Can Desalination Save the Southwest?

And the bigger lesson...

For the past 70 or so years, settlers have been pouring into the US Southwest, some to retire in the sun, others to farm the desert, and still others to work in the casinos and hotels that are sprouting like mushrooms out there.

But there’s a fatal flaw in this mass migration: All of the above takes water, and that is running out.

A Little History

Back in 1922, when California was already well-established but Arizona and Nevada were just being born, those states agreed to share the water that flowed through the Colorado River.

But the terms of the deal — reflecting the states’ respective populations and the unusually large amount of water available at the time — ended up being shockingly favorable for California and potentially deadly for its neighbors. In a nutshell, California has first claim on most of the water that flows from the Colorado, and Arizona and Nevada get what’s left over.

As the current drought intensifies, big parts of the southwest risk being left literally high and dry. And since the 1922 deal has already survived court challenges, wresting more water from California may not be legally possible.

Tech to the Rescue?

If traditions and contracts don’t work, maybe technology can forge a new order. In this case, the savior tech is desalination, which is the process of extracting salt and other impurities from seawater to make fresh water. Israel does it, and several such plants are now operating on the US West Coast.

So why not roll out a few dozen more desalination plants and solve the problem once and for all? Well, that might actually work someday, but…

Not Yet

Water produced via desalination is at least twice as expensive as current sources, which would render much of the Southwest’s economic activity prohibitively expensive. We’re talking billions of dollars a year for a city the size of San Diego, just for water.

Meanwhile, the by-products of desalination include a lot of nasty things besides salt, and there’s no generally accepted way of disposing of it. Dumping it back into the ocean is the obvious solution, but all that salt and toxic chemicals are deadly for sea life. So desalination, for now, will not save Arizona and Nevada.

The Easy (But Currently Inconceivable) Answer

As with so much of the US economy, the answer to this problem is to simply stop doing stupid things. We borrow huge amounts of money and can’t imagine not living that way. We drive tons of metal for long distances to run errands. We eat horrendously poisonous foods because they’re convenient, and then demand that someone else cover the cost of our healthcare. Southwestern water use is just one more example of the dysfunction that has to end, even though we can’t yet conceive of it.

From a recent CNBC article on desalination:

Fallowing lower value agriculture is a cheaper and better alternative from a national and state perspective, since agriculture uses approximately 80% of the Colorado River’s water. “It’s the cheapest and most sustainable way to bring the system back into balance,” Lund said.

That’s right. Stop farming in the desert, and there will be plenty of water for retirees to bask in the sun and industries that turn heat and photons into cash to thrive.

This is inconceivable because those farms have existed for living memory, and powerful interests want them to continue. But markets don’t care about tradition. They reward what works and exterminate what doesn’t. And desert farming is about to experience an epic bout of creative destruction.

The Broader Lesson

So much of what we now take for granted was only possible because fiat currencies granted governments unlimited credit cards, which they used to addict their citizens to credit-based life and enrich a banking/pharma/military aristocracy that feasted on easy money.

But like desert farming, debt-based consumption and regulatory capture are parasites that eventually destroy their hosts — if they’re not purged from the system in time. Let the purge begin.