The Great Lakes hold 6 quadrillion gallons of water. That water irrigates farms, stocks homes and supplies Michigan’s industries. In an age of climate uncertainty, many climate advocates hope to protect this precious resource from outside influences. But this resource protectionism is neither in the best interest of the country, nor the state of Michigan.
Throughout the years, various observers and parties have proposed a pipeline to move water from the Great Lakes region to the arid West. The Colorado River is a prime spot for the pipeline’s endpoint, considering that it flows through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California from its starting point in the Rocky Mountains. Transporting water 900 miles west and a mile high would be a colossal project, costing billions of dollars and megawatts of energy. However, it could save the West from a crisis that would in turn threaten Michigan’s prosperity.
This is a feasible endeavor. Countries around the world, including Australia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and China, have pursued water pipeline technology. China even spent $32 billion on a pipeline to bring water from the wet south to the dry north, drawing on a tributary of the Yangtze river.
America has executed water projects of this scale before, such as the Hoover Dam. The debate that surrounds the proposal to pipe water out of the Great Lakes is heated and relevant. I can see the other side: Leave the lakes as they are with their current stewards, and let the rest of the country deal with the climate crisis as Michigan becomes, as some observers have dubbed it, a “climate haven.”
These sorts of canal or pipeline proposals often run afoul of Midwest observers. “The idea is as old and dusty as the desert Southwest,” a seemingly indignant Michigander wrote for the Detroit Free Press in 2017 about the idea of sending the water from the Great Lakes to the West.
The cities the Detroit Free Press author highlights — Phoenix and Las Vegas — point to the misconceptions people have about this debate; the dialogue is about more than just pumping water to desert in cities. It’s about supporting necessary agriculture. California produces more than one-third of the country’s vegetables and about 75% of its fruits and nuts. California is not alone in providing for our nation’s dinner table. Utah has contributed immensely to the meat industry, given that it, because of its dry air, is one of the most productive places to grow hay in the country; producing animal feed uses two-thirds of Utah’s water supply.
Utah is responding to the demands of the market, while the West is currently experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years. Michigan would not be an “oasis” if the West runs out of water; it would be a flavorless hell, one with sky-high meat and vegetable prices and a severely limited variety of food products.
There’s a reason California is the most agriculturally productive state in the country. The Central Valley, which encompasses almost 1% of the nation’s farmland while producing a quarter of our food, is actually an ancient lakebed, full of silt and sediment that supercharges crop growth. We shouldn’t let our most productive farmland lie fallow.
The West has, at various points, clearly not conserved water effectively. But have the Great Lakes states been good stewards of their lakes? They’ve pumped millions of pounds of sewage, farm and industrial waste into them, with 10,000 metric tons of plastics alone entering the Great Lakes every year.
That’s not to mention that the West is in drought partially because of the Rust Belt. The 20th century saw the industrial dominance of the American Midwest, with Detroit serving as the starting point and beating heart of the American auto industry. Transportation and industry account for more than half of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. So, the Midwest got rich on polluting, and now wants the West to foot the climate bill.
Any infrastructure project of this scale would require a massive legal and regulatory overhaul. Piping water out of the Great Lakes is currently forbidden by the Great Lakes Compact, a multilateral agreement among Great Lakes states. Federal intervention, along with other interstate agreements, would be necessary to both facilitate the project and to regulate the flow of water out of the Great Lakes in order to preserve delicate lake ecosystems.
This pipeline won’t be constructed tomorrow. A trans-continental pipeline exists amid a field of other proposals to revitalize drought-stricken regions. Cloud seeding — the process wherein planes dump water attracting chemicals out of planes in order to cause rain — is a promising but unproven technology. Desalination is also a potential solution, but it is expensive and would still require a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean or Gulf of California to revive the Four Corners states (Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico), assuming Mexico agreed to such a proposal. Desalination also has its own environmental concerns, as the brine produced when separating salts and solids from waters has the potential to wreak havoc on coastal ecosystems if not properly disposed of.
That is also assuming that the costs of a pipeline remain constant. Considering advances in both materials science and construction in past decades, and the potential capacity of artificial intelligence and robotics to multiply the productivity of a single worker, a pipeline could be less expensive in the future than we might currently assume.
We live in a country that is tightly connected by strong economic and ecological bonds. “Climate havens” will not exist if the most productive and vital regions of our country are allowed to wallow in unnecessary drought. As technology advances, we should pursue options that play to our nation’s strengths, including the fact that we have the single largest store of freshwater in the world, one that would take decades of extreme overuse to drain. Effectively managed, a transcontinental pipeline could reinvigorate the drought-stricken West — at Michigan’s gain.
Julian C. Barnard is an Opinion Columnist from Albuquerque, N.M. who writes about politics, culture and the American West. He can be reached at jcbarn@umich.edu.