[Retric]

Except this isn’t about drinking water its just agriculture and not even agriculture used inside the US.

Spending 8% of the US budget to subsidize exports would be lunacy. Ban Alpha exports from California largely solves the problem within the state as does a host of other possibilities like say charging a fee for using an aquifer.

Anyway it’s a self correcting problem, when farms can’t pump out water they will shut down reducing water use. The US is such a massive exporter that none of this will be noticed by US consumers.

[Veserv]

Then don’t do that. You are the one who brought up alfalfa, the classic example of a low value good being subsidized by unsustainable and flagrant water usage, as evidence that desalination is not viable.

I pointed out how even if we decided to support and subsidize the moronic use cases the US can still easily support a desalinated water economy if we had to.

In actuality, if we moved to bulk desalination we would see a reconfiguration of water usage to higher value usage since water would be immensely more expensive. However, despite being much more expensive, even if we massively overestimate water usage by including water wasteful export crops, desalination still ends up being viable including the usage that would almost certainly disappear if they did not get to defray their depletion externalities.

Massive overestimate comes out reasonable. Therefore correct estimate will also come out reasonable.

[Retric]

Simply introducing vastly more expensive desalinated water isn’t going to get people to use it when they can just pump more water from aquifers.

You need to fix the underlying issues or nothing changes. But by fixing those issues there’s no niche for desalination.

Desalination is a solution in search of a problem, not a useful tool here.