We pipeline oil from Canada to Texas, why can’t we pipeline water from the Great lakes to the south?
Edit: thank you all who replied, I’ve gathered that it is technically possible, but would come with a huge amount of legal, environmental, and practical issues due to the amount of water that would actually be needed. It sounds like there are far more practical solutions available if the need became dire enough.
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Aside from major cost and legality, there’s also environmental concerns. Large geoengineering projects like that WILL have impacts on the environment and proper analysis needs to be done or else it can have extreme consequences.
Take for example China’s water pipelines from the water-rich south to the arid north. They’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building dams and canals/pipes to get water from their major rivers like the Yellow River to the north. The problem is that they did all this without any proper environmental evaluations. As a result, downstream of the rivers in cities that used to have massive rivers flowing through them find themselves with basically a dry riverbed. They literally lose their entire water supply. To make things worse, the dams are making floods upstream significantly worse. They had massive floods the last 2 years that flooded major inland cities like Zhengzhou.
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