The former President’s plan to bring water to the California desert is, like a lot of his promises, a goofy pipe-dream.

In an apparent effort to address the pressing issue of California water shortages, Trump said the following: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet. You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he said.

Amidst his weird, almost poetic rambling, the “very large faucet” Trump seems to have been referring to is the Columbia River. The Columbia runs from a lake in British Columbia, down through Oregon and eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Trump’s apparent plan is to somehow divert water from the Columbia and get it all the way down to Los Angeles. However, scientific experts who have spoken to the press have noted that not only is there currently no way to divert the water from the Oregon River to southern California, but creating such a system would likely be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.

  • Jeffool @lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I know this is the politics community so forgive me for saying “this comment aside,” but we really need to figure out a cheaper and cleaner way to desalinate seawater.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      This is a nonstarter because there is a quarter pound of salt in every gallon of salt water. A small town of 50k would easily produce close to a million pounds of salt a day. Now try to scale that up to 20 million people in LA for instance.

    • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      We need to stop encouraging people to live where there isn’t any water. There’s a reason nearly 3/4 of the US population lives east of the Mississippi, and that reason is the Eastern half of the country gets a straight up order of magnitude more rain water than the Western half

    • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Solar desalination is very viable. It’s just that water is so cheap at the moment that it’s not worth the investment.