Our society is too much in the habit of imagining we can just put a technical fix at the end of the pipe (literally in this case) to compensate for the upstream

Our society is too much in the habit of imagining we can just put a technical fix at the end of the pipe (literally in this case) to compensate for the upstream problems, whether it’s carbon sequestration, or using mammoth amounts of petrochemicals and environmental debt to build renewable infrastructure, or in this case “fixing” the water we mess up on the front end with massive energy use on the backend.