THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME?

In the pages of Minneapolis's Star-Tribune, it will be to fight off the great siphoning.

Those far-off onlookers thirst mightily for the Lakes’ 6.5 million billion gallons of fresh water that, to them, just sits there before running off to the ocean. Wasted.

It’s easy for us lake-landers to dismiss such thoughts, but those in the American Southwest are up against a 17-year drought that keeps getting worse. After an unusually warm winter, it’s expected to worsen still more this summer due to a dearth of mountain snow that will again leave Colorado River flow far below normal, with forecasts of dry and very hot weather à la La Niña.

What’s beyond scary is that NASA computer models indicate that the West could be facing a 50-year megadrought, the first such event since long before Europeans even knew North America existed.

The article mentions water stress in the Southwest, but doesn't get around to the root causes until late in the story.

Today, the West’s chief water user is agriculture, with three-fourths consumed by water-gulping crops like cotton, citrus, alfalfa and vegetables. Irrigated fields around hot, dry Yuma, Ariz., produce so many winter vegetables that nearly all of your salad comes from Yuma. Irrigated fields grow countless tons of alfalfa to feed livestock, crowded into giant feedlots nearby.

So much water is sucked from the Colorado to grow crops and quench thirsts that the river’s flow into Mexico is a relative trickle.

The Southwest’s water crisis is a result of dubious policy that pushed unsustainable growth, incented by federally financed dams, reservoirs and canals that delivered water at astonishingly low cost to cities and farmers.

Requirements that states and users repay the cost of building waterworks are often waived with little notice. Just one of these giant projects, the 336-mile concrete canal moving Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, cost $4 billion to build in the 1970s ($26 billion today) and many millions to maintain. Relatively little has been repaid to taxpayers, or ever will be.

I'll probably never, ever, get people, including people who ought to know better, to stop using the terms "cost" and "price" interchangeably. We can't, for instance, speak of rising health care costs until we know something about price discovery. The same error is present in the passage above.  The costs of the water and power projects are great, but those Yuma growers see low prices for the Colorado River water they use because they are living at the expense of somebody else.  I also recall, in the middle 1970s, something called "flood watering" being a thing in Phoenix.  Yup, cover your lawn with water.  We had water meters, and even in Milwaukee there was odd-even sprinkling days, even with new water intake cribs being built as the city grew, as it still was back then.

But nobody wants to get into the implications either of understanding that water is a commodity and ought be priced accordingly, or that those fresh vegetables (and Californian cheese, for Elsie's sake!) coming to the Twin Cities in the winter look cheaper because taxpayers in the Great Lakes are helping pay for those southwestern water projects, and they might be on the hook for even more water projects.

Less than 80 years ago, North Dakota had more electoral votes than Arizona, and Phoenix was a remote outpost. Today, Arizona has more people than North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota combined. That kind of growth is evident throughout the Southwest, which means more and more members of Congress are being sent by dry states rather than by the water-rich Midwest.

The article fears those Members will vote to provide benefits to their constituents, at the expense of everyone else.

Another option is to strictly restrict water use, but that’s politically dicey and can’t get much beyond talk.

Then there’s a plan to spend gazillions to capture several of Alaska’s free-flowing rivers with a grand network of dams, canals and tunnels to divert water south to the Colorado basin. It seems that the drought is getting serious enough so that even far-fetched ideas get a look.

So OK, now what?

To desert dwellers, an idea that makes intuitive sense is to pipe Lake Superior water to where it’s “needed.” Such a project would be staggeringly expensive but technically doable; besides, the Great Lakes surely wouldn’t miss, say, 50 billion gallons — would they?

The populace all around the Lakes is rock-solid against shipping any water anywhere, and advancing any diversion plan would set off political warfare.

Or perhaps one should say “renew hostilities.” This story isn’t new. In 2007, New Mexico’s then-Gov. Bill Richardson suggested a Great Lakes diversion when the Western drought was only six years old.

Note again: "strictly restrict," presumably by quotas or peer pressure or anything but price incentives, but this is the Star Tribune, y'see.  As far as the water diversions go, that idea is much older.  I remember people in Michigan, during the 1980s restructuring of Smokestack America, seriously suggesting that Michigan finance such a pipeline.  Cooler heads prevailed.

You want war, though?  I still fear that, long before the Second Minnesota face off against the Phoenix Zouaves, the Great Lakes Compact the Star Tribune columnists figure Congress will undo will come under severe pressure within states such as Illinois and Wisconsin that have Great Lakes coastlines.