It’s economic to drill for oil a half a world away, transport that oil great distances by pipeline to ports, load it on to gigantic tankers to move across thousands of miles of ocean, then offload to refineries, crack the crude into a myriad of products, truck those various fuel products to retail outlets in a vast commercial network to sell to Uncle Charlie for his SUV.

Too long a sentence.  I know.  That was part of the point.

Yet (adverb introducing the second part of the point) in a world that’s four-fifths salt water, suffering agricultural drought and lacking viable human water resources, we deem it uneconomic to desalinate.

Is there something wrong with this mind-set?  Should we be doing something about it before the western U.S. blows away?  Do I have my senator’s phone number here somewhere?

So far, the answer is no to all of the above.