We Can Terraform the American West

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/we-can-terraform-the-american-west/

by jasondavies • 2 years ago

246 303 2 years ago

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com

OutOfHere9• 2 years ago

No, thanks. People are destructive to the planet in every way possible, and we don't need more. It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people. If anything, having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery.

johnnyjeans4• 2 years ago

I agree. Megaprojects that make large changes to highly chaotic systems never end well. From Mao's Four Pests to the ongoing wildfire crises that plague the west coast thanks to all the terraforming California has undergone (exacerbated by ongoing climate change)

To say nothing of the fact that this is wanton environmental destruction. Just because something is arid, it's alright to completely change it? And for what? Having lived in Dallas, which is not unlike Nevada but more humid and wet, it's not a proper place to live. People jump from pool of air conditioning to pool of air conditioning. You go outside and walk for just 5 minutes, and you're completely soaked in sweat. Shade does not help. Lack of concrete does not help, you can drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere and it's still like being in a preheated oven. You can't really do anything fun outside for half the year because you'll get heat stroke, or generally just be extremely stinky.

If you want to make use of empty land, going to the miserably cold uninhabited swaths of Canada are far wiser. You can always bundle up, but you can only take off so many layers of clothing.

nine_k3• 2 years ago

Arguably the wildfires occur due to not enough meddling by humans. That is, due to not cutting enough old and dead trees, which dry up and become easier to catch fire, and not cutting wide enough openings in the forests to stop the spread of a fire when it occurs. The current wildfire situation is what the natural order of things looks like :-\

tbrownaw2• 2 years ago

People are destructive to the planet in every way possible,

Are we already on track to cause our planet to no longer be a planet?

It's not as if we'll solve the mysteries of existence twice as fast by having twice as many people

Imagine if the people at ASML (or your favorite other one-of-a-kind cutting edge place) had twice as many hours in their days. Or alternatively, if there were twice as many of them. Shouldn't that make them able to do more cool things?

OutOfHere9• 2 years ago

You conveniently ignored the part where I noted that having double the consequential pollution will halve the speed of discovery. And yes, the pollution will double because more humans means more pollution that accumulates without getting recycled. Plastics, PFAS, CO2, etc. are all examples of pollutants that do not get recycled. It harms brains, aging them prematurely. A cleaner environment without strong financial pressure for survival is a much better way to do more cool things. Once the CO2 exceeds 800 ppm, brains will be tired all of the time, too tired to invent anything cool.

jamiek882• 2 years ago

Wow. What a project that would be!

Really interesting read, and while the numbers are a little hand wavy even if they were out on the cost by an order of magnitude it would still be very cheap.

The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.

c0nfused• 2 years ago

I think the issue is that when you look at it from the modern perspective of profit the economics don't work out.

If look at it as a way to spend huge piles of money to subsidize a lifestyle it suddenly is less charming

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 years ago

You're spending $16B to create $1T of real estate value.

That would pay for itself in two years at 1% R/E tax and <10% interest.

I didn't read the entire article, but the reason it won't happen at this scale is because you could never acquire the property rights to be able to do it, not because it's a bad investment.

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

Good? Do you understand the ecosystems and national parks that would be destroyed by this? Once those are gone they are gone. We don’t even need this nonsense, the population is contracting. We will have nothing but empty space in inhabited spaces already.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899

jamiek882• 2 years ago

Article talks about how 90% of the land would remain as is as well as 100% of the national parks, simply restoring watersheds that are intermittent or dried up to wetlands.

I didn't use the word good anywhere or even offer a value judgement, I simply called it interesting.

Also your tone sucks and makes me not want to discuss in good faith with you.

pj_mukh• 2 years ago

Looking past the various NIMBY challenges to this project, I'd love to find a marine-safe desalination method too.

Apparently a lot of marine life gets absolutely wrecked when you pump in water from the California coast, but I see it mostly as a unique engineering challenge.

This should be possible!

cle7• 2 years ago

The USA has lost its appetite for these mega projects, sadly.

Looking around at this thread, it's easy to see why. People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.

Of course, the type of economic progress we've had over the last few decades has been a mixed bag, due to structural deficiencies. But I don't agree with throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The general cynicism and negativity makes me really sad. Esp for a community of builders and problem solvers.

HelloMcFly• 2 years ago

I take the entirely opposite conclusion. Seeing so many value ecological conservatism over economic progress is to me optimistic and heartening. Over the past 100 years we've seen a shift to seeing the world as a shared world vs. one that is our manifest destiny to claim. I see others beginning to see a sense of shared responsibility for the stewardship of this world for the other living creatures as well as a recognition that our fates are more intertwined with theirs than we *used to think.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

People value ecological conservatism over economic progress.

Phrasing such a proposal as "economic progress" is entirely irrational. This is a solution looking for a problem. We have zero, zero, zero economic need for this.

seadan8315• 2 years ago

It is the easy and unsustainable solution. Akin to rewriting a codebase instead of fixing an existing one. Instead of solving the problems of nitrogen pollution, CO2 pollution, plastics- just find a new greenfield instead. Of course code rewrites rarely actually replace the old code. New and shiny is just way sexier than doing things like fixing poisoned waterways.

johnnyjeans4• 2 years ago

It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time.

During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago

We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.

[1] https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/

jefftk2• 2 years ago

An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.

Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...

johnnyjeans4• 2 years ago

Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article.

Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.

You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:

An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.

On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]

An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/media/11332

nosianu• 2 years ago

I will not argue about definitions of terms, but there was a recent study that I found linked on washingtonpost.com I believe (Edit: found, added).

WP article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1... (https://archive.md/RM8ez)

...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
“We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.

Study (restricted): "A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature" -- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705

Partitioning the reconstruction into climate states indicates that more time was spent in warmer rather than colder climates

Look at the graph - our time is on the very right. We humans developed and are still living in unusually cold times for this planet, historically.

alehlopeh• 2 years ago

The problem with South Florida is that it had too much water.

quickthrowman2• 2 years ago

Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households

This is also the case for Arizona, Phoenix in particular.

Air conditioning is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, it’s up there with the airplane, antibiotics, transistor, and shipping container.

kbutler2• 2 years ago

Especially if you include refrigeration for foods.

nradov3• 2 years ago

Air conditioning was huge, but surely mosquito control and the elimination of malaria also played a major role in making Florida habitable. People drained the swamps and sprayed enough poison to kill off at least most of the mosquitos.

skybrian3• 2 years ago

He does mention that:

In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.

sidewndr46• 2 years ago

Coming from that part of the world, I'm relatively certain the elimination of malaria was the cause.

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

The cartels should just build nukes in Mexico and pump desalinated water north. Win-win.

downvotetruth• 2 years ago

The foreign legion should just build nukes in France and transfer electricity east across the Maginot Line.

boxed4• 2 years ago

I mean.. the foreign legion didn't build them, but that's already a thing?

Bjorkbat• 2 years ago

Kind of reminds me of an idle thought I have every now and then. Between the sheer difficulty of establishing any kind of foothold on Mars, and the vast amount of uninhabited land, it’s curious that more thought hasn’t been given into the much easier task of making the empty parts of the planet more bearable.

Alas, the list of reasons to live in the Great Plains is very short, which is also why I’m kind of skeptical of terraforming the American West. You can make existing major cities more livable, sure, but don’t expect a surge of people moving to Montana or Wyoming.

By contrast, Los Angeles and Miami have ocean access. Terraforming coastline is a no-brainer.

xnx• 2 years ago

Colonizing Mars is a joke. Earth was more habitable the day after the asteroid hit that Mars is now.

kbutler2• 2 years ago

More people (net, absolute numbers and percentages) move to Montana or Wyoming than California, Oregon, and Washington combined.

Net migration to each of those coastal states is actually negative, so the "combined" is a bit of a red herring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Sabinus• 2 years ago

Modern desal uses chemicals in the water to help prevent mineral buildup within the plant, and these chemicals are present in the effluent. I wonder if the author has accounted for this pollution?

navi0• 2 years ago

Or the nanoplastics that commercial RO filters appear to create [0]?

[0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300582121

aporetics• 2 years ago

Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?

jackyinger• 2 years ago

Truly, even if we were to disregard the ecological and social impacts on existing inhabitants, the energy required would be extreme. And thankfully that alone is enough to make this simply a fantasy.

I actually quite like the arid west, if anything we should be letting it return to aridity as current water use (I.e. rerouting a lot of the Colorado River to California) is well known to be on shaky ground at the least. If you don’t like arid areas move somewhere else.

boxed4• 2 years ago

One mans hubris, another mans hope for a better future.

To put this proposed project into context: humans already did something similar in scale in what is now the Amazon. We accidentally rewilded the entire area via plagues. The Sahara is also a pretty new thing, and something we could reverse.

We've long past the point of playing god or not. We now only have two options:

1. playing an incompetent god, pretending that our actions are not our fault

2. playing a competent god, taking responsibility and trying to do better

kibwen9• 2 years ago

Surely you acknowledge that "taking responsibility and trying to do better" means learning from our past mistakes and not repeating them? The project in the OP is motivated by vanity, not necessity.

seadan8315• 2 years ago

The Amazon is losing forested area, is nearly carbon positive, and was previously sparsely populated (it being a jungle and all). I have trouble squaring this understanding with the idea it was recently rewilded.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

Why? Honestly, why? There's so much uninhabited land out that isn't uninhabitable, which is already more land than we'll ever need for the sake of putting human habitats on. Go move to the great lakes if you want a combination of remote wilderness and an infinite supply of free fresh water.

throw4950sh06• 2 years ago

Where?

runako2• 2 years ago

We’re missing 300 million Americans

I love this idea, and would be comfortable pushing the number even higher. The cool part about the US is it's relatively unpopulated as compared to European countries.

We could probably fit another 200 million or so people in the eastern half of the country, just by bringing it to the level of density of, say, the UK. If we were willing to live as densely as the Dutch, perhaps we could add 300 million in the eastern half.

akamaka• 2 years ago

Your proposal is fairly modest compared to some of the ideas out there.

In his wildly enthusiastic 1860 book The Central Gold Region, William Gilpin claimed that the Mississipi Basin could support at population of 1.2 billion people, and was destined to become the “world’s amphitheatre”, with all of the world’s trade running through it in a grand “Asiatic and European Railway”.

germinalphrase• 2 years ago

How optimistic to assume we would invest in trains.

akira25012• 2 years ago

of, say, the UK.

of, say, any small island. These dynamics are unnatural modes of compensation for other inconveniences.

as densely as the Dutch

or, say, people who live under the level of the sea itself.

runako2• 2 years ago

any small island
people who live under the level of the sea itself

Your responses read as facetious. I chose two relatively large & wealthy European countries for comparison. But the US ranks 186/249 for population density; there is a lot of room for increased density if it is desired.

If you don't like those, here are some alternate compares you can sub into my post if it helps you engage with the concept:

- Belgium

- India

- China

- Vietnam

- Germany

- Italy

- South Korea

- Nigeria

- Spain

If the US were as dense as the EU, there would be ~1 billion Americans now.

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

I love Casey's stuff - just incredibly detailed, ambitious and reminds you of what the country used to do when it set its mind to it. His new company is across the street where they built the SR-71 which is fitting.

akira25012• 2 years ago

just incredibly detailed

Other than forgetting that literal drilled wells exist.

boxed4• 2 years ago

Ground water is a very limited commodity, one which we are exploiting beyond sustainability. You are just plain wrong here.

skybrian3• 2 years ago

It's always an interesting read, but he should hire someone to fix his website. (For example, when I first looked at it, all the pictures were missing.)

doug_durham4• 2 years ago

Casey is a person that is disconnected from reality. There is a reason that Nevada hasn't been terraformed. It isn't regulations or lack of will. It's physics. He would be better off if he spent more time building things and less time in his spreadsheets. Please read "Cadillac Desert" if you want to have more context.

anon848736286• 2 years ago

The article refers to "Cadillac Desert" but seems to miss the part about how it was all a bad idea in the end.

jarebear6expepj• 2 years ago

Won’t somebody please think of the sage grouse?

Animats3• 2 years ago

Didn't we have the super-cheap solar powered desalinization guy on HN about two months ago?

Each year, MIT announces they solved solar desalination:

- 2021 [1]

- 2022 [2]

- 2023 [3]

- 2024 [4]

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/passive-solar-powered-water-desali...

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-desalination-system-inexpens...

[3] https://news.mit.edu/2023/desalination-system-could-produce-...

[4] https://news.mit.edu/2024/solar-powered-desalination-system-...

Spivak• 2 years ago

Are you not seeing the progress in the articles? It went from a lab proof-of-concept to a working prototype producing in real life 5000 liters/day passively. That's impressive as hell.

Animats3• 2 years ago

2021-2023 is one approach, and 2024 is something else entirely. The 2024 thing is brackish groundwater cleanup.

_fs• 2 years ago

Colorado river averages 500,000 liters a second, and we use every drop of it. Scaling up from 0.055 liters per second is going to be expensive

fulafel• 2 years ago

This raises questions.

What is the this desalination cost competing against, what's the alternative cost of importing water by tanker or pipeline?

Also, why do you want batteries, instead of just running the osmosis when there is sunlight? Maybe the osmosis equipment is expensive enough that it pays off to keep it 100% occupied with batteries?

baking2• 2 years ago

The numbers in the OP show that the RO equipment is by far the largest cost so you need to maximize its utilization. The energy is used to pump water through the RO at high pressure so another alternative would be to use solar to pump water uphill so you could run the RO at night. The design using batteries is easier to price.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

There are energy companies like Quidnet that are commercializing geopressure storage, where water is pumped underground at pressure, then recovered and the energy extracted. This would be an ideal system to combine with solar and RO.

https://www.quidnetenergy.com/

ZeroGravitas• 2 years ago

There was some recent work on cheaper desalination based on cheap intermittent solar (the common reverse osmosis approach apparently doesn't work well with intermittency) that mirrors the blog writer's approach to efuels, so surprised he didn't mention it.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/01/novel-pv-driven-desal...

However, I was under the impression that for the US it's mostly a market failure and farmers are intentionally wasting scandalous amounts of water because they'd lose their water rights if they used the countries resources optimally.

retrac• 2 years ago

Reminds me of one of the big open secrets of North America: northern Ontario and northwestern Quebec are fertile. There is a 250,000 sq. km clay belt that spans almost from Winnipeg to Ottawa. The growing season is short but sufficient for grains and beans and such.

It's the opposite problem. Drainage is poor and there is too much rain at the wrong time, so the land needs heavy drainage. Also it's miserably cold in winter, and it's far, far from the cities. The government tried settling it but most of them moved back south. Less than 5% of the area is under till or pasture today. The whole thing could be turned into a potato belt on the scale of the Prairies. If we could find anyone willing to live there. Truth is there are other places better suited.

whiplash451• 2 years ago

Anyone… or robots?

ben_w• 2 years ago

Depends on what counts as a robot and how far you want to take them.

In the extreme case, we can do aeroponics in greenhouses anywhere on the planet. Or another planet. Or space stations.

But how much does it cost compared to open-air in soil?

fifilura2• 2 years ago

Att 55 degrees latitude is is comparably pretty far south in Scandinavian terms, like Denmark. And we do grow crops in Sweden.

Inland climate in Canada and (for Scandinavia) the Gulf Stream could make the difference. Although I imagine the Hudson bay should give it more of seaside climate?

ovis• 2 years ago

From a map I found[0], it looks like Sweden has an average annual temperature of around +5⁰C, and northern Ontario and Quebec are closer to -5⁰C?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Annual_A...

jseutter• 2 years ago

I just looked up Cochrane ON because I hadn't heard of it before and yeah, it seems a bit of a mystery to me why it isn't more settled. I live around Edmonton where farming is a major industry, and just for comparison:

Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23

Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days

Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days

Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm

Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.

If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.

cgh• 2 years ago

No, northern Canada is just really cold. The Gulf Stream makes a difference in Europe in general, not just the seaside.

Eg, Lillehammer, Norway is around the same latitude as Whitehorse, Canada but the average December high/low is a balmy -3°/°-8 compared to -10°/-18°. And Bergen is at the same latitude as those places but is even warmer, with a climate similar to Vancouver! That always amazes me.

As far as Hudson’s Bay being “seaside”, Churchill, Manitoba is on the southwest shore and is a great place to go and see polar bears.

If climate change does end up affecting the Gulf Stream, northern Europe is in for a tremendous cold shock.

blahedo• 2 years ago

Also, generally, the Great Lakes region. I've been thinking for decades now that when the big water fights get underway in the Southwest, the late-21st century megalopoleis of North America are going to be Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Detroit... between "access to fresh water" and "cold in winter, but rarely subjected to catastrophic weather", the whole region is vastly better suited to large-scale settlement than, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas.

lmaoguy• 2 years ago

No.

You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.

chewbacha3• 2 years ago

Yuck, this would destroy the ecology of the area and require an insane amount of energy. If water is scarce, the most efficient thing to do is move the humans.

rbanffy2• 2 years ago

The article mentions solar desalination.

sizzzzlerz2• 2 years ago

How often has mankind attempted to alter the landscape to suit his purposes and found that, instead of improving it, it is destroyed instead. Far better is learn to live in the conditions as they are and adapt the techniques to utilize the natural resources. In some cases, maybe even that simply isn't possible so we just don't live there.

cle7• 2 years ago

Humans altering the landscape enables civilization. Personally I'm more biased towards that than ecological conservatism.

We should maintain a balance of course. I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.

uoaei2• 2 years ago

The ecosystems are where we live, what you say makes basically zero sense.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

I suppose the real problem here is agreeing on what "balance" means.

Yet I think we can hopefully all agree that expending unbelievable quantities of energy in order to desalinate seawater and pump it uphill a thousand miles in order to turn a desert canyon into a lake for absolutely no good reason whatsoever does not qualify as "balance".

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

To me things are in balance if they're long term sustainable.

petesergeant3• 2 years ago

Virtually all of Europe used to just be forest. Large swathes of East England used to be uninhabitable swamp, much of the Netherlands used to be underwater.

DubiousPusher4• 2 years ago

If you think this is a convincing counterpoint, I assure you it is not.

throw_pm23• 2 years ago

Partly proves the point of the OP: cutting out the forests and draining the swamps led to soil erosion, massive floods, and loss of biodiversity.

I'm not saying it had no reason or benefit, obviously it was for economic reasons (extra land for agriculture and human settlements), just that it is not something that should "obviously" be done.

baxtr• 2 years ago

Landscapes are altered by all life forms, including plants, animals and believe it or not humans.

We are part of the ecosystem. We shape it too.

camgunz2• 2 years ago

There's a difference between clearing a few trees for a cabin vs desalinating and pumping millions of gallons of water and transforming the ecology of a state.

relaxing2• 2 years ago

As plants animals evolved over millions of years to change their landscape, the rest of nature evolved to follow suit.

Not so when humans drastically alter the environment in short periods.

uoaei2• 2 years ago

Ah, the "private citizens owning nukes is covered under the 2nd Amendment" take.

Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.

7speter• 2 years ago

Pretty often. The article's title is a bit misleading to it's own detriment; "terraforming" brings to mind images of using massive furnaces to burn mass to release CO2 on a barren planet. What the author of this article is proposing is pretty routine relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada. I'm not a geology expert so I don't know the viability of this proposal, but it seems the author is proposing to bring flow back to rivers that have dried up at some point in the past.

I took enough geology in college to understand that humans have been shifting riverflows since at least the Ancient Egyptians (with the Nile river), and Los Angeles' vitality is a product of artificial waterflow shift (the movie Chinatown touches on this at least tangentially). If I'm not mistaken, even Hoover Dam diverts a significant amount of water that once flowed elsewhere, though many environmentalists would tell you today that dams are horribly harmful to local ecosystems.

My guess is that with climate change causing significant changes to multiple regions via weather and climate, causing massive upheavals for large swaths of populations, it might be in America's interest to consider where it could create new population centers again by shifting waterflow.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

relative to human societal needs, which is shifting the flow of bodies of water to get water to Nevada

This is not a societal need. If you want access to fresh water, do not choose to live in a desert.

dghlsakjg• 2 years ago

The immediate counterargument is that we already tried pumping water into a desert basin so we know perfectly well what will happen. You end up with the Salton Sea. A notoriously toxic and unpleasant body of water. Irrigating water across a small area is one thing, what this article proposes is a whole other thing.

Lakes that have no outflow, like the Salton Sea, and the Great Salt Lake, end up being collectors for pollutants.They also aren't exactly major attractants for population. Most of the great salt lake shoreline is uninhabited, and most of the development on the East side hugs the mountains rather than the lake. Both lakes have pretty serious issues regarding pollution that will need to be solved. I'm not sure why we would ever want to make another one of those.

There are plenty of places in North America that have plenty of room and resources for people. Coastal sections of the Pacific Northwest are pretty empty still despite ideal climate, water, arable land, etc...

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

Probably 99% of us are alive because our ancestors altered the landscape to provide food and shelter.

Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, but on balance it's a great, even essential thing.

jvanderbot2• 2 years ago

Yes don't get me started on this path. Draining marshes, improving soil, air conditioning and heat, levelling grades, dredging rivers.

All capital and labor intensive.

We can manage without destruction and it's enabled exponential population and economic growth in a virtuous cycle.

sizzzzlerz2• 2 years ago

Don’t misinterpret what I wrote to think we should leave it alone! Obviously, we’ve been doing it for millennia but we’ve only had the tools and machinery to massively change things for 200 years, or so. A farmer digging ditches to route water to his fields using a shovel, plow, and some mules is hardly equivalent to something like Three Gorges dam, the LA aquaduct, or the deforestation of the Amazon basin on a massive scale.

xhkkffbf2• 2 years ago

There are a number of interesting videos on YouTube about people who are adding swales and rock dams to their western land to slow down the departure of rain water. Apparently just these extra terraforming can be enough to turn barren land into a green and lush forest.

Has anyone tried this on their own land? I'm tempted to try it.

doug_durham4• 2 years ago

That's fantasy. If you don't live in the West it's difficult to appreciate that there simply is no water. No amount of of "swales" or rock dams change the fact that water doesn't fall from the sky in sufficient amounts to create a "lush green forest". Also every drop of water that hits the ground has been accounted for long ago and is part of some water pact. If you create a dam upstream you are guaranteed to get a visit from the water rights holders.

carapace2• 2 years ago

Untouched and eighty years old, it was supposed to have been built by men with carts and horses during the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.
The soil was springy and spongy when you walked on it. Like an uncompacted garden bed it was full of mulch captured by rain water. Eighty years of humus was deposited here during flash floods, without any help from mankind.
The trees were all self seeded.
Geoff plunged his hands into the soil and went down 8 inches of moist, black, rich, composted soil. It was still damp.

https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasi...

pegas12• 2 years ago

Actually, most of these regions have rain. (The Atacama does not!) And you do not need lush green forests right away, prairie grasses are a good start. Well-applied rain retention measures do work.

xhkkffbf2• 2 years ago

That was what I thought too. But there are videos from people who are doing it successfully in the American west -- and in the edge areas around the Sahara.

It's worth poking around YouTube to see just what people are saying they've achieved. It changed my mind.

DubiousPusher4• 2 years ago

As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.

Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL

anon848736286• 2 years ago

People assume deserts are lifeless and useless, as opposed to the intricate thriving ecosystems they actually are.

This is something "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't" has been great at showing.

dave3332• 2 years ago

There are bad examples of land use like agricultural monoculture and suburban lawns but if you compromise with nature it can be a thriving ecosystem albeit one designed to benefit humans.

https://youtu.be/wd-b_C7a_es?si=lLAPl4Bcii62g3Cm

johnohara• 2 years ago

Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input.

Fortunately, it takes no energy at all from inside the United States to manufacture solar panels in, you know, some place, over there, somewhere, that I have trouble pronouncing.

Doesn't matter. I just order them online and they magically show up on my doorstep.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

The hardest part with all of these things isn’t the technology. Usually it’s the coordination. High loss aversion among certain groups causes a reflexive resistance to any large scale project. Memetic mimicry has them reach the same result without explicit coordination.

Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward.

It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters.

America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready.

Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one).

We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.

doug_durham4• 2 years ago

Please do more research since it seems you are interested in this. The reason we haven't terraformed Nevada isn't lack of will, or coordination. It's physics and economics. If the technologies listed by the author existed they would be being exploited extensively today. Lack of water is too much of an issue. Billions if not trillions of dollars would flow to it, and any small regulatory issues would be knocked down instantly. This entire article is fantasy.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

Everything could be better.

There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.

devin• 2 years ago

As I understand it, desalination produces brine, and that needs to be disposed of. Where does all of that go?

emtel• 2 years ago

Aside from fossil water, all of our fresh water comes from desalinated sea water, transported inland by clouds - which shows that there is no brine problem as long as the brine is dispersed widely enough in the sea. “How widely” is enough is something I wish OP discussed.

carapace2• 2 years ago

I thought this was a good idea too but then a scientist pointed out that those areas radiate heat into space at night and the last thing we want right now is less of that.

It's a little like a bald person putting on a wool hat: great if you're cold, but counter-productive if you're already too hot.

- - - -

In the next twenty years we will build as much city as we have so far. In other words in the next twenty years the amount of urban area will double. We've gotta design and build these new cities to be in harmony with the global ecosystem that maintains life support for everybody.

"Building cities with ecological harmony" | Dror Benshetrit | TEDxAmazônia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OrRCGY_lkk

iluvcommunism• 2 years ago

I’d like to see the Colorado river less used. The author has a lot of good ideas.

hn_throwaway_994• 2 years ago

The great question is why.

That is, if we build a ton of solar and storage capacity, wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure, rather than going into a giant desalinization project? I'm not arguing that what TFA proposes is technically impossible, I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective. For all the advancements the world has made in renewable energy, we still pump out a record (or near record) amount of greenhouse gases every year: https://ourworldindata.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions

Log_out_• 2 years ago

? Its more a pump it already desalinated from up north rowards the south?

reducesuffering2• 2 years ago

wouldn't it actually make a ton more sense to use that to decarbonize the rest of our energy infrastructure

Some portion of electricity is lost in transmission the longer the distances no? At some point it makes more sense for solar panels in San Diego to desalinize right next to them then try to get that energy to Maine.

hn_throwaway_994• 2 years ago

High voltage transmission lines are remarkably efficient, with losses of 2-3% per 1000km. And while I assume you were using hyperbole, nobody needs to get power from San Diego to Maine in the first place.

oceanplexian3• 2 years ago

It makes a lot of sense for the same reason California is the most productive agricultural region in the world. The arid climate is optimal for consistently growing crops with low risk of disease year-round. Instead of having to import winter crops from overseas we could instead grow them in Arizona, and transport them on rail across the United States vs. importing them on ships from around the world. That also would have a huge impact on greenhouse emissions, and farmland really does "Terraform" the desert and make it more livable by lowering temperatures and helping to keep down dust.

hn_throwaway_994• 2 years ago

I obviously have no idea how the math works out in detail, but I'd be pretty surprised if the economics of this were feasible. That is, spend a ton of money (and energy) to terraform sizable swaths of the Arizona desert just to avoid transporting in crops from Mexico right across the boarder? I'd be skeptical that even a back-of-the-napkin estimate would consider this possible. Relevant example: there are a bunch of rice farmers near Houston that are dependent on the Colorado River for irrigation (note, this is the Colorado River in Texas that runs through downtown Austin - completely different river from the Colorado River that goes through the Hoover Dam and supplies a ton of the Western US with water). Given how we've been getting drier over the past decades, the rice farmers are now frequently cut off from water because that water is deemed more important for city dwellers upstream where the economic return on that water usage is much greater.

If we can't even get enough water to these rice farmers (where it's actually relatively swampy, and note TX is a leader in renewable energy generation in the US), it seems like a silly pipe dream to talk about growing kale in the Arizona desert.

photonthug3• 2 years ago

I'm just arguing that it makes 0 sense from an economic or societal perspective

Arguments like this might be true, but will always feel incomplete if you don’t explain why the situation now is so different from the 1930s. The Hoover dam enabling the city of Las Vegas, and the new deal employing millions to drag the US out of the depression is usually regarded as a success story. There must have been status quo naysayers at the time too, but they look wrongheaded today.

Environmental arguments about carbon or greenhouse gases add color but also can’t make the case completely. Before you can really argue against anything new on the basis of carbon, you kind of need to show that not doing the thing is actually significantly improving things and also that this is low hanging fruit compared to, say, enforcing existing regulations that companies or countries are ignoring.

jes5199• 2 years ago

solar has a seasonal cost curve such that if we build enough to displace fossil fuels in the winter, then during the summertime we’ll have more energy than we know what to do with - in fact, we already have to “curtail” energy production in the summer. after we charge all our batteries, what are we going to do with the summer surplus? using it for desalination sounds good to me

baking2• 2 years ago

So if I build a plant today to produce water at 22 cents per cubic meter, somebody could come along next year and build another plant that produces water for 15 cents and put me out of business. Then the year after that, another plant produces water for 10 cents, etc. You need 20-year contracts to sell water at a fixed price to make this work.

dimal• 2 years ago

Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.

doug_durham4• 2 years ago

At first I thought that this was a satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Cadillac Desert" but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can build a space habitat at L5 by 1995".

There is a lot of money to be made in water. If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.

Finally the author talks about pumping water up hill as though it is a trivial thing. 20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today. The author conveniently side steps the issue of building out the vast electrical grid needed just to pump the water. What was this even posted to hacker news?

seizethecheese• 2 years ago

What was this even posted to hacker news?

This involves hacking geography, as such it is quite interesting for the general hacker reader.

rnrn2• 2 years ago

20% of all of the electricity generated in California goes to pumping water today.

Hi, this is wrong. The 20% figure includes all electricity for water-related uses, not just pumping. Most of that (80-90%) is heating and other end uses, not pumping and transport.

boringg2• 2 years ago

It is true that end-use heating takes a lions share of the energy from the water-energy nexus in California.

That said conveyance and pumping water over the Tehachapi takes a pretty impressive workload. Water is lifted 1,926 feet by fourteen 80,000 horsepower pumps.

OP comment is that the article is flippant on pumping water. OP is correct that they shouldn't be and it is energy intensive.

Correct quote is "Water conveyance, treatment, delivery, heating, and sewage treatment account for about 20% of California's electricity and 30% of natural gas use."

oceanplexian3• 2 years ago

If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale.

It is being done at scale in places like Israel. It doesn't even need base load power, you could run it with the infinite amount of cheap solar energy available in the Southwest. The only reason it isn't being done is places like California is entirely regulatory. In fact Arizona might get there first, there has been recent progress between them and Mexico to do desalination in the Sea of Cortez, which is only 60 miles from the Arizona boarder.

anon848736286• 2 years ago

Sounds like a great way to destroy one of the most diverse and unique marine ecosystems on the planet, thanks to the brine waste.

skybrian3• 2 years ago

According to the article, intermittent operation is assuming new desalinization technology that needs to be invented:

Current RO plants cost more like $2000/kW, so they’re both financially and technically unsuited to intermittent operation, which fatigues their membranes. Thermal desalination could achieve radically lower cost, albeit at lower energy efficiencies, so there’s work to be done here designing new, low cost desalination machines that fully exploit the upside of cheap solar PV.

And that’s largely the point of the article. It’s not being done yet, but he thinks it’s technically feasible and could be a game-changer. Big if true.

It’s not something we should plan on until the technology is further developed, but seems like worthwhile R&D to fund.

teucris• 2 years ago

This post is set in a beautiful, liminal place between fantasy and reality. Could we actually do all of this? Probably not. But we don’t think about the specifics of things like this enough. It challenges us to think about ideas like this in ways more practical problems cannot.

I read somewhere that we dream as a way for our brains, as complex predictive analytical machines, from overfitting. This kind of post feels the same, but for our collective intelligence.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

Could we actually do all of this? Probably not.

It's the opposite. We could, probably, do all of this, given colossal will, stupefying investment, and an infinite appetite for destruction. The trick here is to exercise the wisdom to know that we should not do this, despite there being, strictly speaking, no technical reason why we could not. It's like an intrusive thought writ large: just because you have the opportunity to jump off the lip of the Grand Canyon and plunge to your death, does not mean that you should.

Like, come on y'all: at least eye-popping megaprojects like the Panama Canal were economically and politically motivated. We don't need Lake Nevada.

jazzyjackson• 2 years ago

That's a neat way to look at it. I've always thought of dreams as a kind of garbage collection where we produce simulated situations to test whether new information will help us or if it's irrelevant to us, and throw things out that we won't need to remember. I read that one reason we can kind of remember our dreams when we first wake up but can't 5 minutes later is because our brain has some method of forcing our interpretation of what we see into some kind of reasonable cohesion according to what we consider to be physically possible or likely - this region is inactive in our sleep so like you say, we can play in scenarios free from the constraint of what is known to be possible

When we wake up, those impossible and unlikely scenarios in our dreams are still interpretable for a few minutes, but as we fully wake up we're just totally blocked from recalling that memory because what happened defies cohesive reality

Anyway, I agree that not everything needs to fit into a "serious proposal | speculative fiction" dichotomy

ta_1138• 2 years ago

Go read Cadillac Desert: It's precisely about all the efforts, right between fantasy and reality, that have put is in the hole we are today. From straight out wishful thinking to really expensive investments that haven't ever come remotely close to paying for themselves. There's entire sections covering how we have spend very large amounts of money doing water works that just go to feed very low productivity farms. We dreamed, built, and just wasted money.

It's true that as solar gets cheaper, more parts of the world become livable. Byt why should we occupy more of the US with very expensive, low productivity suburbs? Is there no opportunity costs in piling more people into Phoenix?

But no, it's just more poetic to just spend billions upon billions to make the property of people living in a desert more valuable.

TastyDucks• 2 years ago

For those who are interested in the concept of dreaming as a mechanism for preventing overfitting (insofar as such a term may be applied to biological processes), I myself first encountered the concept in this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560

rgblambda• 2 years ago

If desalination was cost effective it would be being done today at scale

An official from Irish Water (national water management agency) was being interviewed a while ago explaining that even if desalination was cost effective it has to be cut with fresh water at a ratio of 2:1 (I may be misremembering the exact ratio) because fully desalinated water leeches metal from the pipes.

elcritch• 2 years ago

It’s possible to treat high purity water other ways. Essentially just adding in some minerals.

hughesjj2• 2 years ago

Our of curiosity, is there any way to line the pipes with PVC or similar? Like a large scale version of those "pipe fixers" they pump up with air/water that lines existing pipes and hardens in place?

I could see problems with that, and of course cost is always one of the biggest, possibly health too, it's just weird to me that we don't seem to have a solution for this

wbl• 2 years ago

A sacrificial metal bed could work as a solution.

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

Just have some of the seawater bypass the desalination and mix it in.

idiotsecant• 2 years ago

Oh no, how could we ever manage the impossible technique of dissolving minerals back into water?? Truly, this technology is doomed.

mrthrowaway999• 2 years ago

At first, I thought this was satire, but then the joke never landed. The author cites "Modern Physics, 8th ed." but then ignores everything in the book. This posting is fantasy in the same vein as "we can have personal jetpacks for everyone by 1995."

There is a lot of money to be made in air travel. If commercial flights were cost-effective, they would be operating today at scale. It isn't a regulatory issue; it's strictly economics. If someone could demonstrate the technology the author describes, indefinite amounts of money would flow to them. It hasn't happened. It's not happening anywhere in the world.

Finally, the author talks about building massive fleets of airplanes as though it is a trivial thing. A significant portion of global fuel consumption goes to aviation today. The author conveniently sidesteps the issue of producing enough fuel and managing the environmental impact just to keep these planes in the air. Why was this even posted to Hacker News?

mulmen2• 2 years ago

The entire body of technological progress stands as a counter-argument to “if it was possible someone would be doing it”. Things are only impossible until they aren’t.

hn_throwaway_994• 2 years ago

And the "until the aren't" part importantly involves a feasible plan to actually get there.

This article is just an art project. There are tons of easily identified questions that would need to be answered to make a project like this feasible. The author conveniently answers none of them because it would show how unrealistic this whole thing would be.

x3n0ph3n3• 2 years ago

It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics.

I guess you haven't heard about the desalination plant proposed in Huntington Beach. [1]

In May 2022, the commissioners of the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the plan in agreement with the staff report that recommended denying approval of the project.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Beach_Desalination_...

fhars• 2 years ago

It is posted for the same reason people sometimes post about Atlantropa:https://hn.algolia.com/?q=atlantropa

Dig1t• 2 years ago

Israel gets most of its water from desalination.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_...

California is discussing rationing water.

Nevada is a dry empty expanse, Arizona is pulling the dregs out of their aquifer.

Cheap energy + desalination is the answer, but we need more energy. Nuclear and other renewables are the obvious answer.

tolciho2• 2 years ago

The answer? Another answer is that the desert population collapses, possibly due to the breakdown of too complicated infrastructure and troublesome hand-offs of political power, factors one may observe in the decline of various other past civilizations. But one must not get too salty when talking about such places as the fertile crescent.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

It isn't a regulatory issue, it is strictly economics

We pillage our natural water sheds so the Central Valley can grow almonds. The underpricing of water is absolutely a regulatory issue.

nradov3• 2 years ago

The bigger water waste problem now isn't almonds but alfalfa grown for export to places like Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately this isn't just a regulatory issue; we can't fix it with improved regulations. At the core it's primarily a property rights issue. Many property owners are legally entitled to a certain quantity of water by titles that in some cases go back over a century. The government can't legally just take those away without paying compensation, which would be tremendously expensive.

jonstewart• 2 years ago

I don’t know what else to expect from a scientist who previously worked at can’t-possibly-work-and-didn’t HyperLoop.

lumost• 2 years ago

The article does make an interesting point on our energy usage. As an industrial society - we hit the limits of scaling energy output sometime in the 70s. With the majority of gains coming from improved efficiency as well as incremental expansion since then.

Conceivably, if solar continues its price trajectory - we could see a world where new large scale projects are started.

ctoth• 2 years ago

Hate to be glib, but this "if it were possible, someone would've done it" thinking is exactly why we're stuck. Your reasons sound smart. Well-reasoned. Totally rational. And they're missing something fundamental.

Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.

You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.

Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.

Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.

boringg2• 2 years ago

I think you underestimate how much larger of a task terraforming the USA west is then say building a rail network through the US (which was an impressive feat) or building hoover dam(also impressive). Not only that the issue with terraforming the West is you are pulling sooo many resources away from productive uses into low value uses.

The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity.

Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas.

Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them.

Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.

ikiris• 2 years ago

This can be summed up with “physics isn’t real, we just need some American ingenuity.” Very similar to the argument given by the guy who ignored all engineers and made his own submersible out of carbon fiber.

SiempreViernes• 2 years ago

Why don't you apply that "can do" spirit to describin how we limit climate change within this decade? That would be more helpful for everyone.

narrator• 2 years ago

The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb were published in the early 1970s. These books convinced many developed world politicians to put a break on almost all large scale infrastructure projects. Slowly the ideas of degrowth and depopulation have been pushed through many areas of society and culture.

One small exception, the sudden U-turn on nuclear power last month after 40 years of not building a nuke plant was only made possible by the dire need to beat China in the AI military race. Little of that power will go to civilian use and will be used to power massive data centers.

The failure to build hi-speed rail in the United States is a huge contrast to the non-stop obsession with climate change legislation, administrative agency activities and diplomacy that go on. It's so boring that nobody reports on it, but since I follow the energy sector I get the news alerts and there are non-stop climate negotiations, policy making and legislative pushes and so forth to do everything possible to implement the Limits to Growth and Net Zero 2050 agenda. Voters rank it fairly low on their list of issues they are concerned about though.

If you want to get really dark, there's this guy who's been popular in left of center intellectual publications pushing "Degrowth Communism" which is like communism but there is no prosperity for workers, just endless lowered standards of living to save the planet.

throwaway4220• 2 years ago

I feel your sentiment for sure but this is unfair criticism of the top post. Bold claims need proof.

To me it harkens back to the whole hyperloop thing which was such a disappointment that I am very skeptical of details. Doesn’t mean it’s not possible of course!

chrisbrandow• 2 years ago

It is quite literally a regulatory issue. Orange County just recently shut down a permit for a significant desal plant with a ton of planning. Very frustrating.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

The Middle East has been doing it for atleast 4 decades. Kuwait has run exclusively on desalinated water for 50+ years. The reason we don’t have a lot of of them in places like California is the same reason we don’t have a lot of big new bridges or new high-speed rail lines or new underground tunnels. Building big things in America is just hard now there’s a lot of regulation, labor is expensive and we just don’t do it as much.

nyrikki2• 2 years ago

I don't know if invoking the Salton Sea, which is probably the canonical example of the risks of creating endorheic lakes by introducing water into an endorheic basin is really a good argument.

The Great Basin is North America's largest endorheic basin, and the one large natural endorheic lake, the Great Salt Lake is currently drying up.

Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..

This also ignores other parts or hand waves away difficult problems. Brine from continental scale desalination as hazardous waist can be understood by the challenging problems with data center scale problems as an example.

Also water from Lake Meed and Powell would require serious treatment to move anywhere due to Quagga muscles etc.

Also large amounts of currently productive farmland are already at risk due to the Colorado being oversubscribed and declining aquifers.

Heck, just stopping at the dry lake bed at Xyyzyy would show the issue with trying to use the Mojave river.

While I am glad the author had fun with this thought experiment, the idea is simply not realistic in its current form.

rnrn2• 2 years ago

Those of us who live down wind of it are already suffering the effects of it drying, and if it continues to dry. Millions will be displaced due to the health effects of Arsenic in the dust etc..

It sounds like you agree with the author that refilling the salton sea and the great salt lake would be a big win… I don’t understand this line as a counterargument.

nyrikki2• 2 years ago

Refilling the salt lake should be a goal to protect existing populations, that is not the same as creating new population centers that we have even greater challenges.

Unfortunately curbing growth and shifting agriculture needs to other locations is probably the only practical way.

The Bear River divide is next to the Green River drainage, as that is already in a state of overallocation to support SW desert populations, that isn't practical.

Pumping water into death valley wouldn't be the way to get water into the the Salt Lake either, and would still have to deal with disposing of the brine in scales gar larger than any municipal supply.

kibwen9• 2 years ago

Why should the rest of us subsidize the people who want to live in a place that is so inimical to human life?

downrightmike• 2 years ago

The only thing I can think of that might be a net plus for the west if if we start pumping water from the ocean to the Salton and allowing that to evaporate and creating more greenery where it creates rain shadows.

einpoklum• 2 years ago

Why don't you guys (= US'ers) start by not spilling that much crude oil and toxins into your existing potable water sources? :-(

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

I think that problem is greatly exaggerated by those with certain motivations.

seadan8315• 2 years ago

It is not really.. there is massive polutionnof waterways. Iowa is one off the worst states for nitrogen pollution. In that state "just 24% of stream segments and 30% of lakes that were sampled were deemed healthy." [1]

I was traveling through iowa recently. There were ducks floating face down dead in polluted waterways. Algae so thick it looks like you could walk on it. It is quite bad..

[1] https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2024/03/15/more-than-half-of...

anon848736286• 2 years ago

I guess one man's economic miracle is another man's environmental disaster.

The western water projects were an engineering marvel, but short sighted. And Florida? Gee, how long can it stand against the rising seas?

oceanplexian3• 2 years ago

They weren't short sighted, they expected we would continue and keep improving the infrastructure. We built some utterly incredible infrastructure in the past (Bridges, highways, dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, etc.) and then people stopped dreaming and stopped building.

As a result we have been living on the infrastructure that our parents and grandparents built while supporting 10x the population. Which is incredible but at some point something has to give.

anon848736286• 2 years ago

They didn't expect us to build a solution to undo destruction of the Owen's valley or the Colorado river delta.

Maybe it hasn't continued because that type of infrastructure reached a local maximum.

If you want dreams, how about reshaping the California Central valley as an enormous management intensive agroforestry system that uses highly diverse and resilient native species to meet human calorie needs.

This isn't an engineering challenge, it's a social, cultural, and political one.

closetkantian• 2 years ago

If only Saudi Arabia had spent their money on this stuff instead of NEOM.

zft• 2 years ago

great opportunity for hashicorp

composter• 2 years ago

If the Casey's interest is in terraforming the American West to support substantial population growth, I would start with the Columbia River Basin and identify the bottlenecks to growth there.

The Columbia River drainage basin is larger than the Great Basin (670k km2 [1] vs 541 km2 [3]), it's the 4th largest river in the US by flow [1], and there are already existing megaprojects like the Columbia Basin Project [2] that have unmet potential.

If the growth Casey envisions isn't happening and/or won't happen with the easy access to substantial volumes fresh water of the Columbia River then it's very unlikely to occur in the scenario they envision with desal + pumping water into the Great Basin.

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Basin_Project - [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin

prpl2• 2 years ago

Yeah this is the place to do it. Much less competition with established places.

I think Bend and Boise are likely to experience rapid expansion in the next 20 years on the west coast, especially as winters grow milder.

prpl2• 2 years ago

Probably the place that makes the most sense would be Idaho/Oregon/Washington. The weather is relatively moderate (compared to the midwest), more water available nearby.

The weather is a bit nicer in Utah/Colorado/New Mexico - especially the lower elevations, but it’s too reliant on the Colorado/Rio Grande IMO, and has to compete with southern California and Arizona/Vegas and Texas. Western Montana is also nice but may be a bit too snowy in the winter until climate change takes hold.

0xbadcafebee2• 2 years ago

It is terrifying to me that people like this author exist and are serious. Even more terrifying is the possibility that one day, someone in power will read this and think, hey, that's a good idea.

(also terrifying: who is upvoting blogs like this??? is there really a vast underground of people in favor of destruction of the [remaining] environment so we can add a trillion more acres of concrete strip-malls and Wal-Marts?)

pegas12• 2 years ago

Before we try to bring water to a desert, we should stop turning livable places into deserts. If you take a ride on the I-20 or I-30, you will see a lot of harmful engineering and inconsiderate land use, both causing regions will lose the rain. You see, the annual average total rain is not given, it can change with the land use and rain handling. Gorchkov and Makarieva put it in good math and named one of these processes a biotic pump. Generally, we need to stop treating the rainwater as an obnoxious waste and we need to stop greedy water management practices and start sharing the water with nature.

BTW: just in case you need to know, I am not a dreamer, but I do have a good education in Hydrology. Currently, I am doing an experiment that will revive a couple of springs with very cheap and simple measures. Everything is measured and documented.

jacobolus• 2 years ago

For some inspirational promotion of building local-scale water harvesting structures (swales, check dams, ponds, ...) for improving individual watersheds, I've enjoyed the YouTube videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison https://www.youtube.com/@amillison/videos for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXqkSh7P7Lc

gaudystead• 2 years ago

That was a fascinating video to watch. Thank you for the share! :)

triyambakam• 2 years ago

Are you sharing your work anywhere? Sounds really interesting

lazystar• 2 years ago

terraforming articles always remind me of my favorite "what if" plan - what if australia used nukes to create a canal right down the middle of the outback?

nathanasmith• 2 years ago

Leave it alone. It's fine the way it is.

dave3332• 2 years ago

The vision of big lakes in NV valleys is way more water than is needed for viable habitation. See for example the permaculture project in Jordan "Greening The Dessert" https://youtu.be/MAousRO0e3g?si=wsCNQwQrH8Z8yfyn

WalterBright2• 2 years ago

California can't seem to build its high speed rail. How is it going to build all this water infrastructure?

EGreg• 2 years ago

Let them try it in Australia first. The whole continent is mostly desert (hi Mad Max!) and just a few cities on the coast.

Or at least if they can't terraform the desert, let them terraform "the bushland" first: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bush#/media/File:View_...

This is egregious considering that humans have actually terraformed forests into farms [1], and now 1/3 of the arable land is desertified [2]. How about terraforming it back into arable land by regenerative permaculture [3]? Start there first!

1. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

2. https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/fores...

3. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-h...

We Can Terraform the American West

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