[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
One more note: The California Water Wars were a result of the profiteering prescience of Frederick Eaton and William Mulholland, entertainingly fictionalized in the haunting masterpiece Chinatown (though as far as I know, Eaton didn’t rape his daughter and marry her off to Mulholland). There was a very deliberate, and in hindsight, very obvious profit motive for doing so, and in a time when California was still a frontier and both the state and federal courts more flexible to corporate interests.
The environmental and agricultural impacts of the water theft to nominal and downstream users of the water from the Sierra Nevada runoff and Colorado River Basin is manifest and detrimental, and will dramatically influence and overshadow any future water redirection efforts, most likely even those ostensibly for the mitigation of said demands. The failure of the Colorado River Compact, the Owens Valley Memorandum of Understanding, and the California Water Quality Act of 1970 to protect the interests of people and areas which stood in competition to the water requirements of Los Angeles will remain in the forefront and feed the skepticism of anyone offering plans to “take care of” other interests. One only need drive through the Owens Valley (once described as “Switzerland of California”, now almost a desert with irregular overflow-fed marse) to understand the cynicism displayed by those who would reflexively contest any plan involving moving water around through the Southwest.
Stranger
[/QUOTE]
I grew up in the valley just south of the Owens Valley, and I have an extensive interest in its history. Contrary to the popular perception, the valley’s basic look hasn’t changed hardly at all. Yes, Owens Lake is now dry, which is a really bad result (it used to be deep enough to float a paddle-wheel steamer), but the Owens River was never a very robust waterway, and the valley floor, until it was irrigated by settlers (who set up orchards, for the most part) looked much as it does today, because most of the water in the Owens River comes from north of the valley; the valley itself gets only a relatively small input from the East side of the Sierra Nevada. The concept of a “lush” valley floor is the romanticization of people opposed to the Los Angeles Aqueduct. So, except for a dry lake bed, and the addition of some reservoirs (Crowley Lake, Tinemaha Reservoir, Haiwee Reservoir), and a somewhat reduced riparian ecosystem along the lower Owens River (after the main diversion intake), the valley really isn’t that changed.
As for the water issue, power is nothing but money. As I have pointed out, the main resistance to desalination is the cost, not the lack of ability to engineer it. In societies where water is expensive as a necessity, the issue is mooted. In our society, we have yet to reach a point where cheap water is no longer available. And while we certainly can be more efficient in its use, there will quickly come a point (and Las Vegas is fast reaching it) where it simply will pay to undertake the engineering and cost involved.
As for eminent domain issues, nonsense. They still build new pipelines in the East and Midwest, and, while it isn’t like the salad days where you just trampled the rights of landowners, it isn’t particularly hard to accomplish, just time-consuming. After all, eminent domain is a right of the government in our land, and one government has never been shy about employing when needed.
I make the following claim, and will be happy to be proven wrong if it turns out not to be true: we will be involved in large-scale desalination in the US WELL before we are involved in significant fusion power production. 
