Last week New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich spoke at a climate change rally in front of the U.S. Capitol and reasserted what we all know to be true — that “we can’t wait any longer to act on climate;” that “it is by far the greatest challenge of our generation” and that President Biden’s version of a Green New Deal and zero greenhouse emissions in 30 years needs to be given a chance to succeed.
This week Brian Egolf, Speaker of the New Mexico House, will convene the “first ever” New Mexico Climate Summit at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe and on Zoom. People from all over the state have been invited to speak about drought, farming, energy, pollution, environmental injustice and the urgency many of us feel about turning the next three years into an unstoppable effort to reduce CO2 emissions and the dire destruction wrought by the overheating of our planet.
This is potentially a powerful moment in the environmental history of our country and our world, a time to think big, to try out ideas and see where they could lead, to let our optimism out of its cage of despair, fatalism and frustration at the thoughtlessness of climate change pollution, and give close and respectful attention to even seemingly “way out” ideas — like a national water grid, a flourishing small farm/local agricultural economy and linking three major energy grids so that locally-generated renewable energy can move easily to where it is needed the most.
The idea of a national water grid in the United States has always seemed to me to be a pie-in-the-sky notion with little hope of going anywhere with fiscal, political and environmental price tags that made it simply impossible to even contemplate. But now, I’m reading about plans in India and Australia for building water grids to accommodate one of the great paradoxes of climate change — the simultaneous existence of drought and flooding in different parts of a national landscape. It’s an idea that some think is more viable than massive desalinization of sea water and inland brackish water, in that its costs are discrete rather than ongoing and that it involves much less direct hazardous waste.
The idea is to alleviate flooding by draining off excess water and sending it to places in the country that are caught in intractable droughts, like much of the Southwest, California and the Colorado River system. As the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) at the U.S. Department of Energy put it in a 2009 technical report, “The trend of increased flooding on the Midwest’s large rivers is supported by a growing body of scientific literature. The Colorado River Basin and the western states are experiencing a protracted multi-year drought. Fresh water can be pumped via pipelines from areas of overabundance/flood to areas of drought or high demand. Calculations document 10 to 60 million acre feet of fresh water per flood can be captured from the Midwest’s Rivers and pumped via pipelines to the Colorado River and introduced upstream of Lake Powell, Utah, to destinations near Denver, Colorado, and used in areas along the pipelines…(including) the cities in southern Nevada, southern California, northern Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Indian Tribes, and Mexico.”
The OSTI report contends that “A national Smart Water Grid Project will create thousands of new jobs (and)…will pay for itself in a single major flood event,” which often does billions of dollars in damage.
In India, the “national water grid” is a “perspective [sic] plan for the transfer between watersheds from surplus basins to deficit basins by interlinking Rivers of India. Indo-Gangetic Plains in India witness devastating Floods while the Peninsular States suffer severe drought,” according to jaborejob.com. Australia, last year, began serious planning for a National Water Grid that will be “a series of region-specific water storage and distribution solutions” involving some $1 billion in infrastructure projects taking water from areas of flooding and piping it to areas of drought.
A National Water Grid may prove not to be so “way out” after all, especially if the great growing areas of the West — which supply much of the nation with its winter crops — is threatened by interminable drought.
The same may be true for the idea of local agriculture being able to supply local nutritional needs, circumventing at least in part the transporting of massive amounts of food from growing sites around the country in a time of drastically uneven water distribution. I’ve never thought this was a “way out” idea simply because it has a history of phenomenal success in WWII in the Victory Garden Movement, supported by the federal government. It’s estimated that 20 million victory gardens were planted in a nation that had a population at the time of some 132 million people. Victory gardens produced an estimated 9 to 10 million tons of food, an amount, according to livinghistoryfam.org, that was “equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables.” And now, stimulated by books like “Small Farm Future” by Chris Smaje and by the personal experience of countless gardeners and small farmers over the decades, the reality of local societies and economies built around food production has the feel of realism that commands respect.
What used to seem like one of the most “way out” ideas has become one of the most down to earth and practical. Called the Tres Amigas Superstation, the project would “unite” the eastern power grid, the western power grid and the Texas power grid at a 22 square mile site on state land near Clovis, New Mexico. The project’s been in the planning stage since 2009 and is, according to tresamigasllc.com, not far from actually being built. The project will bury in triangular shape about 15 miles of superconducting wires from the Massachusetts company American Superconductor Corp. that would create a high-voltage direct current electric transmission network. From what I can tell, the great virtue of this idea is that the source of the electricity being combined from the three grids doesn’t matter, so it is ideal for conveying energy from intermittent, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power. The long-standing gripe about renewable energy sources is that they don’t produce energy when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. But when the energy they produce is combined with energy from the grids at Tres Amigas, their intermittency ceases to be an issue, and the power they contribute becomes just part of the flow.
All three of these ideas have been met with a normal array of negative reaction. But this age of climate disaster is not a time to be saying “no” reflexively; rather, our needs require an attitude that gives serious attention to any even vaguely reasonable sounding idea, even “way out” ones. We need to say, let’s take a more careful look and weigh all the potential consequences. Maybe we’ll get lucky. We need all the help we can get.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
This is a bold proposition, as befits the urgency of the situation. I wish I could believe that we might implement it. The other day, passing over the Rio Grande, I was shocked to be looking down on a vast muddiness: less water than I’ve seen in a long time. It breaks my heart (and enrages me) to realize how politics rooted in ignorance and corporate greed are devouring our future.
THINK BIG! YES! But let’s cut military spending by 2/3rd so we can do this.
The top ten defense contractors and their business of death: Lockheed Martin Corp, Raytheon Technologies Corp, General Dynamics Corp, Boeing Co, Northrop Grumman Corp, Analytic Services Inc, Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc, Humana Inc, BAE Systems, L3Harris Technologies Inc.
Imagine if these major defense contractors were retooled and their capabilities put to the task of implementing some of the amazing things V.B. talks about. They can even keep some of their profits! Lockheed Martin, Ben Raytheon, are you listening?
Building new grids to share our water and power makes great sense. I had never heard of either of these ideas. Thanks!