Will seawater save the Southwest?

The same Nation story cited in my previous source notes that American technological man believes seawater can replace drought losses.

Fat chance, unless SoCal starts buildling a lot of nuke plants. New climate regs there mean the Golden State will never see a new coal-fired plant, unless it’s the cleanest of clean coal. The U.S. has already hit Peak Natural Gas, and Canada will by the end of the century.

Passive solar evaporation can’t desalinate seawater in that quantity on that fast of a time scale, and it would require a lot of active solar panels. Australia uses wind power for some of its desalinization, but I can picture a huge NIMBY factor in SoCal. Plusa, wind for desalinization will have to compete with wind power for other electric uses, since California is more than 50 percent more populous than Australia.

Frankly, comments like this exemplify not just what’s wrong with American conservatism, but the largely self-inflicted delusionalism of the American middle class.

It wants to believe in the magic quick fix, the technological silver bullet. Well, “American exceptionalism” wayyyy aside, there is no such guarantee. I’m sure the Romans were hoping for one about 1,600 years ago; it didn’t happen either, and the Dark Ages were bad enough, despite some historical revisionism of thought, that some Roman knowledge, like Portland cement, was actually forgotten for more than a millennium.