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China should build the Bengal Dam, and turn Belt and Road into Belt and River. Bengal Bay is one of the rainiest places on earth, + freshwater from Brahmaputra. Harvest it and send it to Xinjiang/Thar desert.
build the infrastructure for land reclamation in the Sunda shelf, and rainwater harvesting, send it all to the bleached white deserts of Thar/Central Asia/MENA
literally creates new land, fixes flooding, potentially fixes geopolitics and united Asia if done properly
NAWAPA but 20x as expensive and destructive. I love it.
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. Diverting rivers is always worse, because it means youre affecting every point downstream on the river. And you're just distributing an already shared water resource--you're not actually CREATING any new resource.
This idea does not do that, it takes freshwater which otherwise would have been spat out into the Bay of Bengal, and just puts it elsewhere. Freshwater which would have otherwise been turned into saltwater, gets to be freshwater instead.
It WILL affect wildlife off the Bengal coast. It would turn from a saltwater bay into a huge freshwater lake. Fishermen would have to transition to catching freshwater fish, but in return, they get to NOT DIE from massive flooding, and other places in Asia also get multiple Germanies worth of arable land.
South Korea also already built something similar, and is using it (Saemangeum dike). It only cost 2.6 billion dollars. The Bengal dike would have to be about 10x longer and 10x deeper, let's say $260 billion, and just for the hell of it let's say it costs 3x more for various reasons, at a total of $750 billion. but surely China can afford something that costs less than a trillion dollars, and gives them a Germany worth of arable land?
TLDR: NAWAPA wanted to export already-existing Canadian freshwater to the US. Bengal dam takes unused freshwater from the Bay of Bengal, and puts it somewhere else, also prevents global warming from killing 400 million Bengalis.
it would still require the same kind of unimaginable engineering and reckless abandon. and for the record NAWAPA was working from the exact same premises of water going to sea=bad, lets instead make it go where dry
If you look at what NAWAPA was trying to do, it was very different. They wanted to dam SEVERAL rivers and divert them. Many of the complaints were about disrupting the flow of the rivers.
NAWAPA wanted to divert rivers. The Bengal plan does not divert rivers.
The Bengal plan dams the whole bay. The rivers are completely untouched. The equivalent of this would be damming the Arctic/North Alaskan areas where the rivers drain, and then sending that water back into North America.
(no such proposal was ever made, probably because these drainage areas are SO FAR away from the Arizona desert--Asia lucks out here because Bengal is so much closer).
No, it's NOT the same logic, because when you divert a river, downstream flow is affected and the water's altitude is lower. Certain branches of the river can go completely dry because of this.
NAWAPA was purely about water. Bengal is about water, but ALSO about preventing the catastrophic flooding that NECESSARILY WILL happen to 300,000,000+ people if you do nothing. Building it is a twofer, basically
Also, the Bay of Bengal gets 2.5x more rainfall than the Alaskan coast. And the Brahmaputra-Ganges-Meghna's discharge is 4x bigger than all the combined rivers of Alaska/Canada. So the bang-for-the-buck is way higher too.
And in addition to all that, China and India simply need more land, far more urgently than the US. China also has far more capacity to build something like that than the US.
The Bengal plan WOULD have environmental effects, but only for the actual Bay reservoir area. Not for the land/riverine areas. And the effects would simply be a matter of quality, not quantity. Rather than forests running dry and being deprived of a precious resource, it would simply be a seawater habitat turning into a freshwater one. The engineering would be equally unimaginable though, yes. But the EU is looking at a North Sea dam which would actually be a lot more difficult to build than this.
the dam part is perfectly feasible.
gathering freshwater from that project and hurling it at the Tarim basin ... Thats NAWAPA shit. just casually sending large quantities of water 4,000km over the tallest mountain range on earth :sicko-hyper:
then there's the fact we'll have no idea just what the fuck any of this will cause---the dam & greening desert will fuck with rain patterns, the ocean currents, multiple ecosystems, just generally our already unravelling ecology
but since everythings fucked anyway who cares lets do it. they're gonna put fucking chalk in the sky and a billion satellites in orbit, it'd be a shame to not build great monuments down here
Pretty sure deserts are bad for the climate
