I’ve always had a fascination with old Soviet/Russian engineering disasters and projects which are quite clearly going to be disasters. I really don’t know why. But sometimes, just sometimes, other countries come along and vie for the coveted top slot in the Magnus Greel Hierarchy of Human Idiocy. And yeah, that’s a real thing. Today it’s China. And boy oh boy do they have an offering for us that I bet will just put Chernobyl to shame when the whole thing goes wrong. And it’s totally going to.
“When it is completed, it will be one of the world’s biggest feats of engineering. China’s South-North Water Diversion Project, initially a vision of Mao’s, will take water from the south of the country to the arid northern region, including the capital Beijing, which suffers from water shortages.
The ambitious project has been under construction since 2002 and it is expected to take almost 50 years for all sections to be complete. It aims to pump almost 45 billion cubic metres of water a year to the north, equivalent to the water flow in the Yellow River in northern China. The water will be pumped from the Yangtze river and its basin” – The Guardian
Good. That’s very good. Don’t encourage people to, you know, live where the goddamn water is. Let’s bring the fucking water to them with miles and miles of pipe, unnatural irrigation and defiance of physics. What the hell. People who live in Siberia don’t get a lot of sun. Maybe we could build an artificial one for them. Or, you know, there’s millions of people in Afghanistan who don’t eat fish because they’re totally landlocked. Why don’t we just build them their own goddamn ocean? No, that’s okay guys. Don’t bother living according to any sort of logic or common sense. Just go right on doing whatever the hell you want wherever the hell you are. We’ll just move heaven and earth, literally, to cater to your lazy asses.
While the dominant narrative is that the world will one day be at war over oil, most scientists quietly acknowledge that fresh water is where the conflicts are going to arise. And as much as we’d like to we just can’t drink seawater even though it covers most of the planet. Which is pretty cruel if you ask me. That’s like wallpapering an obese man’s house with pizza topped with Anthrax. But I digress. Sort of. Most of us here in America like to think that these problems are far away in another country or magic land spoken of only in myth. However, it’s a lot closer than we would probably choose to recognize.
“California could be headed for a drought if Mother Nature doesn’t help it out soon, experts say.
“We are having our third driest year on record for San Diego,” said Helix Water District Director of Engineering Jim Tomasulo. San Diego gets most of its water from the Colorado River, which is only at half its normal levels. It also gets some from the snow in the Sierra Nevada.
However, right now, there is literally no snow in two-thirds of the mountains. If California doesn’t get some free rain or snow by next year, the state could return to emergency water restrictions.” – ABC
Yeah. Or, maybe people could stop living in a fucking desert expecting water to be brought to them like a bunch of Little Lord Fauntleroys or something. That’s one of the reasons the wife and I moved to Northern California. It’s where the water is. And, I might add, where the crushing urban sprawl and toxic air quality isn’t. There are also fewer stray bullets flying around and the homeless say hello before publicly urinating in front of your building. Yeah. It’s a real slice of heaven up here.
Magnus Greel 