My Pipe Dream

I have a dream. My dream is not as meaningful or as impactful as that of Dr. Martin Luther King, but it's a dream nevertheless.
My dream is to awaken in America one day when there is a pipeline stretching from one end of this country to the other. No, mine isn't meant to tote oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Mine is to transport water from where it is overly plentiful to more arid areas.
Sure, this redistribution of water wealth might seem like a socialist ideal, but I think it's a plan that can make America better in the long run.
Consider the ways it could help us right at this very moment. There's a drought in California and many other western states. There there's also a bit of a water surplus in the Plains. Why not take the floods away from Texas and Oklahoma and deliver them to parched California? No more flood, no more drought. Ahh, if only there was an efficient way to deliver water from flood-proned places to traditionally arid regions.
We could build a pipeline. In the same way an oil pipeline can be built, a water pipeline can be built. But even better, a water pipeline could be built cheaply. With a short Internet search and some rudimentary math skills, I estimated we could build a 2-foot wide line stretching for 3,000 miles for just over $1B. Indeed, other lines going north and south and wherever else would drive that cost up to $2B or $5B, but consider how much it cost to clean up after Sandy, or this mess in Texas or Katrina. Surely insurance companies would be interested in investing in such a private-public project as this...to save on payouts to flood victims. Verily, how good would it be to help keep those flood victims from becoming victims in the first place?
And that's a financial benefit merely from loss avoidance. What about the economic boon on the other end?
I worked for a short period of time for the California Department of Food and Agriculture. One of the most productive regions in the state is the Imperial Valley, a desert area with no business being an agricultural powerhouse. But it is through irrigation. What if we duplicated that bounty in desert regions of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and more? Yields and quality would go up. Prices for consumers would drop and we could expand exports to other countries, even areas where poverty and hunger are extreme. The agricultural boon alone would pay for the pipeline in a matter of years. We could end the feuds between farmers, boaters and citizens. We wouldn't have to flush less or take shorter showers. Farmers wouldn't have to leave fields fallow and sportsmen could fish their hearts out.
And what of environmentalists? If my...nay, our...water pipeline were to leak, what then? Well, it's just water. It'll evaporate. Surely the wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico or the California coast would be no worse the wear if a massive water spill were to dump into the ocean. The ocean is, after all, just one giant water spill anyway.
Haven't the people who live near our great rivers had their fill of piling sandbags in front of their homes? Certainly helicopter pilots are burned out from plucking people from their roofs. News agencies, I know, are tired of running pictures of cracked, parched soil...because nobody can comprehend what a drought is otherwise.
We can solve this problem once and for all. Dr. King realized his dream! Well, I mean, we're still tweaking it a little. It's only been like 55, 60 years, so...
OK, so some dreams are hard. But this one is easy, relatively cheap and will make us better in the end.