Reply #10: So suppose ... [View All]

[Shorebound]

A company comes into Maine and buys, say, 900,000 acres of North Woods, including all the shoreline of several dozen lakes and ponds plus all the aquifers under its property. And then decides, since it can't develop the land for house lots, to start selling the water on and under the land to Boston or New York City using a new pipeline paralleling the already existing natural gas pipeline.

The idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Back in the early 1980s, according to rumor, the NYC Water Department sniffed around both Sebago and Moosehead Lakes as potential new water sources for the metro area. Water shortages are already becoming apparent in the Southwest (which wants to tap the Great Lakes) and the Midwest. Water may well be the next great resource shortage. And as Mainegreen has noted, "we seem to get an awful lot of water here in Maine."