Has desalination replaced water marketing as the future new source of water for Southern California?
I don’t believe it replaces it. However, it is the upper bound. Obviously desalination is technically do-able. It may have its own environmental issues before we get done, and economically it is certainly on the high side of what water supply is going to cost, but it is physically possible to do it. Los Angeles is planning on completing a prototype desalination facility within the next decade to establish our scientific and operational understanding for the future. However, the answer to meeting our water supply needs truly is going to be a combination of all of these methods. I don’t think that you can say any one solution is going to be satisfactory. We need a multiplicity of things – when you have a problem with one there is something else to rely on. That’s where Los Angeles has done well over the years and continues to do well—we have four separate sources of supply and they don’t all go dry at once. What explains the failure of water marketing in California? First, the so-called
