this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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Desalination is a thing. The only bankruptcy for a lot of these places is the lack of leadership and investment into providing water.
I mean, the reality is that the lions share of water in all the places listed in the graph above goes to agriculture. And a lot of agricultural water is lost to evaporation. In Iran, for example, they are currently suffering a water crisis - but a big part of their problem is that the government mandates that X percent of all food sold in the country must be grown in the country.
Desalinization is nice and all, but there are much better and easier solutions to these problems, like making water cost more for farmers so they invest in tech to stop letting it evaporate or grow less water intensive crops, or importing more food instead of growing it locally.
I was under the impression large scale desalinization is prohibitively expensive, is that not the case?
Dying croplands and dehydrated people are expensive too. We can somehow afford to build crude oil pipelines from Canada to Houston Texas, but desalination is always “too expensive”.
It’s just a matter of priorities. California built a desalination plant in the 90s but then mothballed it. Thankfully they’ve come to their senses, refurbished it, and opened a number of additional plants since then.
https://californiacurated.com/2025/03/13/salt-to-salvation-the-desalination-revolution-in-californias-drought-battle/
Thanks, point noted. I’ll give this a read later
Israel gets 55% of its water through desalination and the UAE over 40%. It's all over the US too, El Paso, TX, for example gets 25% of its water through the desalination of brackish groundwater
My understanding is that its very energy intensive and thats where the economic pressure happens. Cheap (and clean) power makes it viable.
There's also a bunch of environmental costs.
There can be. But we are getting to the point of no return where we are going to have to do this. Water is becoming the new oil.
We could do things like not sell our ground water to Nestle to bottle up and send away. And we could charge data centers what the water they use is worth. Gray water for toilets and irrigation is also a thing.
But again, all of that takes competent leadership that believes in infrastructure, and money (that’s currently being spent elsewhere like oil subsidies and ICE recruiting ads).