The simple truth is, it’s the most expensive way to make water. Okay? But at the end of the day it’s often the only option…I think it would make sense in Southern California, ‘cause you’re at the end of the pipe in San Diego and the further south you get from LA (Los Angeles), you know. I think it would make sense to have another plant or two strategically located
Interview with desalination industry expert of more than 30 years of experience (October 2019, emphasis added).
Desalination, sometimes also called desalting, desalinization, or more conversationally, “desal,” is the process of producing potable water from the sea. Of course, this is an obviously fascinating idea and would seem to solve innumerable resource scarcity problems. For example, in March of 2016, American television host, engineer, and comedian William Sanford Nye, a.k.a., Bill Nye the Science Guy, said “desalinization could be the key to the future for so many of us humans.” [1]
But, I would contend, we need to be asking what kind of future we want (e.g., Singh et al. 2021). To be sure, desalination is a maturing industry, with significant expected growth, up to $32 billion (that’s about half the estimated size of the wind industry) [2], in the coming years. And new technological applications continue to be tried, such as the possibilities of nuclear desalting processes, as at the Ōi nuclear power plant in Japan. Furthermore, these trends have gained attention across a range of sub-sectors and funders. For instance, the World Bank is enthusiastic:
Today, over 20,000 desalination plants in more than 150 countries supply about 300 million people with freshwater every day. Initially a niche product for energy rich and water scarce cities, particularly in the Middle East, the continued decrease in cost and environmental viability of desalination has the potential to significantly expand its use – particularly for rapidly growing water scarce coastal cities. [3]
All of this has occurred amidst discussions of a “Green New Deal” (O’Neill and Schneider 2022), with the notion au courant in the water sector is “the blue economy.” For example, the European Union’s Blue Economy Report outlines the need for desalination’s proliferation, because it is “poised to provide a solution to this impending crisis,” i.e., climate change (emphasis added). [4] And so, while the wind turbine has now become the symbol of the “green economy,” desalination is becoming a similarly captivating “blue” bastion.
As a sociologist interested in the fervor surrounding new technological innovation, I have been trying to reframe some of the debate around desalination. Isn’t the point that people, in society, need to drink this water?
From 2019 to 2020, I was engaged in 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork into the historical contours and the contemporary politics of this pressing global climate adaptation issue. I examined the various debates surrounding the question of whether or not to produce a new source of water, desalinated water for cities and regions concerned about scarcity (O’Neill 2020; 2022; 2023). A common refrain I heard from industry experts, executives, as well as some public sector officials was that desalination is a strategic decision, as the opening quotation describes.
To give another example, Governor of California Gavin Newsom was fond of saying desalination is needed because it is “another tool in the toolbox” aimed at diversifying the water supply portfolio of cities or regional water entities. [5] Of course, in our contemporary mode of public sector austerity, such a tool must always be mobilized via some public private partnership model. However, if I would have stayed at the level of the decision-makers, that is, to preoccupy myself with understanding their logics, my findings would have consisted of a rather homogenous refrain (of course with some exceptions) echoing the discourses I have just outlined.
One of the remarkable qualities of ethnography is that it is a mode of investigation that it is not geographically bound, per se (to a city, a neighborhood, etc.), and that it is ideally suited to articulating competing, or conflicted concerns and debates that span multiple, more or less organized social groups. What I was fascinated in then was not desalination technology as such, but rather people who were finding themselves in debates about this approach to producing what cultural geographer Matthew Gandy has called “unconventional water” (2014). It was therefore very striking when I would discuss the desalination issue with local residents in California, who felt marginalized in a debate that would directly impact their city and surroundings with the construction of a 50 mgd plant, or what they would sometimes call “the water factory.”
And so, what did I hear in the field? My conversations at town halls and street corners didn’t consist of how to make crystal catalysts (largely the stuff of science fiction), how efficient reverse osmosis is or could be, or even if there are other methods like solar energy that could be applied as a source to produce the water. I heard a much broader set of considerations. For example, desalination is not done just anywhere – it is specific in its requirements of land, energy, and other resources, and as the case of the United States is showing, a conducive political and regulatory climate.
During fieldwork, my aggrieved interlocutors saw a contradiction in the siting of numerous industrial waste, energy, and oil projects in their midst – an area they called “the toxic triangle.” As one resident put it to me, the area of coastline and neighborhood where the plant I studied would be sited has become “a good dumping ground” utilized to improve the municipal tax base (Interview, March 2020). And indeed, who wants to live near a cacophony of industry?
Likewise, environmental justice was a concern across my project. One of my Latino interlocutors discussed the issue, going even further by discussing how certain organizations had, sometimes quite surprisingly, been promoting the technology:
BFO: When did desalination come on your radar?
OR: Desalination has been on our radar here in Oak View since 2016. That was when Poseidon5 was, you know, trying to market this project to the Latino community, saying this was an environmental justice (sic).
BFO: In terms of being good for the community to provide them with more water?
OR: Yeah, to provide [us] with more water. So, they were going out to organizations, specifically, the William C. Velazquez Institute, which is based in Texas with the Southwest Border Registration Project. And, unfortunately, the guy who founded it, William C. Velazquez, he ended up passing away not too long ago. And, they have done some good work in terms of registering people to vote in the Latino community, and also, with organizations like Hermandad Mexicana, which have a lot of followers in the Latino community here. The problem that I see here is that you have this big company … Wall Street investors, coming in with their money and trying to persuade the community—in this particular case the Latino community —that the water is needed, and that we’re in a drought, we’re needing water. But I think they were using that to their advantage to push for this agenda.
Much to the chagrin of the California Governor and other promoters the project mentioned in this excerpt was eventually denied its permit from the California Coastal Commission on May 12, 2022, specifically because of the problematic relation to environmental justice that the project had. [6]
As my discussion has outlined though, it is tremendously difficult to step outside of certain ingrained forms of instrumental rationality (Gunderson, Stuart, and Petersen 2018). And while I am sure many of us will be sympathetic to the tact of economistic thinking – and probably have used it ourselves – this likely unconscious atomization of our “troubles” needs to be problematized if we want to think more seriously about climate change adaptation. Sociological analysis then continues to be relevant, and especially for the oceans, because otherwise we risk conceiving of harms as divorced from humanity. Instead of talking about people’s lives, we are implored to discussions of technological particular, property values, hotels, parking lots, and the list could go on. Similarly, we need to think in ways that are not just preventative, like so many technological fixes, i.e., staving off the problem until a new technology can be innovated (O’Neill and Boyer 2020), but generative and restorative with regard to our relationship to the natural world (Abrahamsen and Williams 2009; Harvey 2020).
By way of conclusion, this brief essay has not been so much an attempt to recapitulate the plethora of findings I uncovered. Nor is it an attempt to outline and enumerate some policy recommendations on desalination. The aim has been much deeper – to strike at the core of the logic, the way we think about water and climate adaptation and to give pause on the structure of thinking surrounding it: that spending inordinate time, resources, and energy on so-called strategic, technological solutions at the expense of a social program cannot be the road forward. We need to see more discussions of social equity in oceans in general, and certainly desalination specifically if we are to combat the still pervasive logic of techno-solutionism and techno-optimism and move toward a more just, respectful, compassionate, and livable future society based on a reasonable use of resources (Hickel 2020). If the principles of equity were what guided our thinking, industrial, community dividing, polluting technologies might not be our only option.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3rn5AMybZs
[3] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/31416. This remains a hotly debated topic within academic and industry circles, as research supported by the United Nations, for example, has shown that the actual discharge of brine, the hyper-saline byproduct of desalination is higher than predicted.
[4] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/676bbd4a-7dd9-11e9-9f05-01aa75ed71a1
[5] See for example: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/29/newsom-desalination-project-should-be-approved-we-need-more-damn-tools-in-the-toolkit/
[6] See for example: https://voiceofoc.org/2022/05/3153068/
References
Abrahamsen, Rita and Michael C. Williams. 2009. “Security beyond the State: Global Security Assemblages in International Politics.” International Political Sociology 3(1): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00060.x
Gandy, M., 2014. The fabric of space: Water, modernity, and the urban imagination. MIT Press.
Gunderson, Ryan, Diana Stuart and Brian Petersen. 2018. “Ideological Obstacles to Effective Climate Policy: The Greening of Markets, Technology, and Growth.” Capital & Class 42(1): 133-160.https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816817692127
Harvey, David. 2020. The Anti-capitalist Chronicles. London, UK: Pluto Press.
Hickel, Jason. Less is more: How degrowth will save the world. Random House, 2020.
O’Neill, B.F. 2022d. Water for whom? Desalination and the cooptation of the environmental justice frame in Southern California. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space: 25148486221102377. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221102377
O’Neill, B.F. 2023. Desalination as a New Frontier of Environmental Justice Struggle: A Dialogue with Oscar Rodriguez and Andrea León-Grossmann. Capitalism Nature Socialism. 34(1) 107-128: 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2126130
O’Neill, Brian F., and Anne-Lise Boyer. 2020. “Water Conservation in Desert Cities: From the Socioecological Fix to Gestures of Endurance.” Ambiente & Sociedade 23: e00691. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-4422asoc20190069r1vu2020L1AO
O’Neill, Brian F., and Matthew Jerome Schneider. 2022 “Demystifying the Global ‘Just Transition’—On Power Struggles and Electric Mountains.” 15(3): 311-316. DOI: 10.1177/19427786221098700.
Singh, Gerald G., Harriet Harden-Davies, Edward H. Allison, Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor, Wilf Swartz, Katherine M. Crosman, and Yoshitaka Ota. 2021. “Will understanding the ocean lead to “the ocean we want”?.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 5: e2100205118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100205118
This blog was edited by Leah Huff.