Environment & Energy

...being rapidly depleted. This resource is key to American farming, and it is clearly at risk.

I think about this problem quite a bit.

Ultimately humanity may need to face the issue of desalination, which is energy intensive. There are a number of subsidiary issues with this beyond energy, in particular planetary scale salt gradients.

And no, the energy problem will not be solved by converting all of the US deserts into an industrial park for solar energy.

It is however feasible, not easy nor necessarily "cheap" as our bourgeois Ayn Rand clones around here like to argue, to address part of the energy consideration using process intensification with very high temperature systems. This is a material science problem but certainly one that is increasingly a subject of research.