[scythe]

He's doing it wrong.

I don't mean some grander point about environmentalism or development, I mean that I have specifically examined solar desalination for the Imperial Valley and he's missed a much simpler way to get the water from point A to point B.

See, there's this other basin in nearby Mexico called Laguna de Salada which is basically an empty salt flat about ten meters below sea level. If you flood that by dredging a canal (about 10-20 km and not very high), you only have to transport the desalinated water about five kilometers to get it into the Imperial Valley drainage basin.

There's no need to back up the Colorado and mess up what's left of the delta, plus you can put the rejected brine back into the now Golfo de Salada where it will mix more slowly and (hopefully) less destructively with the seawater to the south. The area will still be something of a dead zone, but it would only replace an existing dead zone.