Fixing our water shortage with energy consuming desalination plants will just continue the global warming negative feedback loop. Better would be to simply change what farmers are growing to conserve water.
* Edit: Why the downvotes? Look, solving water shortages with desalination plants, is like trying to fix air pollution with air filtration systems. Unless you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, you're just further contributing to the core problem.
And even if you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, that clean energy could instead be used to displace fossil fuels elsewhere if water was conserved instead of desalinated to continue business as usual.
Maybe you're getting downvoted because you misused the term "negative feedback loop."
As any beginning engineering student knows, a negative feedback loop is a system that tends to return to an equilibrium state when perturbed. A positive feedback loop is a system that magnifies any disturbance until the conditions change, because it's inherently unstable. When you engineer a dynamic system, you typically want it to have a negative feedback loop, so it doesn't blow up or something.
In other words, the term "negative feedback" does not have anything to do with the social consequences. Using it this way is painfully stupid.
* Edit: Why the downvotes? Look, solving water shortages with desalination plants, is like trying to fix air pollution with air filtration systems. Unless you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, you're just further contributing to the core problem.
And even if you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, that clean energy could instead be used to displace fossil fuels elsewhere if water was conserved instead of desalinated to continue business as usual.
Am I wrong?