The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [127]
NAWAPA was colossal in scale. It proposed redirecting north-flowing rivers headed to Alaska and northern Canada into the Rocky Mountain Trench—thus forming a giant inland sea—then pumping the water south through connections linking all of the major drainage basins of western North America and the Great Lakes. Flows in the Yukon, Peace, and other distant northern rivers could end up in the Great Lakes, California, or Mexico.
NAWAPA’s price tag and ecological damages were immense. Reviled by environmental groups and most Canadians, and with an estimated cost of $100 to $300 billion in 1960s dollars,522 this grandiose plan did better at attracting media attention than financial backing. But NAWAPA firmly planted the idea of massive north-south water transfers in the minds of generations of engineers and politicians. A half-century later, it continues to inspire revulsion, awe, and smaller spin-off project concepts.
The second immense north-south water scheme of the 1960s, the GRAND Canal, continues to have its advocates today. Its idea is to build a dike across James Bay (the large cove at the southern end of Hudson Bay, see map on p. ix), thus retaining runoff from this lowland’s many north-flowing rivers prior to their entering the ocean. The enclosed part of James Bay would become a giant freshwater lake, and its water then pumped back south again toward Lake Huron.
The GRAND Canal plan’s inventor, Tom Kierans, now in his nineties, remains its tireless proponent. He points out that the only place the project would deprive of water is Hudson Bay, a brackish sea overwhelmed by jellyfish. Every now and then the plan is resurrected by Canadian politicians.523 But with a current estimated cost of USD $175 billion—not to mention many environmental impacts and a local climate change over the region524—its revival seems distant, at least for now.
Smaller projects in the same area, like the very recently proposed “Northern Waters Complex” concept525 (see maps on pp. viii-xi), could realistically win support sooner. This particular plan is to impound seasonal floodwater from three north-flowing rivers, temporarily inundating about eleven hundred square kilometers of land before pumping it south again. According to its proponents, the Northern Waters Complex would cost only USD $15 billion, could be finished by 2022, and would generate $2 billion annually in hydropower and perhaps another $20 billion annually in water sales. With economic incentives like these, the great sucking sound from the United States could start sounding better to many Canadians.
Giant water projects cause significant environmental damage and are no longer popular in either the United States or Canada. In fact, the American trend today is to remove dams, not build them. But smaller-scale water exports can happen with pipelines, tanker ships, and bottling plants. The Great Lakes, fronted and shared by both countries, can be replenished at one end and decanted from another, for example at the Chicago Diversion. In his book The Great Lakes Water Wars, author Peter Annin describes how Great Lakes governors and premiers—fearing the specter of long, greedy straws coming at them from the American Southwest—are engaged in a flurry of cooperative lawmaking, hoping to barricade themselves against future water diversions out of the region.
An open question—one feared by many environmentalists—is whether Canada could in fact become obligated to sell bulk water to the United States and Mexico under NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Unlike oil, the much more controversial issue of water was deliberately left unaddressed during the writing and ratification