So? The projects are already built and the water comes from within the state, for Northern California and most of the agriculture. Only the cities of Southern California rely on water from other states.
Please renounce your moderatorship since you are obviously unable to correctly deduce what is a real argument and what is designed to cause flame wars.
I have no idea why people here fawn over your moderating. Please spare this website of anymore of it.
You’re very mistaken about what kind of hippies PNW folks are if you think they’ll happily give their water to Californians. They’re hippies, but surly ones with guns who don’t look kindly on capitalists who adopt liberalism as an affect. My wife, whose family were among the first settlers in Oregon, gets mad seeing Tillamook cheese in stores here in Maryland. (“That’s our cheese. Fuck you.”)
I think this gets closer to the point I tried to make. There is no unified "blue" or "red," so there wouldn't be a split along the colors cable news paints on election maps. Our FPTP system papers over a lot of diversity of thought that gets wrapped up under the big tents, but doesn't match geography. There are tankies in conservative-run states and evangelicals in Blue Country. Any attempt to split the country along ideological lines would make the most ridiculous gerrymandered district blush.
I think you're mixing up different things. You're correct that teams "blue" and "red" are actually coalitions of people who believe quite different things. But in part that's because of geographic and cultural commonalities that cut across party lines. Both Oregon Democrats and Oregon Republicans skew libertarian, because the state does. In Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans skew more religious.
A lot of the intractability of our national politics is because geographical and cultural differences are overlaid on top of normal political differences. Splitting the country up along geographic lines would allow us to just fight over politics, instead of over deep-rooted cultural patterns.
That's an easier position to take if you aren't one of the people who'd suffer worse religious persecution in a state unconstrained by the constitution. I would still be fighting against those deep-rooted cultural patterns, but I would be overrun quickly without support from enforcement of the 1st and 14th Amendments. State equivalents would be quickly discarded.
But that's what their religion says and it is what it is. It would be wrong for someone else to come along and impose their own cultural patterns (such as secularism) for the sake of a minority. That's just imperialism.
you realize most of the area by land in oregon and washington is very very red. and in a secession scenario they have a shitload more guns than the cities.
and even the parts that are less red probably wouldn't want to pipe the water down to cali latifundia. a lot of that area seems very culturally independent so i doubt they'd like being the breadbasket for something like the cali big cities.
and regardless yeah y'all do because population along the coast is very dense. you don't have enough space there to grow all that food for especially the big cali cities.
they are also way too small to grow enough food for colossal cali cities. and most of that agricultural land east of the coast is very red. look how many people in east oregon want to deadass secede to idaho because they're so sick of portland's bullshit.
Review some electoral maps. The OP was referring to secessionary scenarios, in which case most of Inland California, including the San Joaquin Valley, belongs to Team Red.
Even so, produce does not comprise a material percentage of the US caloric intake. Grains, tubers, grain oils, and meat definitely do.
Beyond food, there's mining and energy. Without the coasts, The US would be significantly inconvenienced. Without flyover country, the US would be dead.
American agriculture is entirely dependent on petroleum, of which the US imports millions of barrels a day.
Inland farmers require foreign oil as an input to the caloric production you describe, which means that to survive they need the ports and pipelines of North America as well as the cooperation of oil-rich nations.
Recently become a net exporter of all petroleum products, with Texas, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Alaska and California being the largest producers. At least in the near term I don't think the flyover states are as reliant on imports as the coasts if you were to put them in separate categories.
Pretty sure if there was such a split, gulf coast states and their ports would go with the inland farmers. So petroleum would be imported around the Mississippi.
Likely a split would have the ‘red’ states net exporting petroleum.
Both sides would either devolve into unlivable hellscapes or realize ideological moderation is the only way to run a sustainable government. You can't run a government if it's all "death to red! never mind all the minorities there who've been suppressed" or "death to blue! my kids will hate me and leave at the first opportunity, but I won't care until it's too late."
This is why I said all the current informal federal-based stuff would come back through treaty. I think most people on both "sides" are reasonable, so the split would never actually happen. And if it did, people would quickly miss all the stuff from the other side of it.
It's on a level with considering what happens if the sun disappears. It can't happen without something freakish happening, and none of us really knows how it would go.
Modern farming is completely dependent on those ports you so eagerly gave away. How many millions of people would die of starvation and from the inevitable resource wars while the few people who know how to farm the old-fashioned way figured out how to make it work on land that's been made dependent on abundant imported fertilizer and pesticides?
I do not believe the people yelling "secession!" are prepared to revert to a pre-WWI world.
Modern farming is indeed dependent on imports. But modern-"ish" farming, with tractors, combines, and some degree of mechanization can still be done and maintained without microprocessors, sensors, and precision pumps and machine tools.
And if your supply requirements decrease by 150MM people, that makes the job substantially easier to manage.
> I do not believe the people yelling "secession!" are prepared to revert to a pre-WWI world.
Ah, but they think they are. Which is really the only thing that matters, since beyond a certain point, it's too late.
you are aware the gulf coast has a lot of ports for imports and exports. most gas comes out of "flyover country" and ends up at gulf export sites (see henry hub) and that's the big input to producing ammonia fertilizer.
You guys are really delusional. You think the economic powerhouses (SF, LA, etc) in CA will just let half of CA secede?
California produces almost 14% of all the crops grown in the US. A large portion of that are nuts and high calorie items like avocado and soy. You want food oils? Grains? Meats? CA exports all of those. CA is the 4th biggest producer of cattle in the US, 10th biggest poultry producer. 9th biggest producer of potatoes (Washington is #1, another coastal state). 2nd biggest rice producer.
As far as energy, you realize Texas is also not one of your flyover states, right? And even if it wasn't, we import plenty of energy from pipelines to coastal states so it can be sold or refined. CA has nearly the same refinement capabilities as Texas itself.
Fly over states are land. Undeveloped land is not extrinsically valuable.
