The reality stopping water pipelines to the parched western US

Summary

Summary of "The Indicator from Planet Money" Episode: The Reality Stopping Water Pipelines to the Parched Western US

Release Date: February 3, 2025
Host: Waylon Wong
Guest: Alex Hager, KUNC, Colorado

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Introduction

In this episode of The Indicator from Planet Money, host Waylon Wong engages in an enlightening discussion with Alex Hager from KUNC in Colorado, delving into the complexities surrounding water distribution in the United States. The central theme revolves around the persistent question: Why can't the United States simply move water from regions with abundance to those experiencing scarcity, specifically from the East to the West? This query gains heightened urgency in the wake of prolonged droughts exacerbated by climate change, particularly affecting the Western US.

Historical Context of Water Infrastructure in the Western US

The conversation begins with a historical perspective on water management in the Western United States. Alex Hager emphasizes that even before the current climate-induced droughts, regions like the West were inherently dry, with large portions classified as deserts. To address this scarcity, over a century ago, engineers embarked on ambitious projects to transport water from areas with surplus to those with deficits.

Notable Quote:
"In the 1930s, there was a boom of new pipes, tunnels, and canals that helped the state's water defy gravity."
— Waylon Wong, 03:47

These engineering feats included carving pathways through the Rockies to divert water from the Colorado River, resulting in extensive canal systems such as the 336-mile Colorado River canal that traverses the Arizona desert. This intricate web of water infrastructure has been pivotal in shaping the modern landscape of Western cities like Denver and Phoenix.

Current Challenges and Proposals for New Pipelines

As the 21st century progresses, the Western US faces escalating water challenges due to a megadrought persisting for over two decades. The Colorado River, a critical water source for approximately 40 million people in the Southwest, is experiencing diminishing supplies. In response, the idea of constructing new, larger pipelines to redistribute water from the East resurfaces as a potential solution.

Notable Quote:
"It's how we ended up with a 336 mile canal carrying the Colorado river across the Arizona desert."
— Alex Hager, 04:17

However, despite the seeming simplicity of the proposal, experts highlight significant obstacles that render the construction of such pipelines highly unlikely.

Engineering Hurdles

The first major barrier discussed is the engineering challenge of building new pipelines on the scale required to transport vast quantities of water across regions. John Fleck, a water policy professor at the University of New Mexico, points out:

Notable Quote:
"We already did the ones that were feasible and the ones that are left are the ones that just turned out not to be feasible."
— John Fleck, 05:13

Unlike existing pipelines for fluids like gasoline, which can be relatively narrow, water pipelines would need to be significantly larger to transport the necessary volumes. The scale of such infrastructure requires traversing diverse terrains and navigating complex regulatory landscapes, further complicating the engineering efforts.

Political Obstacles

Beyond engineering, the political landscape presents formidable challenges. Water management in the United States is governed by a fragmented system of laws and agencies, with no single entity overseeing freshwater resources comprehensively. This decentralization makes interstate water transfers contentious.

Alex Hager explains:

Notable Quote:
"There’s no government agency that pulls the strings on the ownership and management of fresh water in this country."
— Alex Hager, 06:17

Moreover, any attempt by Western states to acquire water from eastern river systems like the Mississippi would necessitate negotiations across multiple jurisdictions, each with its own stakeholders and vested interests. The lack of a unified governing body on water exacerbates the difficulty of implementing large-scale redistribution projects.

Financial Constraints

The financial implications further deter the pursuit of new water pipelines. Kathleen Ferris, legal counsel for major water agencies in Arizona, underscores the prohibitive costs involved:

Notable Quote:
"Money, money, money. Extraordinarily expensive."
— Kathleen Ferris, 07:36

Historical projects serve as a cautionary example. The extensive canal systems in Arizona, initiated in the 1970s, accrued costs exceeding $4 billion—a figure that would translate to approximately $28 billion in today's dollars. Additionally, the ongoing maintenance and energy expenditures required to pump water over long distances add to the financial burden, making such projects economically unviable.

Alternative Solutions

Given the immense challenges associated with new pipelines, experts advocate for exploring alternative, more feasible solutions to address water scarcity. These alternatives include:

• Agricultural Adjustments: Implementing programs to pay farmers to reduce or modify crop cultivation, thereby conserving water usage.

• Urban Water Recycling: Investing in high-tech infrastructure that can safely convert sewage into potable water, reducing dependence on external water sources.

John Fleck emphasizes the importance of prioritizing proven methods:

Notable Quote:
"Why don't we do the things that we know are possible and that are within our jurisdiction first before we go looking for some kind of a grand proposal that we don't have any reason to believe could succeed?"
— John Fleck, 08:28

These strategies not only present cost-effective solutions but also align with existing regulatory frameworks, making them more practical and implementable in the near term.

Public and Political Discourse

Despite the identified hurdles, proposals for new pipelines continue to emerge in public and political discourse. Notably, former President Donald Trump suggested transporting water from Canada to mitigate the Western drought:

Notable Quote:
"We have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down and they have a very large faucet."
— Donald Trump, 10:03

However, such suggestions have been met with resistance from Canadian counterparts and experts, who argue that transferring water across international borders presents additional logistical and diplomatic challenges.

Conclusion

The episode concludes by reaffirming that while the idea of constructing large-scale water pipelines from the East to the West of the United States remains in the realm of discussion, its practical implementation faces significant engineering, political, and financial obstacles. Experts unanimously recommend prioritizing existing, viable solutions to manage water scarcity effectively. Nevertheless, the dialogue surrounding water redistribution persists, reflecting the ongoing struggle to balance water distribution in an increasingly arid climate.

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Production Credits:
Produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by James Willits and Sina Lofredo. Fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Edited by Kicking Kenan. The Indicator is a production of NPR.

Transcript

[NPR]

Npr.

[Waylon Wong]

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong and I am joined today by Alex Hager of member station KUNC in Colorado. Welcome to the show, Alex.

[Alex Hager]

Hey, Waylon, thanks for having me.

[Waylon Wong]

It's great to have you. So there has been a lot of confusion lately over how one of our most precious resources, wall water, can be moved from regions in the US that have lots of it to places that don't.

[Alex Hager]

A recent example of that confusion came up after the deadly fires in Los Angeles. President Trump claimed that the US Military went to California and quote, turned on the water flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. End quote. White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt repeated that claim to reporters last week.

[NPR]

Water has been turned back on in California and this comes just days after President Trump visited Pacific Palisades and as you all saw, applied tremendous pressure to turn on the water and to direct that water to places in the south and in the middle of the state.

[Waylon Wong]

In fact, there was no spigot to turn on that could direct water to the Los Angeles region in this way. Moving water around is complicated. Still, that hasn't stopped people, including the President, from wondering, if we have a lot of water elsewhere, why don't we just move it to somewhere that needs it more? That question comes up a lot in California and in the arid west as a whole. I know you know all about this, Alex, since you cover water infrastructure.

[Alex Hager]

Yeah, I get this question more than anything else. A lot of people say, look, we've.

[John Fleck]

Got a lot of water in the.

[Alex Hager]

Eastern U.S. why don't we just pipe it to the west, you know, share the wealth a little bit.

[Waylon Wong]

Today on the show we're talking water infrastructure and that tantalizingly simple proposal of piping water from one region to another, in this case from the east to the West.

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[Kathleen Ferris]

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[Waylon Wong]

People have thought about moving water around for a long time.

[Alex Hager]

Yeah, especially in the Western U.S. even before climate change started fueling our present day drought, it's always been pretty dry. I mean, big parts of the region are literally a desert.

[Waylon Wong]

And for more than a century, that's had farms and cities looking at ways to get water from where it falls naturally to where people need it.

[Alex Hager]

That is something you can hear in this old archival footage from here in.

[Unknown Farmer]

Northern Colorado, farmers on the east side of the Continental Divide said, how about all that water on the west side? Much of it is just surplus over there. Down here is where we really need it.

[Waylon Wong]

In the 1930s, there was a boom of new pipes, tunnels and canals that helped the state's water defy gravity.

[Alex Hager]

Engineers carved up the Rockies so they could take water from the Colorado river, pipe it underneath the mountains, and supply all the crop sprinklers and kitchen faucets on the other side.

[Waylon Wong]

Throughout the 20th century, there was similar work being done all around the West. It's how we ended up with a 336 mile canal carrying the Colorado river across the Arizona desert.

[Alex Hager]

Right. Without ambitious pipelines, we would not have the west as we know it today. You know, big cities like Denver, Phoenix, they would not look the same today without this complex web of water moving infrastructure.

[Waylon Wong]

So it makes sense why people are asking about building another pipeline today, a bigger pipeline to solve the bigger water challenges of the 21st century. The Colorado river supplies about 40 million people across the Southwest and and its supply is dwindling thanks to a megadrought going back more than two decades.

[Alex Hager]

But if you ask the experts, there are some real hurdles in the way that make a new pipeline from the east very unlikely. The reasons break down into three. Engineering, politics, and money.

[Waylon Wong]

Let's start with that first one, engineering. Sure, we have all these other pipelines from the last century, but John Fleck says the kind people are thinking of today would be different.

[Unknown Expert]

We already did the ones that were feasible and the ones that are left are the ones that just turned out not to be feasible.

[Waylon Wong]

John is a water policy professor at the University of New Mexico. He says a pipe that big, that long, would have to go through a lot of places. That might throw up some red tape about a huge new construction project going through town.

[John Fleck]

Yeah, and it's worth noting that we do have super long pipelines to carry other fluids. The longest gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel pipeline in the country. It stretches from Houston to northern New Jersey. But John says that system, which includes more than five and a half thousand miles of pipe, isn't a good comparison.

[Unknown Expert]

It takes so much more water to supply a city than it takes gasoline. So the size of the pipe or the size of the canal has to be a lot bigger, has to be much wider, has to cover a lot more ground.

[Waylon Wong]

So we've got engineering. And then there's another reason, too. Political obstacles.

[Alex Hager]

It basically boils down to this. Say you're a western state that wants water from, for example, the Mississippi River. Who would you even ask for it?

[Waylon Wong]

Right. There's no government agency that pulls the strings on the ownership and management of fresh water in this country, and there's no one agency that runs the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River.

[Alex Hager]

We talk about that river system a lot because it's just so big. If the Southwest attempted to get some water from the east, there's a good chance they'd be tapping into the Mississippi.

[Waylon Wong]

River basin that stretches from tiny mountain creeks in Montana to a giant river through the heart of Pittsburgh.

[Alex Hager]

Because of that, in the east and the west, water is managed by a messy patchwork of different laws and agencies.

[Waylon Wong]

And there was one elephant in the room we haven't mentioned yet. Even if you could call up someone in the east to ask for some water, who's to say they'd want to give it away?

[Alex Hager]

Exactly. There are cities and farms and boats and wildlife that depend on that water. And it is not just the Colorado river that experiences drought. There have been some seriously dry times further east lately.

[Waylon Wong]

With climate change throwing curveballs to water supplies everywhere, it's unlikely that most places would want to give away the water they already have.

[Alex Hager]

So let's say the leaders of the west have somehow convinced the east to give up some of its water. They've gotten all the permits to build a humongous pipeline to get it here. But there is still that third big hurdle.

[Unknown Expert]

Money, money, money. Extraordinarily expensive.

[Waylon Wong]

That's Kathleen Ferris. She's made a career as legal counsel for some of the biggest water agencies in Arizona.

[John Fleck]

Just for comparison's sake, on the costs the big canal system in Arizona we mentioned earlier that cost more than $4 billion to build starting in the 70s.

[Waylon Wong]

That's about 28 billion in today's dollars. And any pipeline we built today would have huge maintenance costs, not to mention the energy required to pump all that water uphill.

[Alex Hager]

Kathleen says it isn't just that a pipeline would be so expensive. It is the fact that we have proven solutions that cost less.

[Waylon Wong]

Right. Here's paying farmers to pause growing some.

[Alex Hager]

Of their crops or another, like installing high tech equipment in cities that can safely turn sewage back into drinking water.

[Unknown Expert]

Why don't we do the things that we know are possible and that are within our jurisdiction first before we go looking for some kind of a grand proposal that we don't have any reason to believe could succeed?

[Alex Hager]

All the experts I talked to for this story said some version of just that. Let's look at pretty much everything else before we even consider a cross country pipeline.

[Waylon Wong]

But just because it's so low on the list of options for solving the Western water crisis doesn't mean nobody is taking it seriously.

[Alex Hager]

Yeah, in 2012, the federal government actually looked pretty deep into this idea. Engineers analyzed all the places where the Colorado river might be able to get.

[Waylon Wong]

Some more water that ranged from the imaginable, like pulling from a nearby river.

[Alex Hager]

In Wyoming to the truly wacky, like taking bags full of melted Alaskan icebergs to Los Angeles by boat.

[Waylon Wong]

Did you say a bag of icebergs?

[Alex Hager]

Again, we said imaginable to harder to imagine.

[Waylon Wong]

Ultimately, those engineers decided even the more reasonable options weren't worth pursuing. At least not yet.

[Alex Hager]

I talked to one retired federal worker who helped put that study together. He said even if an east to west pipeline doesn't make sense now, we shouldn't write it off completely.

[Waylon Wong]

The west is full of big cities that want to keep growing. The whole country stocks its grocery shelves with produce grown with Colorado river water.

[Alex Hager]

And it is not just the people in my inbox calling for a big pipeline to help out the dry Southwest.

[Waylon Wong]

President Trump just a few months ago gave a press conference at his LA area golf course suggesting piping in water from Canada.

[Donald Trump]

We have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down and they have a very large faucet.

[Alex Hager]

That idea did not go over well with our neighbors to the north. Canadian experts said piping water from Canada is unreasonable for a lot of the same reasons we described here.

[Waylon Wong]

But with Trump now in the White House, these kinds of suggestions are sticking around in some of the highest seats of power. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by James Willits and Sina Lofredo. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Kicking Kenan edits the show and the indicator is a production of npr.

[Kathleen Ferris]

This message comes from Bombas. Their slippers are designed with cushioning so every step feels marshmallowy soft. Plus for every item purchased Bombas donates to someone in need. Go to bombas.com NPR and use code NPR for 20% off your first order. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right. They offer premium wireless plans for less and all plans include high speed data, unlimited talk and text and nationwide coverage. See for [e-mail] Switch support for NPR and the following message come from Bolen Branch. Change your sleep with Bolen Branch's airy blankets, cloud like duvets and breathable sheets. Feel the difference with 15% off your first [e-mail] with code NPR exclusions apply. C site for details.