Too bad we don’t pump sea water to the desert, fill up a basin somewhere we don’t care so much about, let all the brine sit in evaporation pools, and power it all with local solar. Input from somewhere in Gulf of California and send the water to somewhere in imperial county away from the crops. We process Tijuana’s sewage free of charge so it seems reasonable we could ask Mexico to help us with a pipeline.
Desalinization at scale produces a LOT of brine. Like, way more than anyone needs. The evaporation pools would need to be gargantuan to service SoCal. State of California uses about 5maf of water (non-ag; with agriculture, much much more). That's is 6 cubic km of brine, per year. Say we service SoCal, that's 3 km^3 of brine per year... The entire salton sea is 7km^3. And that is only residential/commercial use like drinking water.
Which basin don't we care about? The desert is not "outside the environment" especially at that scale. There are critters living even in the most godforsaken areas of Anza Borrego. We are talking an environmental catastrophe, something like the Aral Sea.
plus california has the literal example of the salton sea ecological disaster here to draw upon. like, brine is a well known and difficult problem to deal with at scale. it isn’t just the massive amounts of salt, it’s all the concentrated metals as well.
