does exist
Agriculture is only profitable if the water used is super cheap. Piping in water from far away is really expensive, with the cost going up the farther away the water has to come from. Oil is pretty expensive already and people are OK paying a few extra dollars per barrel to pipe it far away, but a few extra dollars per barrel of water would be uneconomical for agriculture.
We do actually pipe water for agriculture and residential use but past a certain distance it doesn’t make economical sense. It would become so expensive that it would make more sense to invest in ways to reduce water consumption like more efficient irrigation, aquifer injection of treated wastewater, etc.
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