Yes, of course. Existing bodies of freshwater can be put to use. Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

"The National Association of Home Builders, asked about the wisdom of building houses where water is running out, said the industry was responding to the demands of homebuyers who want to live in those areas."

As Buckminster Fuller so eloquently illustrated, it's not a problem with resources, it's a problem of distribution.

Plus we pollute the Great Lakes like there's no tomorrow.

I see no way around this except to continue to build large cities in the desert.

If only we could use something to transport large amounts of liquids long distances.

Brilliant, I wonder why no one has thought of this before?

Lake Superior is now potable again. In most parts of the coastline you can walk out about 10 feet to where the turbidity is low and just go ahead and drink the water.

The rest of the Great Lakes are unusable for many applications without processing the water first.

Key point is that no uniform policy works on global scale. In some places you need to seriously limit use of ground water. In others you don't really need to care. And this can change over time.

There's almost nowhere that you don't need to care about ground water use.

Acquifiers are mostly ancient systems that were at equilibrium before humans started pumping from them. Any use of groundwater is potentially destabilizing the equilibrium.

What you said is true of surface water, however: there where you need to seriously limit its use and others where you don't need to care.

Note, however, that even an island as famously wet as Great Britain in recent years has faced water shortage issues, not because the total precipitation across the whole island is too low, but because it falls in the "wrong places".

I took a pee on the Canadian side so take that eying up the lakes. How many lakes you guys going to run dry?

You might recall that last summer (2022), the Mississippi became unnavigable for long stretches for boats of any significant size.

There actually isn't a lot of spare water in the Great Lakes, certainly not enough to irrigate the southwest, let alone the rest of the country.

The Great Lakes are protected by a treaty with Canada, that has strong bipartisan support in the neighboring states. You can't have our water.