Got anyone in mind cough Kim Kardasian cough? 
Let’s also not forget that, perhaps a little non-intuitively, desalination is a kinda dirty tech. All that waste brine has to go somewhere and the near shore ocean is nor immune to its effect. If we need the water, we need the water - but there will be an environmental impact price to pay which will only go up the more we build.
I’d have to see or work the numbers, but pumping brine a few miles out to sea would not seem to be any major issue unless the pipe is aimed at a fragile band of the shoreline ecosystem. It really should be easy to disperse salty water in salt water. The quantities involved would be comparatively small even in large-scale desal efforts.
Doing it in the desert and trying to dump the brine in pits or something… yeah. That would have consequences.
Prior thread discussing the environmental impact of desalination (short version is that we don’t have a use for all the leftover salt, as Tamerlane notes, and pumping it out to sea will have a noticeable impact on ocean salinity.)
Seems like, but unfortunately what tends to happen is that due to higher density from the concentrated saline relative to seawater, is that it will tend to settle out as a mass to the sea floor impacting benthic life. If the effluent is elevated in temperature it will float, impacting pelagic life. A short-term pulse dispersal is one thing, but continuous industrial-level output is quite another.
Beyond that it is not just high salinity. Periodic acid and caustic solution washes to de-scale fouled reverse osmosis membranes, chlorine dosing of various sorts ( chloramination, bleach solutions or the straight stuff ) for organic fouling control, polymer coagulants in some cases, threshold inhibitors to help prevent scaling, heavy metal concentration from piping or other sources if wastewater is being treated, acid feeds for pH control. Unfortunately there are a lot of chemicals that goes into the process :). Though saline is probably the biggest issue.
All of this stuff can be mitigated a bit of course. But some impact is probably inevitable over time. And the more we build the higher that price will be, both in terms of the upfront energy costs ( enormous and CA has had rolling blackout periods before during peak demand ) and downstream environmental impact. Like I said if it has to be done, it has to be done. But it will cost.
Farmers have a lot invested in their trees, and they can’t take them with them when they move. They’d have to sell their farms and their trees along with them, and under current conditions they wouldn’t be able to get much. How much would you pay for a farm with a bunch of water-thirsty trees during a drought? On top of this, a farmer who planted trees in a new location would have to wait years for them to bear crops. So a farmer who moved would take a loss on his property, and would continue to take losses for years until his new farm started producing.
Also, some of these crops wouldn’t do well in the southeast. They grow avocados in Florida, but I suspect that almonds would do very poorly.
No, I was merely saying that despite the wailing, gnashing of teeth and doomsaying, droughts do end, and often in spectacular fashion.
Aquifer depletion is a somewhat different story though, in that it’s ultimately more a matter of poor resource management and conservation, instead of a rainfall issue.
Well, yes, you could probably say with certainty that all droughts have ended and all droughts will end… as long as you’re not too specific about the timing and overall conditions.
The evidence is quite strong that the southwest is not seeing “just another drought” but the early effects of global climate change. An El Niño next year won’t fix it. Waiting it out is going to need a perpetual calendar. The arc from Stockton to El Paso and beyond is going to return to something a whole lot like desert long before the rains return.
Looks like the salton Sea is doomed. Better sell my beachfront property.
Actually, be the end of the century, if we see 7-9 meters of sea level rise, the Salton Sea could be prime beach property.
Too bad about El Centro and Mexicali, though…
On the other hand, we could dump all the desalinization brine there and it would hardly change a thing. (I’m at least 10% serious, here.)
As the Earth warms, couldn’t the opposite happen? Injecting more energy in the system obviously can warm up air and change patterns so that rain clouds are less likely to fall on a given area. The system is so complex that it seems like there might be earth heating states where these drought prone areas get tons of rainfall and they do ok.
Well, that’s part of what confuses people about “global warming” - that its effects will be widespread change, not necessarily global “warming up and drying out.”
But the consensus seems to be that the desert bands will creep up on the temperate/arable band all around the world. The US grain belt is going to become a lot less productive, the belt will move well up into the northern states and Canada, and the south/west is going to lose its toehold on arability and become mostly desertified.
Wishing otherwise, counting on El Ninos, and hoping enough cyclones blow through to bring regular rain is probably not very useful.
ETA: Which, furthermore, is why the real problem is geopolitical. We’re on pretty good terms with Canada (all of North American is pretty harmonious) - but in Asia, the arable belts are going to move across some rather hostile political borders. When China and Ukraine lose a large part of their productive capacity, Russia better be ready to be a real nice guy.
Municipal water departments charge residential clients a mandatory minimum monthly fee for water even if the client uses less than the minimum amount of water required monthly. Example: Living alone, I conservatively used only 150-200 gal per month in Ranson, WV. They charged me for about a minimum 1200 gallons per month. The price per gallon of water I actually used per month was very high. I did not have a financial incentive to conserve any water what-so-ever. I believe the city makes a nice profit from the Water Dept. The water meters DO NOT measure water by the individual gallon. The water meter clicks over every 100 gallons. And the monthly bill shows water used not by the gallon, but by the cubic feet. This is confusing and deceptive. This needs to be changed in favor of the residential clients. Cites make hidden profits off the water sold. I believe that is why the meters and amounts are not clear for us to understand.
If I refused to pay for 1200 gallons per month they would shut it and the electricity off.
There’s no question that civil water agencies have really antiquated rules, muddled by ill-thought “emergency” changes, and that a lot of them have their financial structure tangled up with town/city/county revenue. But I’m not sure there’s a lot of low-hanging droplets to be gained by tightening up, modernizing and incentivizing urban water use - and only a little from suburban use. (A pricing tier that cuts in for excessive watering and pool fills would be a VERY good idea, but for “normal household/yard use” - there’s not all that much to gain, relative to all the other big users and wasters of water.
I am having trouble with your math, unless you are not counting laundry gallons and showered elsewhere a lot. Even one five-minute shower a day with a low-flow head is around 375 gallons. 30 toilet flushes = 90-100 gallons.
ETA: If you bathed a lot less or somehow combined those uses… we don’t want to know, thanks. 
It’s possible to explain away most such uses. Laundry? The poster uses a laundromat or lives in an apartment with shared laundry facilities (although, AFAIK, most apartment rentals include the water bill, as separate water meters for each unit are rare, unlike the individually billed electric). Showers? The poster works out at a gym most days, and winds up taking a lot of their showers there. Toilet flushes? They’re away from home many hours during the day and wind up using work or public restrooms a lot. It’s believable, though extreme. Of course, the conditions I just listed don’t indicate a “low water use” footprint for the poster - they just shift it to somebody else’s dime, which they ultimately pay for anyway.
It’s still not really possible to explain those figures. Almost nobody takes five minute showers, and most people do not have low-flow shower heads. The average American takes an eight minute shower and uses 516 gallons a month. Even if you took half your showers away from home that’s still 250 gallons. On average, people consume 10 gallons per day from faucets, including bathrooms and kitchens. Cut that in half and it’s still 150 gallons.
On second thought, we also have this:
The meter more likely is used to read 100 cubic foot “units”, which is what the water utility likely bills by - they do here. Perhaps the poster is confusing a bill they got for 2 “units” = 2 CCF for 200 gallons, rather than 200 cubic feet. 200 CCF is 1496 gallons. It might still be the case that they bill for a minimum of 12 units, but that seems high.
My meter looks about like this:
https://www.sjwater.com/for_your_business/business_customer_care/business_reading_your_meter
The meter DOES register much smaller amount than the billed units, which is the CCF number read off the black on white digits. The two lower digits reading actual cubic feet seem to be ignored by the meter reader - they don’t round, they just read the CCF part of the meter. The sweep hand, as noted, measures a single cubic foot. That article should also note the little red triangle to left of center on the meter face. That’s an even finer grained measurement useful for leak detection. If you have even a dripping faucet, that will be turning. You don’t have to note the sweep hand position and wait.
In California, they do, or they’re in violation of the law, since 2014: