Eli5: why haven’t we started considering or implementing large scale desalinization in response to our water shortages?
In: 307
So I’m going to talk about this from the perspective of the western United States. Obviously things will be different depending on where you live.
There isn’t really a “shortage” of water in the United states. I mean there *technically is*, we don’t have as much water as we want to use, but that “shortage” has far more to do with what we use the water for than lack of rain or snow.
Industrial, home use and commercial water use make up only 14% of all water use in the United States. There’s plenty of water in the state that even if those users quadrupled their demand (they never would), we would have no problem meeting that need. The category that is actually using all of our water (86%) is agriculture. Now agriculture is really important and I’m not saying we should stop growing food but many of these farmers are receiving huge allotments of water at ridiculously cheap prices (tens or hundreds of gallons per penny, orders of magnitude cheaper than water to salination could ever provide). For varying reasons too, they are not being incentivized to be very efficient with their water use either. In fact, because many of their water allowments are written weirdly into state laws, they actually need to use an excess amount of water or they lose it. Even the ones who aren’t incentivized in that way are getting water so cheap that they’re frequently just using it to dump in the desert to grow incredibly water inefficient crops like alfalfa for cattle feed.
Tldr: the Western United States has plenty of water to meet its needs. If we could figure out how to stop vastly overusing it.
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