California has a number of desalination plants online already, including the large billion-dollar Carlsbad project, and several more plants in various stages of planning or construction.
I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also expensive, in both up-front and ongoing costs, and the predicted intermittent wet years are going to make the economics of desalination tricky. And then there's the environmental impact; it's a good bet that 40 years from now, the state will be even drier than it is now, and 40 years of brine dumped up and down the coastline may have more severe consequences than we are anticipating. (To their credit, the Carlsbad project has made a large effort to remediate this with the construction of 60 acres of wetlands.)
For perspective, the Carlsbad plant is the largest in the western hemisphere and it produces enough water for 400,000 residents in one county. It is, aptly, a drop in the bucket.
Salty land will become less fertile to the point of becoming a desert. Very few plants actually like salty soil (mostly marsh plants). "Salt the earth" is an expression for that reason.
I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also expensive, in both up-front and ongoing costs, and the predicted intermittent wet years are going to make the economics of desalination tricky. And then there's the environmental impact; it's a good bet that 40 years from now, the state will be even drier than it is now, and 40 years of brine dumped up and down the coastline may have more severe consequences than we are anticipating. (To their credit, the Carlsbad project has made a large effort to remediate this with the construction of 60 acres of wetlands.)
For perspective, the Carlsbad plant is the largest in the western hemisphere and it produces enough water for 400,000 residents in one county. It is, aptly, a drop in the bucket.