Desalination is Not a Solution to the Water Crisis
There is no magic bullet solution to the climate. Sorry
We’ve been talking a lot about the global water crisis lately.
Whether it be aridification in the western States in the U.S., the massive drought that hit my country last summer, rising ocean temperatures, or severe water scarcity on the African continent, everywhere you look there is a water issue.
Mexico struggles with freshwater; India’s drinking water crisis is well known, and most of us know all about the issues with obtaining clean water in Gaza while it’s under siege. It goes without saying that in warzones like Ukraine and South Sudan, access to safe water is outrageously difficult to find.
And then you bring in climate change, and it all gets worse.
Rivers are drying up, flooding is smashing records where it never happened before, and whole regions are having to completely revamp their local infrastructure to meet changing needs.
People are desperate for answers. I wish I could give easy, practical solutions to these issues that would be implemented quickly and painlessly, and solve our problems so that this all can stop.
People crave simplicity. They want to be able to brush these problems away and get back to living life in peace.
I wish I could give them that. But I can’t. Nobody can. Because the truth is, this is a complicated problem with many moving parts, and it’s going to take a monumental restructuring of our entire system to get caught up — let alone halt progress and reverse the damage.
There is no magic bullet solution to the climate crisis. No simple, easy answers, no one-stop-shop method of preserving our way of life.
The good news is, we know how to fix it.
The bad news is we aren’t doing it because profit and convenience are in the way.
Let me talk about the title of this piece for a second, because the topic of desalination is what inspired this whole rant.
Desalination is the process of pulling salt out of salt water — usually sourced from the ocean in some form or another. Desalination plants draw in the sea, filter out the salts, organic matter and toxic chemical contamination through reverse osmosis and filtration, and provide clean water that becomes available for people to use.
Now, in theory, this sounds awesome. I saw someone suggest it in the comments on one of my articles a while back as a possible solution to aridification in the American Midwest; desalinated seawater could be shipped in from the coast to help meet the shortfall.
It’s already heavily used in the Middle East to provide drinking water to millions of people in arid regions with little rainfall.
That’s one of the infrastructure pressure points being targeted in the U.S.A.’s ill-advised war with Iran. Trump targets Iranian desalination plants, and Iran strikes back against plants operated by America’s allies.
In the tit-for-tat, local civilians lose out. Drinking water becomes harder and harder to find.
On paper, great. Desalination plants sound awesome. They provide clean water from a readily available source; after all, our planet’s surface is like 70% ocean!
But in practice, the process is absolutely not sustainable for the rest of the globe.
The thing with removing salt from seawater is that the salt does not disappear. It has to go somewhere. You have a ton of leftover heavily concentrated brine that needs to be disposed of.
Where does it go?
Well, unfortunately, it often goes right back into the ocean.
Salt levels in the ocean are not easily sorted out, as it turns out; heavy salt sinks, and it leads to the water near the sea floor being heavily contaminated and difficult for oxygen to penetrate.
This is bad news for the plants that depend on oxygenated water, and even worse news for the fish, which have adapted to a far lesser volume of salt. You screw up the balance, and you wind up poisoning the entire ecosystem.
The marine wildlife quite literally suffocates.
Now, depending on where the plant is situated, there might be strict environmental rules about dilution and distribution of that brine to help prevent an imbalance of salt in the ocean.
Might be. That depends on the laws and regulations where the plant was built. And it also depends on how legally conscious the owners and operators of the plants are.
After all, we’ve talked about the infamous Hanford Site before. The operators of the nuclear plant were well aware of the dangers of nuclear radiation, but they fell back on extremely unsafe practices and disposal methods anyway because it was cheaper and more convenient.
Their negligence not only cost workers the comfort of a long, healthy life, but they’ve rendered swathes of Washington state toxic and left the government scrambling with a cover-up.
If you think these plants are following all of the rules just because the rules are on paper, I have a lovely pond to sell you in the Sahara.
As long as the penalty for breaking the law is cheaper than the money you lose in following it, corporations will consider legal defence fees to be the smarter business decision.
In the eyes of the owner class, money is greener than ethics.
Desalination is not the only silver bullet proposal for the water crisis.
There’s also evaporation, solar capture, mist-harvesting and rain collection — all methods of what’s called atmospheric water harvesting.
These have their own problems. But the biggest one shared by all is that these are not solutions; they are stop-gap measures. Methods of providing water in the short term as the crisis continues to get worse.
There is no magic solution. The issue is climate change.
That’s our fight.
The thing with climate change is that we know exactly what’s causing it. We know the impact of fossil fuels and how they affect the atmosphere. We know about the tipping points that fuel global weather instability and warming. We know that it’s our overreliance on electricity use and convenience that causes this mess.
It’s the corporations pouring billions of tons of harmful gases into the air, pouring toxins into the water, and dumping oil into the oceans. It’s the millions of tons of plastic waste in landfills full of perfectly edible food left to rot, because it doesn’t look pretty enough for grocery market shelves.
It’s the industries that destroy forests, logging as if we have immeasurable abundance, clearing farmland for cattle and monocrop farms.
It’s the constant one-day shipping and never-ending stream of cars that clog the roads, necessitating more land used for tarmac and asphalt and parking lots.
And we know how that goes, don’t we?
How Does Public Transportation Help the Environment?
Where I live, public transportation is spotty at best.
We know how to fix climate change and start to reverse it. But it means that many of the conveniences and luxuries we’ve grown used to need to stop.
We need to drastically cut back on fossil fuels — eradicate them if necessary. We need to find methods of carbon capture, restoring forests and ecosystems and grasslands that effectively work as sinks.
We need to stop producing so much waste, stop putting corporate profits above the needs of citizens and quit throwing away perfectly usable foods to rot and contribute to landfills that don’t need to exist.
We need to go back to reusing instead of throwing away.
One-day shipping needs to stop. Public transportation needs to replace cars as much as possible. Our extravagant energy use needs to roll back to reasonable levels, not just at the individual level but at the level of industry.
We need to stop polluting and start working to solve the crisis. We need to take it as seriously as we took the Pandemic.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because we all know how that went.
Millions of people were told they needed to stay at home and mask up to save other people’s lives, and millions of people said ‘fuck no.’
It pricked their convenience. It pricked their personal enjoyment. They wanted haircuts, restaurants, to go see movies and be with their friends — no matter what it did to anyone else, they got theirs.
Imagine telling them they had to cut down on power consumption entirely. In a world where Netflix and computer games are the only source of enjoyment for so many people, can you imagine if regulations tried to cut back?
Can you imagine taking those gigantic trucks off the road and telling Joe Buddy he can’t drive his Hummer anymore?
Can you imagine telling these people that they can’t have plastic bags at the grocery store? We did that in Canada, and they still bitch about it years later. The fuss people make over plastic straws is insane.
Imagine telling them they can’t have same-day delivery anymore because there’s a limit to how much a corporation can pollute per day and they repeatedly hit their quotas too quickly, so they have to find an alternate method of shipping. They already scream about carbon taxes at the gas pump.
Trains would come back, but holy shit these people would lose their goddamn minds!
They won’t go backwards in lifestyle. And it’d cut into corporate profits to force them to, so they won’t.
So we’re left hunting for other solutions, ones that won’t affect people’s happiness or lives in measurable ways. It’s hard to find, and I don’t know if we’ll do it quickly enough.
There’s no magic bullet to solve the climate crisis. So here we are. And it only gets worse from here.
Solidarity wins.