[floatrock]

So basically pump seawater up from the Gulf of California across the border over a flat floodplain to the Salton Sea (south of joshua tree) and use cheap PV to run desalination plants that will restore one of our biggest environmental disasters https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/sea-worth-salt back into a vacation hotspot greater than Palm Springs.

Costs of the PV and desal (relatively cheap but still absurdly expensive in absolute terms at this scale) will be offset by real estate development and hand-wavey mineral extraction from the sea water.

Environmental impacts of desal's salty waste stream is hand-waved away.

I mean, economic math miiight pencil out. But basing the speculative prosperity of an entire region on a bunch of water and energy machines seems... well... fragile? Full of hubris? Seems like a really expensive way of maintaining an otherwise-unsustainable Potemkin vacation village.

But then again, that's basically the story of the american southwest, so, /shrug? (see Cadillac Desert and all the water stories out there...)

[bryanlarsen]

AFAICT, restoring the Salton Sea and capturing the land appreciation is the mechanism for funding the project, not the goal. The goal is to restore the Colorado river.

[floatrock]

And what pays for it again in a decade when the corroded water pipelines start to need replacement?

Or 30 years when the solar reaches end of life?

I assume original developers will have cashed out by then, someone else is left holding the bag, and the Salton Sea collapse story plays out a second time because it's just too expensive to maintain. That, or it's an exclusive enclave to the LA ultra-wealthy who don't mind that the high taxes keep the undesirables away, all while they've gotten the state to subsidize their vacation homes because the state is trapped and can't afford not to keep the machine running.

[bryanlarsen]

High property values and rich residents mean lots of property and income taxes to pay for maintenance.

[datadrivenangel]

We must maintain our life support machines.

Or move to places that don't need them.

[deelowe]

Isn't that the same story with Vegas? Would it exist without the hoover dam?

[floatrock]

And Los Angeles. And Phoenix.

Not saying it doesn't work. Clearly it does, at least for a time or up to a certain level of population (Phoenix is banning new development because it's literally out of water, California is poster-child for water wars).

I guess it's something about spending that much effort and human capital to force something so inherently unsustainable that just seems... wasteful? Full of hubris? I don't know, maybe it's just a general sadness that this much ingenuity isn't being spent elsewhere where it could amplify existing natural forces instead of fighting a never-ending battle against entropy for something that doesn't want to exist.

Or maybe I'm just an internet sourpuss without enough vision. I just can't shake the "why are we doing this" melancholy about this.

[tracerbulletx]

Yeah it wouldn't be a city but just as a fun fact Las Vegas means "The Meadows" it had a really big aquifer and artesian springs fed by the Spring Mountains. It was sustainable as a town without the dam. Vegas also is allocated a very small portion of the water from Lake Mead, Nevada only gets about 4% of what is taken from it every year, and most of that is for farming still. The city probably needs like 1% to survive.

[tracerbulletx]

We're already doing that with dams.