Do you favor sharing Great Lakes water on a short-term basis to save human lives during emergencies in water impoverished areas?

I appreciate the thoughtful way people have responded to my "absolutely not" -- but I am going to stick with absolutely not.  Here's why.

I said in my response that I cannot imagine a time when the absolute best way to get water to people in a crisis would be to use Great Lakes water.  If people are literally dying of thirst in, say, the Sahel, or the western desert in China, it has got to be cheaper and less wasteful of energy to bring them water from a closer source.  No matter what our cousins in the southwestern states claim, they are not doing to be dying of thirst anytime soon.  As long as a green golf course or splashing fountain exists in the southwest, those states have enough water not to need Great Lakes water.

A point made about a resource available to the American southwest is desalination.  Exactly so.  The burden should be on the wasteful regions to create new resources close to home, and using the ocean is a lot less damaging to other oceanside communities than using the Great Lakes would be to GL communities.  (And that's not adding in the costs of transportation.) 

In the future we will see fewer attempts at gargantuan-scale projects like, say, a Great Lakes pipeline to Arizona ... but only if there are noisy advocates for sustainable solutions. An interesting point raised in the responses is, and excuse my paraphrase, we should create our own language around the issue before it gets forced on us.  There's merit to that.  The language of sustainability will resolve this issue, and that has to be front and center in the vocabulary of GL advocacy.  Sustainability cuts several ways: it cuts across the attempts of communities to bottle GL water and sell it outside the watershed and it should slice off, at the root, attempts to move GL water under the heading of emergency planning.

Where I am coming from in my absolutely not is the sexual battleground of American womanhood!  Having been a young woman once, I know that there is no way to say no except to say no, and people often don't believe an absolutely not when they hear it anyway.  As soon as you begin to allow for "emergencies" you open the door to any fool who thinks that his rights are greater on a cosmic scale than your rights.  If an outside agency attempts to coerce the GL states into unwise use of GL water, even by calling it an emergency, it should be seen for the rape it is.

I have to go with the "Absolutely Nots". Yes, history has shown when the have-nots want something they don't have, conflicts can arise.

We have also learned from history that when Man starts trying to control and modify the environment, there are inevitably undesirable side effects.

I will soften my response to the point that if there was a dire water shortage, I would not hesitate to provide water but only as a last resort and utilizing only water trucks, railways and such. I would never be in favor of diverting water directly. That being said, the SW states are far closer to the ocean than the Great Lakes. Desalinization has been used with great success in other countries. I see no reason why we could not do the same.