The political problem for the parts of California where desalination would probably make a lot of sense (for example, from north of Los Angeles through to San Diego), the value of beach property is through the roof and ONLY very rich (and very well connected politically) people own property. In the past, they have fought furiously against ANY "ugly" desalination plants of any kind. That's one issue that will have to be surmounted.
The other is that, for example, just the reduction from Lake Mead, which supplies Los Angeles and Las Vegas, will be reduced by 750,000 acre-feet (? trillion gallons.) The need is, of course, much greater than that. It's just announced that their State Water Project, which had already warned they would be at only 5% normal, decided to go to 0%. They transfer water from northern California to southern. You are probably talking of a need on the order of many trillions of gallons of water a year. I've honestly no exact figure. But just the Lake Mead shortage alone gives a limit that must be very much smaller.
Reverse Osmosis is a technique that is said to achieve perhaps $3 for every 1000 gallons in areas like that. Assume the politics is dealt with. The cost would run easily into many billions of dollars for desalination. Might be $10 billion, or $20 billion... I've no idea. But it runs into serious money.
Should they do it? Sure. Los Angeles is a huge city of people living in what is essentially a semi-arid to arid desert where NO HUMANS should EVER have lived. Certainly not in that qty. They have to suck fresh water from distant states in order to balance the need now. It's insane. If they want to continue, it's probably a good idea that they use their nearby resource (ocean and sun) to start creating their own supplies on a large scale.
Will they do it? No idea.
As far as parts of the west that do NOT have an ocean resource? Big problem.
The U.S. southwest has a water problem even without climate change, though I rather doubt that desalination will be a major solution. It might be advisable in a few coastal areas with abundant solar or wind energy to run the desalination plants.
desalination on a large scale is very expensive US southwest and southern cali were little more than desert when first populated. If it wasn't for aquifers and diverting the Colorado river to supplt water, they would have barely been able to grow crops of have green lawns.
About 90% of the worlds water resources are use for agriculture and cattle farming, so as the population grows, more and more water resources will be depleted including the southwest US
Drought conditions in Cali have been bad this year and this can be expected to be the norm due to climate change
That area is subject to periodic severe droughts lasting up to several hundred years.
So desalinization or something similar will probably eventually be necessary to prevent the occasional drought driven depopulation suffered by the Hopi, Zuni & mogolon peoples in precolumbian times.
I hate to shoot you down, but my Triple Output solution was implemented by another nation to feed their country 4 times better and at the same time Turned OFF Global Warming, confirmed by our Satelite reports 11/28/2012. As for plant life, there are lots of plant life in the west. There's a hundred thousand acres of plant and timber life in the northwest just around me alone not counting all the rest. Mike
No. Global warming has never been proven to be a scientific problem.
