Yesterday, a public figure suggested a remedy for California’s historic levels of drought that not only ranks high on the “climate change can’t be real if we’re getting all of these blizzards” scale of cluelessness, but is also callous enough in its disregard for others’ rights to cause massive temporary mandibular dislocation.
The public figure is His Supreme Self-Importance himself, William Shatner. The remedy is basically to steal the water from Washington State. “I want to build a pipeline, say, from Seattle. A place where there’s a lot of water. There’s too much water.” He has suggested raising thirty billion dollars through crowdfunding efforts to get the project started.
Words fail me. So I’ll let Emma Watson, in character as Hermione Granger, respond on my behalf. She even leaves long pauses between her words, just the way Bill likes them.
More after the break.
There are several problems with Bill’s big idea. Any of them could have been foreseen by consulting an atlas, or Wikipedia, or an actual Washingtonian—or even by comparison to California itself. I lived in the Golden State for ten years, and I’m well aware that the entire state doesn’t consist of palm trees, beaches, and pernicious liberal studio moguls. There’s a lot more to it than that, and Washington is the same way.
To start with, the “wet part” of Washington covers only about one third of the state, if that. The other two thirds, starting about a hundred miles or so east of Seattle, ranges from arid to semiarid. In parts of Eastern Washington, triple-digit temperatures were common even before global warming really kicked in. In one of those areas, the government built its first plutonium production facility, in part because there was little around to endanger or kill. And across the rest of Eastern Washington, farming relies on irrigation the same way it does in California.
Then there’s the question of size. Old jokes to the contrary, size matters when it comes to geography, and Washington only has about forty-three percent of the land California has. That makes the “wet part” of the state about fourteen percent of California’s total size. Of course, we could factor out California’s deserts as well, but the size differential is still big enough to drain Washington as though it were being attacked by the Salt Vampire (hey, remember her?), even in a good year.
And this is not a good year.
The photograph below shows the Skykomish River, in the “wet part” of Washington. The Skykomish runs about a mile from my house, and I took the photo this afternoon. Normally, if I tried to stand here in mid-April, I’d drown.
The difference is snowpack. Yes, it rains all the time in Seattle (at least during the winter months). But Seattle sits on the shore of Puget Sound, which is a body of saltwater connected directly to the Pacific Ocean. What the trees don’t scavenge runs into the Sound and out; it is not kept. In the nearby mountains, the rain does feed reservoirs, which are in reasonable shape for the time being. But we get the bulk of our water supply at altitudes that are normally too high for rain, as snowpack in the high mountains. And of that, we have very little this year.
Our state government has already declared drought emergencies in about half of the state’s watersheds, and more may follow. We have enough to provide everyone with drinking water for the time being, but not enough for agriculture. Runoff from snowpack also forms a large part of our energy economy, which is heavily dependent on hydroelectric power. And lastly, the unusually low river levels pose a threat to our populations of salmon, which we have a moral duty to protect for future generations even though they’re so damned delicious.
So go bark up somebody else’s tree, Bill. Or better yet, help work out some sort of scheme—logistical, technological, or otherwise—to make it possible for California to meet its own needs. When I was a kid, I remember a TV show where a man often called on the communities he visited to work out solutions of that kind.
I forget his name.