There's a lot wrong with it. People like to point out Israel as an example of successful desalination, but that ignores the fact that Israel is a quarter of the

There's a lot wrong with it. People like to point out Israel as an example of successful desalination, but that ignores the fact that Israel is a quarter of the size of San Bernardino County and basically a narrow strip of land next to an ocean. You would need to build 4-8 plants the size of the largest desal plant Israel has for each major population center in the Southwest, and you'd have to do it very very quickly. But even that's not the problem. The problem is physics. The entire West, an area the size of Europe, is basically the Rockies sloping down to the Pacific, with a few inland coastal mountain ranges like the Cascades to break the flow. The rivers start in the mountains from snowmelt and flow downward and generally westward from there. So you'd need to reverse the hydrology of the entire region and pump that water uphill thousands of feet and inland over hundreds - thousands - of miles of terrain that is often rough enough that people still don't really live there. A region in which many areas are regularly seeing temperatures approaching 120°F for much of the year. And you'll have to do this in a matter of single digit years, not decades, in a country that's facing the worst political divisions since the Civil War, with an economy teetering on the edge of recession and possibly - almost certainly if he domino effect of this water crisis plays out the way a lot of people, myself included, think it will - actual collapse. So it's fine in theory, but absolutely impossible in practice. The civilizational complexity of the American West is about to be reduced, and nothing short of a deus ex machina will stop it.