Or. You use technology. Even places like Saudi Arabia have water for everyone. We cannot after hundreds of years predict human behavior with much accuracy but we can fix water problems.
When you are a small country where much of it is bordered by water and the largest distance from tip to next border is ~300km, and you have immense oil wealth, desal and distribution makes sense.
Not explain to me how that works for a state like Arizona, where the closest salt water body is ~80km to the state boundary, yet the closest metro area (Tucson or phoenix) is 250+km. How does processing and delivery get paid for? Note those are the two closest areas.
I picked AZ because there are neighborhoods growing and some are having to rely on trucked in water.
This is a false dichotomy. There's no conflict between studying things from a social science angle and creating water infrastructure. They're not coming out of the same budget, they're not coming out of the same talent pool, they're not mutually exclusive, there's just no conflict there.
I agree that foreign aid is a good way to avoid conflict. I'd love to see the US help the entire world have access to clean water. Shame that they dismantled the apparatus for providing it.
That's like saying HR's budget is the same as Accounting's budget because they're both part of Incorporated Widgets, and that we should fire Bob in HR because Sandra is a good accountant. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense or reflect how these decisions are actually made. Funding more social sciences doesn't actually mean funding less other science, just like hiring an HR rep doesn't entail firing an accountant.
Different funds are appropriated for different purposes, funding the kind of research you're talking about would likely be connected to an NSF grant or a national lab. Note as well that science, like everything else, experiences diminishing returns. Putting 1000x the money into water treatment research won't get you 1000x the return. Allocating funds at the scale of the federal government isn't zero sum; you can saturate the amount of funding it's possible to provide, and it does make sense to spread funding around many different areas.
Incidentally, that research you want to see is probably in jeopardy because the grant funding it contains forbidden words like "environment."
Not explain to me how that works for a state like Arizona, where the closest salt water body is ~80km to the state boundary, yet the closest metro area (Tucson or phoenix) is 250+km. How does processing and delivery get paid for? Note those are the two closest areas.
I picked AZ because there are neighborhoods growing and some are having to rely on trucked in water.