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Already happening. You can buy gas or oil at market rates or you can invest in some renewable energy. As prices for one go up and for the other go down, people

Already happening. You can buy gas or oil at market rates or you can invest in some renewable energy. As prices for one go up and for the other go down, people start doing the right things. As for water, there's plenty of it in the ocean. All you need is some cheap energy to desalinate it. Californians need not worry. One of the richest and high tech economies in the world sitting right next to the largest reservoir of water on the planet. They'll figure it out eventually. I'm not saying it will be easy. But the combination of large scale investments in making renewable energy generation dirt cheap and increasingly more energy efficient ways to desalinate water inevitably means that people will have access to as much water that they need when this gets pushed far enough. Just a matter of time. Lots of places manage to get by with desalinated water already. Large parts of the middle east for example. It's just about making the process cheaper and more efficient.

ptha 4y ago
Desalination is not without problems, producing 1 to 1.5 times the amount of brine (compared to fresh water) being one of them. How to dispose/use this brine. There are some options: https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213 https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-h...
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Sounds like a nice engineering challenge but not a show stopper problem. Also this seems like it would be more of an issue in shallow waters than it would be in open ocean. A simple pipe to deeper waters probably goes a long way to fixing things. The Pacific is pretty deep near the Californian coast and has strong currents too. The volume of water moving through that is probably many orders of magnitude larger than any brine you can dump there. So, unless I'm very wrong about this, I'd expect things to dilute pretty quickly.

ptha 4y ago

Desalination is not without problems, producing 1 to 1.5 times the amount of brine (compared to fresh water) being one of them. How to dispose/use this brine. There are some options: https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-hydroxide-0213 https://news.mit.edu/2019/brine-desalianation-waste-sodium-h...

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Sounds like a nice engineering challenge but not a show stopper problem. Also this seems like it would be more of an issue in shallow waters than it would be in open ocean. A simple pipe to deeper waters probably goes a long way to fixing things. The Pacific is pretty deep near the Californian coast and has strong currents too. The volume of water moving through that is probably many orders of magnitude larger than any brine you can dump there. So, unless I'm very wrong about this, I'd expect things to dilute pretty quickly.