Arizona's even worse. They have Earth fissures all over the place from over draw on the confined aquifer systems. It's slowed down since they started storing water from the Colorado River, but there's a dozen states trying to siphon that thing off just to sustain themselves. Southwest is going to be a very different place 100 years from now.
Only 2.5% of the water on earth is freshwater. That ratio will change slightly over the coming generations as glaciers and ice sheets melt but it won't change enough to really help us out. Desalinization is a very expensive process. It gives large industrialized nations an option to enhance freshwater supplies but at a heavy cost. So you take a city like Los Angeles and you see the potential for desalinization, with the sea close at hand. The problem of course is the cost and the likelihood that we'll just let LA depopulate instead of creating water to pipe into a desert. If you look at Phoenix however the math completely changes. The sea is not close at hand, approximately 275 miles away. The city sits at 1,117 feet above sea level meaning that you'll have to spend a lot to move desalinized water from the coast inland and up slope. There isn't a huge population to potentially sway the federal government to foot the bill for desalinization. What population there is doesn't believe in big government anyway. That's a perfect recipe for a city being one tenth the size it currently is in 300 years. It could well be a ghost city if the worst projections of global warming related drought come true.
Buying up water rights is a pipe dream. There will be major nationalizations in future generations because the urge to profit from water will be seen as immoral and not worth supporting.
Pipe dream my ass, it's becoming a reality. As far as immorality, there are thousands of things that are seen as immoral done by large companies and government and not a damn thing is ever done about them. This will be the same.
Funny enough, a large scale desalinization plant might be more feasible in Arizona than L.A., simply because at least they'd have somewhere to put the shit. Biggest issue with desalinization isn't actually the cost, it's the waste - roughly a pound of brine/sea salt per three gallons. The Carlsbad plant that's supposed to go online in San Diego is shooting for 50 million gallons a day. That's over 76,000 tons of salt a year just piling up on the California coast - and that's not even a huge operation. Unless we're going to literally build new islands along our seaboards made of brine, it's not really feasible on a macro scale.
This will never happen. Too many downsides when relating to jobs and tax money. The government will shut this down real quick if it ever came to function. Similar to the guy who invented the tire that never loses tread. Government shut him down because it would basically bankrupt all tire companies and people would never need to buy tires again. Think about how many jobs will be lost when these panels are installed and never have to be tore up again? With the amount of bullshit road work they do around me, so many people would lose jobs.
Of course that's the notion right now. These panels would basically be maintenance free, thus never needing to be tore up and put back down. Once they are installed, there is nothing more to be done. It creates a ton of jobs in the short run, yes. Not to mention the cost to have to dig them up and relay them down if pipes need to be replaced underground. It's an idea in the making, but there will be a lot of problems to pass it.
You're talking about introducing a HUGE step in technology in almost every single job market across the board. Computers were being introduced to every single company and job known to man. There isn't a job on this planet that doesn't relate back to a computer somewhere. We are talking about solar panel roads here. Of course they are technology based, but the introduction to computers was monstrous. Solar panels have been around for quite some time now. Just because they are all within the technology sphere doesn't mean they relate
I think you should read up on this a little bit because it doesn't seem you know anything about it. You started by saying the government would shut it down when the government has been funding and encouraging it from the beginning. These are smart, solar roads which means people will need to be able to work on all the technology involved. There will be hardware and software in the roads. Jobs will be created to service and create new hardware and software. This infrastructure would hardly be maintenance free. That's not even considering the boost to the electric/smart car industry.
I wasn't aware of the government funding at the time of that comment. That still doesn't take away from my opinion on the matter. I don't think this will pass because of the reasons I stated. Just my personal opinion from seeing things like this time and time again. There are thousands of ideas that would be huge steps forward but are always brought down for similar reasons.
It's not more feasible in Arizona than LA. You're not factoring in the cost of pumping water uphill. Whether it's fresh water that's been desalinized or seawater that hasn't it's still water that has to go uphill. One hard and fast rule of water supply everywhere is that the water moves downhill. That's because the cost of moving it upwards is prohibitive. It's going to come down to whether people in a given community want to pay the price of ensuring their water supply. Odds are tremendous that large desert communities will not want to do that. This is a natural pattern. Communities arise in the desert in wet lush times and retreat from the desert in dry arid times. It's happened thousands of times in human history and the US southwest will be no different. It would take a Socialist Republic to survive in the desert in a drought and they'd fail in the end anyway because when you lock horns with Mother Nature you always lose.
They're just dumping the waste back into the sea. If you choose not to pay all the costs of desalinization then it will be cheaper but your grandchildren will pay the price you would not. As an example: what are the effects of desalinization Israeli style going to be for their national fisheries?
I don't think we know the answer to that, do we? The ocean is pretty big - maybe it can handle a higher salt concentration in a relatively small area on it's own?
