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We Can Terraform the American West


Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing  30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…

Nearly 40 years after he wrote, however, the answer to shrinking flows of the Colorado and ever more demand for living space is not to stage some kind of retreat from land otherwise blessed with climate, solar power potential, mineral and human capital wealth. In this post a year ago I showed how a desalination project in the Imperial Valley could not only double southern California’s water availability but also jump start an enormous brine mineral extraction industry, convert the Salton Sea environmental catastrophe into a warmer version of Lake Tahoe, and pay for itself in short order. Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, the eastern Cascades, much of India, Australia, Namibia, Chile, Argentina, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Saharan Africa could be, with the use of less than 1% of its land for solar desalination, converted into an arbitrarily fertile paradise.

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