The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [128]
Most Canadians oppose the idea of becoming water purveyors to the United States, although their provincial governments are generally more open to the idea. Alongside environmental concerns, Canada suffers water shortages of its own. A water-rich country on paper, most of its uncommitted surplus lies in the far north, flowing over thinly populated permafrost to the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay. The south-central prairies are prone to drought, with spotty rainfall and heavy reliance on a few long, oversubscribed rivers fed by distant melting snow and glaciers. If any future megaprojects arise to divert water from northern Canada to the United States, a cut will likely go to southern Canada.
One place where we could well see the resurrection of a massive twentieth-century water-transfer idea by 2050 is in Russia. Siberia’s mighty rivers, flowing untouched to the Arctic Ocean, have long been contemplated as a potential water source for the dry steppes and deserts of central Asia. In the 1870s, tsarist engineers noted the favorable, if long, topographic gateway linking wet western Siberia with the Aral-Caspian lowland, in what is now Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. By the 1940s the Soviet engineer M. M. Davydov had drawn up a grand plan for north-south water transfers out of western Siberia, complete with canals, pumping stations, and the creation of a giant inland lake that would have inundated the same area that is plastered in oil and gas wells today.
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s the USSR studied, revised, and finalized a scaled-down version of Davydov’s plan. The idea was to tap Siberia’s mighty Ob’, Irtysh, and Yenisei rivers using a 2,544-kilometer-long canal to irrigate cotton fields around the Aral Sea (see map on page xii). Diversion of the Aral’s feeder rivers was already careening the region toward the desiccated disaster it is today. By 1985 the canal’s route had been surveyed and the first work crews arrived in Siberia to commence the “project of the century,” known by then as “Sibaral” (short for Siberia to Aral Sea Canal).526 But then, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, abruptly halted the project in 1986, citing a need for further study of Sibaral’s environmental and economic impacts. Nothing further happened and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the project, after decades of planning, was abandoned.
Today, Sibaral continues to rear up from the grave with surprising regularity. The megaproject is more politically awkward than before because six sovereign countries—Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—are now involved instead of one. However, all five former Soviet republics want Sibaral to happen and continue to clamor for it.
Support for this in Russia is mixed. In 2002 Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, wrote a letter to President Vladimir Putin urging the plan’s revival, citing destabilization of Central Asia over water shortages and the specter of refugees pouring across the Russian border. Russia’s deputy minister of natural resources also wrote support for the plan.527 By 2004 Luzhkov was stumping the project in Kazakhstan; and the director of Soyuzvodproject, a government water agency, said they were assembling archived project materials from more than three hundred institutes in order to revisit and revise the old plans. Most Russian scientists are opposed to Sibaral but some note that reducing river runoff to the Arctic Ocean could slightly mitigate the anticipated weakening of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation described earlier in this chapter.528 Modeling studies are needed to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, but if correct, Sibaral could conceivably win