3 ms·

That doesn't mean it has to be the case. Israel is a good model for how you can invest heavily in desalination and irrigation efficiency and support profitable

• woodruffw 4y ago
  Sure. It's all a manner of economic and political pressures and weights. We can also colonize the Moon or fill in the New York Harbor, but there are much cheaper and more realistic alternatives. Israel is an unusual case: it's a state that exists more or less by religious mandate, meaning that its residents have gone above and beyond ordinary economic and political forces to make it livable. Lots of individual outcomes there can be applied elsewhere (like drip irrigation), but much is also politically infeasible in the US (like Israel's central authority that progressively taxes commercial water use.) Ecological variables also differ: the majority of people in Israel live in the Northern half of the country, which is wetter and greener than the American Southwest. That's also where agriculture is concentrated.