I wonder if this is helpful? 'You are screwed no matter what you do' is not a good way to motivate people to action. People have heard this all before, and don't trust it. You can only cry wolf so many times with apocolyptic stories.

In the UK after a prolonged drought in Southern England the news announced something like, 'The aquifer is so depleted that it will take years to recover'. Then came 3 months of the wettest summer on record. I remember a local fishing tackle shop going out of business because noone could fish due to flooding! The acqifer filled in 3 months.

Then I saw a village in Southern Spain where the acquifer dried up. Someone realised that the Moors had built an ancient water harvesting system in the hills, at least hundreds of years before, and because of rural depopulation the knowledge and labour to maintain them had been lost. The abundance of water was not natural, it was human created, and then human lost.

I think the final problem I wanted to speak about is the 'it's the end users fault' problem. I pay for my water, through water rates (a tax on the property I live in). Others have water meters. The company that gets that money has to supply me water, and take away my sewage. The company used to be a public utility, but was privatised when I was young. When there is a drought they tell me I should shower rather than bath, they ban the use of hosepipes! They tell me to buy low flush toilets and more efficient washing machines. But they never share that pain, they still make massive profits for their shareholders. The private water companies in the UK have not built a single reservoir since privatisation in 1989. To be fair most of the water infrastructure is Victorian. The infrastructure that filed reservoirs was left unmaintained. A staggering amount of water leaks from pipes in the road. Their solution is for me to use less water, so they can continue to get rich. And they know that they can fail to invest forever, and the government will have to bail them out. I suspect this is the problem in other places too.

In WW2 and the decade or so after, the owners were forced to 'improve' the land or have it confiscated by WARAG. The solution was to drain it, so sheep could graze, turn flatter bits into field etc. This was a justifyiable response to the U-boat menace that tried to starve Britain out of the war. The sponge was destroyed

There is now a greater understanding that the sponge is good. There have been small projects to block drains and reflood bits, that then start to sponge again.

But greater roll out meets innevitable resistance. The hill may have a nominal landowner, but it may also have many smaller surrounding properties that have grazing rights on the hill. Now some environmentalists turn up offering to flood their grazing, on a farm that is already marginally profitable... and so we each an impasse.

Downstream are millions of people who want drinking water but don't want flooding. The solution of them paying the 'commoners' to use their grazing as sponge never comes up.

In the lowlands are small rivers that were 'canalised' in the same era. A little stream was dug 6 feet deeper and straightened. This dried the fields for grazing and cultivation. Now people want to restore these streams for both habitat and flood control reasons. Often this is simply by inaction from the people meant to maintain the canal. There is zero talk of ongoing payments to the people who lose fields through this! They are supposed to just put up with it!

I suspect this story has analogues in many other places.

I know 'wanted' is doing a lot of lifting there. Solve the hypothetical as a star trek culture, everyone wants this to work.

What would it look like?

I am under the belief that we get a lot of fresh water but because we baked the earth or paved it, and that an awful lot of water could be redirected into the ground if only we could slow it down.

Could America engineer an aquaduct from the great lakes to california?

would it destroy the great lakes?

i dont know a thing about this topic other than from my arm chair, i'm just here to start a thread if there's interest, i'm sure interested to hear from people smarter than me

Surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen from salt water, and when hydrogen is burned to generate energy it releases desalinated water.

It is inefficient yes, but solar is so cheap I think there is an opportunity for a twofer here.

Private enterprises and individuals will deploy solar panels equivalent to several new nuclear plants every year. IMO governments should invest massively in hydrogen infrastructure. Plants, distribution and storage.

My comment then: UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.

and this is why you need sane people at the top earliest

I've lived all over the USA and I remember wondering why I was stuck with a shitty shower with California-standard shower head even though water was cheap and plentiful where I lived.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754600