Desalinated water is $1000+ per acre-foot, while water from existing water infrastructure is heavily subsidized and sold for a few dollars per acre-foot to farmers. There are many reasonable arguments as to why we should not be building new infrastructure that produces water at 100x the cost it is currently sold at. Nearly all water projects in the west in the last hundred years are “political”, not economic.
OP sounds like someone not from 'the west'. Water has always been political in the western US and will always be. Like, there is this little Rep.-Dem. divide out here, but when push comes to shove, the real divide is water rights. Hell Chinatown was all about water. California's water wars [0] go back a long ways, and those struggles are emblematic of all western US states to some degree.
