> I would challenge you to tell the people in the Southwest of the US to move out... or the Middle East... or desert parts of Africa... or small island nations

> I would challenge you to tell the people in the Southwest of the US to move out... or the Middle East... or desert parts of Africa... or small island nations in the Pacific. Why would I try to do that? Seems authoritarian and wrong to tell people they can't try to live some place. The issue is economics and risks. Let them assume them as they will, no need force move anyone. Water has always been an issue in the west. I'm rather familiar with it as I have researched water rights and live in this region. There is nothing untenable about living in the south western US. Going into the nuance here you seem to be missing. Water rights for the region are principally based on who arrived first. This was intentionally done by the first settlers to insure their own access. As little as 10 years ago you couldn't even collect rain water because you would impede the water access of a water right's owner down stream. Over time this has been tweaked and oh so slowly modernized. It's time for a major overhaul as the quantity is based on the flows that just aren't there anymore. So the water is over allocated, and the costs paid by the water rights owners often do not reflect its scarcity. So you have people with lots of water rights using it to grow animal feed and otherwise farm the desert in a region that is increasingly water scarce. There is plenty of water in the region to support the population if the use cases are allowed to be more elastic. A system needs to be put in place that ALL users pay based on availability, which would provide funds to maintain and build more capacity. If we really value humans then miscellaneous environmental concerns should not be allowed to block large scale water projects. Making such moves would allow people to live there as they desire by removing the cheap water away from mostly farmers and some industrial uses in the region. Which will disrupt a lot of food supplies. This is why I believe our efforts are best centered around food and water, not emissions.