Short of Water? Let's Get More!

Although economists and market forces don't seem to have figured it out yet, water is the world's most valuable resource. It's essential for life, yet only 1 percent of all water is fresh and possibly available for consumption; another 2 percent is fresh, but it's frozen in glaciers and the polar ice caps. The rest is salt water, and can only be made fresh by energy-intensive and very expensive desalination projects.

So what do you do when you don't have enough water? The answer depends on how wealthy and powerful you are.

If you're poor and isolated - i.e. you're among the largest segment of the Earth's population - you must put the same water to multiple uses. You drink a little, then wash with it, then boil it for cooking, and then finally use whatever remains for your plants.

But apart from its limited supply, the main problem with water is that it's not where it's needed. In North America, most of it is in the north, while the populations and agricultural regions consuming it are further south. It's an obvious problem that appears to have an obvious solution: bring the water south. The fact most water is in Canada is at worst a minor irritant. If you're rich and powerful, you can take whatever you need from somewhere, someone, else.

Suggestions for how water might be transferred include building an underwater pipeline from Alaska or Canada to California, towing icebergs and water-filled plastic bags from Alaska, using a fleet of converted oil tankers, and diverting northern rivers south through a series of canals and man-made lakes.

The benefit-cost analysis of such schemes says they're not even worth thinking about. Not yet, anyway. But they're already under serious discussion.

A 1700-mile 20-foot diameter plastic pipe from Alaska to California would need pumping stations on land every 150 miles, some of which would have to be in Canada. For all that, California would get only 10 percent of the water it needs. Other regions of the USA would get nothing. Towing icebergs and or bags and using tankers would bring even less water and be even more vulnerable to terrorist attack.