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Water: An Ocean of Opportunity

It won't ever happen. A desalination plant only takes a percentage of the water out of salt water. It is too expensive to remove all the water and leave only salt. I believe you are thinking of evaporation, while most of these use reverse osmosis through a membrane via pressure. They have limits on the concentration of salt in the water they will work against.

The concentrated salt water is put back in the ocean 'downstream' of your plant intake. And the water you extract eventually makes its way back to the ocean through evaporation and rain, or sewage treatment, or groundwater, etc. So you are only temporarily separating it, not permanently.

What the article only brushes on and is the main drawback of desalination is the expense. It takes a lot of energy to run the process as you are putting back or reversing the energy of solution. It has been a while since I looked into it, but from memory I think it cost 5 to 10 cents a gallon for treatment when I did. Typical freshwater rates are in the sub 1 cent per gallon range. This water is more like bottled water, used only for drinking, unless you have no other choice. Watering a lawn would be very expensive. In a climate like California or Nevada, it might cost you $500/month for water during the summer using this method if you are a homeowner with a swimming pool and landscape plants. Obviously not feasible for third world countries where that might be yearly earnings.

The true solution to the water crisis (and so many others) is fewer people. Cheaper too. But what are the odds of that? :-(

Inflation: Pass It Through

Inflation is when prices rise because a currency is being debased. It is not about prices rising because of demand or supply shifts in a market. The commodity markets are experiencing huge price gains mostly because of demand increase, not a debasing of the currency, though the US dollar has been debased and is being debased to pay for our deficits. My guess would be that about 25% of the price increase is because of debased US$ and the rest is demand shift up the supply curve.

Gold is subject to inflation also. At the time the Spanish were plundering the new world, gold and silver were the currencies in Europe. The sudden influx of all the gold and silver from the new world caused massive inflation to occur. They debased the currency. Because the supply of gold has increased at a much slower rate than economic production, if we were on the gold standard we would be experiencing deflation. That's because a unit of gold would come to represent more and more production, so could buy more and more.

Inflation is very tempting to those who issue currency, as they get something for nothing. Politicians and debtors especially benefit from inflation.