“Had they started building desalinating plants 30 years ago, they wouldn’t be in the hole they are in today.”
Have you bothered to investigate the amount of energy desal plants need? They would have been a viable solution if we had stayed with nuclear power, but using fossil fuels for this isn’t a real solution. The truth of the matter is that California ( thanks almost exclusively to Jerry Brown and his cohorts) hasn’t build a new water storage facility since 1979. And in that timeframe the state’s population has doubled. We have a water infrastructure that counts on a snowpack. The reservoirs are not big enough in a normal year to store the early rainfall and the snowpack, so we have to release that water to make way for the snowpack when it melts and it is lost. But that’s only part of the story since the majority of the water (80%) goes for agriculture. And worse still, the Central Valley Project (CVP) was supposed to supply agriculture with water so that it would be able to stop pumping groundwater for irrigation. But when they got the new sources of water, they just opened up more land to farming and kept pumping groundwater.
Now, let me get this straight, the money that the California government spent and are spending on “SPEED TRAINS TO NO WHERE” was better spent on that instead of desalination? While the state was promoting “GREEN REVOLUTION” couldn’t they use those SOLAR PANELS to desalinate the water? They are spending millions of dollars in putting solar panels on hundreds of acres of usable land, instead of using the same panels to desalinate water. Fine use nuclear or solar panels or wind, really doesn’t matter. Israel seems to be doing just fine in using whatever they need to use to desalinate water, and they seem to be winning.