We Can Terraform the American West

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.

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.

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!

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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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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

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

> 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.

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

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

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

A sacrificial metal bed could work as a solution.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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?

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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.

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.

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

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.

Especially if you include refrigeration for foods.

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 :-\

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

> 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".

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

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...

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Flattening ontologies doesn't do anything useful.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.