Talk:North American Water and Power Alliance

Quakers
I recall hearing the flooding was liable to cause earthquakes in BC. Can anybody substantiate? TREKphiler  hit me ♠  13:36, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Frank Church Quote
Senator Frank Church of Idaho made a great quote comparing NAWAPA too the Lousiana Purchase. Should it be added too the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Est300 (talk • contribs) 02:31, 28 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Source?   Will Beback    talk    04:12, 28 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I looked around and all I could find was a quote in a Guardian Weekly article from 1971. The webmaster was the writer. It says, without giving the circumstances of the quote:
 * Senator Frank Church of Idaho took the NAWAPA Project so much for granted that he publicly stated, "To perform the great task before us may well need a programme as farsighted as the Louisiana Purchase." 
 * The quote does not appear in either the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times. And Google News just has a reprint of the Guardian article. I suppose the article is a sufficient source, but we'd have to be careful to avoid characterizing his remark beyond what Cockerill has written.   Will Beback    talk    21:56, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I had originally read it in the congressional record in the 1990's but I can't find it on it's website. I guess people aren't interested in the NAWAPA project because it was never built. Est300. 22:13 September 2, 2011 (UTC)
 * If I understand correctly, some treaty (NAFTA?) now prohibits mass transfers of water between Canada and the U.S.   Will Beback    talk    12:04, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * In any case, we can add the Church quote, above, if you think it's significant.   Will Beback    talk    12:06, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Misleading edit summaries
Please do not use misleading edit summaries. This edit is labeled "(rv deletion of sources)" -- a cursory examination of the edit will reveal that no sources were deleted. Instead, contentious opinions which were being put forward in Wikipedia's voice were properly attributed to the person offering those opinions. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 18:03, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I should also point out that ironically enough, the aforementioned edit deleted two sources. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 18:07, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * And this edit, made after the above comments were posted, is a simple revert, with another misleading edit summary ("add refs and cited material.") Please desist from these tactics. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 18:18, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Stop reverting out well-sourced material from the best source available about NAWAPA - and no, LaRouche publications are not sources. The plan is defunct for a number of very good reasons, as the sources point out. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 18:53, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia operates on a neutral point of view basis, which specifies that articles reflect the mainstream thinking based on reliable sources. The majority of modern reliable sources available on the topic consider the project defunct for the environmental and economic reasons described. The idea that NAWAPA will ever be built is a fringe theory today supported only by a small fringe political group. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 18:58, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Once again, a misleading edit summary: this is a blanket revert, with a summary that says "(No, it's not "undue" to extensively cite the best source on the entire defunct project.)" Whether Reisner is "the best source" is certainly a matter of opinion -- but none of the material source to Reisner had been removed. However, that is entirely irrelevant to fact that you reverted numerous edits without explanation. Please either restore the edits you reverted, or provide a detailed explanation for your reverts. Also, your comment above is likewise misleading, because a simple look at the Reflist will confirm that no "LaRouche publications" are used as sources in the article. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 19:06, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Moreover, we don't segregate a project's critics off into a separate section, as you have attempted to do. We discuss the project based on how it has been viewed in reliable, published sources. All reliable, published sources in the modern context are basically critical of the project and treat it as a dead issue. That you do not like that is of no consequence. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:09, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * There are numerous reliable, published sources available, and you haven't demonstrated why we ought to prefer your favorite over all the others. It's not helpful to make a blanket statement claiming that "all reliable published sources in the modern context" adhere to your preferred POV -- on the other hand, it would be helpful to cite reliable published sources (with proper attribution, not in Wikipedia's voice.) Also, when a contentious opinion is cited, it should be attributed to a source, and it should not appear in the first line of the article. Please explain all the other edits you reverted that were unrelated to Reisner. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 19:14, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * It is not a "contentious opinion" that building a 500-mile-long reservoir in the Rocky Mountain Trench would destroy wildlife habitat. It is purely a fact. You cannot drown a 500-mile series of river valleys without destroying wildlife habitat. Whether that is a good thing or not would be an opinion. Thus, the statement which demonstrably expresses an opinion of the idea is quoted and cited.
 * That doesn't even appear in the disputed sentence. However, calling it "defunct" is certainly an opinion, not universally held, which should not be in the opening sentence. It also looks like you prefer "to supply more water to the Colorado River system and other areas of the United States" over "continental water management system" because is minimalizes or trivializes the effect of the project. I have added the neutrality tag, in particular because of your practice of stating Reisner's opinions as fact in Wikipedia's voice, without attribution. If you were to attribute them, of course, it would tend to reveal to the reader that the article is dominated by the views of one commentator with an axe to grind. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 19:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Moreover, it is not a "contentious opinion" that pumping NAWAPA water uphill from Alaska would use more energy than would be recovered from downstream hydroelectric facilities. That's the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One can't create a perpetual motion machine of water by pumping it uphill and then recovering the energy on the other side. It might be possible to argue that the energy generated by hydroelectric facilities in the United States would be more usefully-located than the energy used to pump it uphill, and that there is excess power somewhere in Alaska which could be put to use to do the pumping. But NAWAPA would have had to get power from somewhere. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:32, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I suppose you could make that argument if the Southwestern deserts were higher in elevation than the mountainous areas of Alaska, but they are not. NAWAPA involves, of course, numerous ascents and descents, so your statement would be an oversimplification in any event. There is certainly no harm in attributing it; in fact, Wikipedia policy encourages attribution. 99.118.149.2 (talk) 19:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * And you could make that argument if there was only one mountain range in between Alaska and the Southwestern deserts. Instead, as you said, there are a whole bunch of ascents and descents. NAWAPA's own plans foresaw construction of multiple nuclear plants to power the Sawtooth Lifts alone. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:48, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Many of the southwestern deserts and the plateau areas between ARE much higher than the Yukon River's sources (Atlin Lake, Tagish Lake, Teslin Lake); the passes between that drainage and the Fraser and Skeena and the Stikine and Mackenzie/Finlay system are also fairly high. The Fraser basin can connect to the Columbia's at a fairly low elevation but flooding the Fraser on that scale is not politically viable, and not just because of environmental concerns, doing so would flood out much prime BC real estate.Skookum1 (talk) 15:54, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I agree that it is the mainstream view that a project such as NAWAPA is no longer acceptable. This is because it has been found that the fresh water flowing into the Arctic Ocean is affecting world climate, and thus if it were diverted, changes, deleterious to existing patterns of human settlement and agriculture, would result. I recall that a Russian interbasin transfer project was abandoned following U.S. pressure for this reason. However, the article nowhere refers to this; instead, the only environmental objections referenced are the ones known at the time the project was in active consideration - the destruction of wildlife habitat and so on. I was quite surprised that the neutrality of the article was in dispute from this direction; I was expecting that its neutrality would be disputed because of it being overly critical, rather than overly favorable, to the project. 207.245.236.152 (talk) 11:44, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I now see that what I was thinking of is discussed in Northern river reversal. Quadibloc (talk) 11:49, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * While Googling for that, I saw a bunch of results noting that global warming was creating a pool of fresh water in the Arctic Ocean that might interfere with the Gulf Stream, cooling Europe excessively. So it's not impossible that someone could make a case for a project like NAWAPA as a geoengineering response to global warming. Of course, the problem with that is that the water diverted would be determined by consumption needs, not by what would be needed to compensate for global warming effects. Quadibloc (talk) 11:52, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Scholarly sources
I have found a few recent scholarly publications which are of use as reliable sources for this article:

Engineering the North American waterscape: The high modernist mapping of continental water transfer projects. Benjamin Forest. Political Geography. 01/01/2011. Vol. 31. Issue 3. GRANDIOSE WATER DEVELOPMENT PLANS. By: Landry, Clay; Payne, Matt; Root, Skye. Water Resources Impact, Mar2012, Vol. 14 Issue 2, p18-18, 1p

Basically the only recent sources mentioning the proposal as anything other than a historical curiosity are LaRouche publications. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 05:27, 18 July 2013 (UTC)


 * You seem to wish to keep any reference to Marc Reisner out of the article. I don't see why. He was clearly a leading opponent of NAWAPA, and nearly half of the source citations in the article are to his book. The bio of Reisner in the opening pages of his book describes his tenure with the NRDC, so it's not exactly a secret. Incidentally, with so many citations to one source, it would be appropriate to include page numbers or hyperlinks. 99.118.151.55 (talk) 04:37, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Because you have cited no source which specifically links Reisner to any part of the opposition to NAWAPA, much less supports your assertion that he was "a leading opponent." Cadillac Desert is a historical and journalistic study written by Reisner — considered the seminal history of water development in the West — and treats NAWAPA as what it is: a totally dead issue. The book was written in 1986 and revised in 1993 — long after NAWAPA was effectively dead and gone.
 * The evidence of its demise is all around you: Google "NAWAPA" and all you'll find are a few bemused water historians and a 100-page stack of LaRouchite bizarrity. There is no interest in promoting NAWAPA by anyone else. It's dead, Jim. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 06:11, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Peaceful nuclear explosions
This is the most bizarre and comical edit war thus far. Peaceful nuclear explosions are a well-known concept; there are international treaties that govern their use. Apparently one editor feels that anything "nuclear" is inherently bad, and the use of the word "peaceful" is upsetting, so that edits have been made referring to PNEs as "bombs", etc. Explosives have been used throughout history for excavation, including for the Panama canal. There does not seem to be much confusion about this; I don't see dynamite being referred to as a weapon of mass destruction. So why the fuss? 99.118.151.109 (talk) 21:17, 19 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The special implications of detonating a nuclear bomb vs. conventional explosives are well-known. Like, massive radioactive contamination, fallout, etc. See Project Gasbuggy, etc. We ought not to use euphemisms — or if we do, we should explain them. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 21:21, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

RfC: Is the use of the term "Peaceful nuclear explosions" a euphemism?
Is the use of the term "Peaceful nuclear explosions" a euphemism? The article North American Water and Power Alliance contains a link to the article Peaceful nuclear explosions. One editor objects to the term, calling it a euphemism, and has proposed "nuclear bombs," or the use of scare quotes around the word "peaceful." 99.122.153.94 (talk) 22:02, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Survey

 * Support use of this term as well-established term in use in the international law and by industry. Beagel (talk) 17:23, 20 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Support non change. Has someone gone nuts? If every nuclear explosion is to be regarded as non-peaceful unless in scare quotes, then why isn't every dynamite or TNT or ANFO or FAE explosion or shaped charge even more in need of visible lamentations? They also get used in war and have killed far more people than nukes, even in WWII alone. Come to that how about the explosions propelling cars? They too have killed more than nukes in war. Why not matchheads? This would not only be POV, but OR as well, as well as a nonsensical out-of-context insult to readers and WP. JonRichfield (talk) 06:42, 21 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Support using PNE. Whether or not it was originally coined as a euphemism, it's what nuclear explosions used for civil engineering (or testing apparently) rather than in armed conflict are called.--Wikimedes (talk) 07:24, 24 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Support use of 'PNE' because... that's what they are called!  Why is there even an objection at this article and not Peaceful nuclear explosions? --SubSeven (talk) 15:20, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
 * It is absolutely not a euphemism; it is arguably an oxymoron but it is one that is supported in wp:rs—let the reader decide. :) John Cline (talk) 13:37, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

Threaded discussion
Peaceful nuclear explosions are a term used by international organizations (e.g. IAEA) and treaties, in science. Calling it "euphemism" is OR. Beagel (talk) 17:33, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

Origin of Overall Idea
I am thinking that what became the NAWAPA plan was first proposed in a very rough sketch form around 1933-1934 by someone from the Technocracy movement and/or people in the Roosevelt administration as a means of dealing both with unemployment and the protracted drought which was beginning to show where it might go as far as scale, scope, and impact.

There were also enough concerns about transportation infrastructure that this was the time of the first speculations that also were refined into a plan in the 1950s, namely for the Interstate Highway System, which Roosevelt and others were discussing as 4 or 5 east-west and 3 or 4 north-south toll roads. Then, in the 1950s and now, the navigable waterway part of the plan is said by some to in effect be the long-sought North-West Passage and a means of moving massive items and a batches of things in vast number that are too large for aeroplanes or motorised vehiceles from one side of the continent to the other without going all the way down to Panama to do it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.95.162.98 (talk) 15:21, 5 October 2015 (UTC)