Responding to this in broad terms, I have been in meetings with SNWA officials where I stated the obvious solution: Desalination of ocean water piped into the desert. They stated they knew this, but they were going to drain the Basin first because "it's there".
I'm not much of a wild-eyed socialist, but the only people who have listened to me are the Lyndon LaRouche democrats, who also prefer to ignore me in favor of the Kennedy Administrations NAWAPA project for bringing fresh water down from Alaska or even Canada on a continental water redistribution plan that includes giving some artic water to Mexico.
I'd put a Colorado-river-sized pipeline into the Pacific off Camp Pendleton, using a field of wells drawing water from under the ocean floor sands, using the sands as pre-filter, and pump the water over the mountains in northern San Diego County, into the desert near the Salton Sea. I'd build a pond system to recover the concentrate brines, reclaiming the salt for industrial use and using solar evaporation vapors to saturate the air intakes into the multi-stage flash evaporation system which would be the second stage of water recovery, after the first stage RO treatment. Of course, the power station that supplies all the needed power should be nuclear, and designed with multiple redundant systems for cooling the core in any emergency event, and any wastes should be reclaimed and re-used throughout their lifetimes.
Some land should be opened up for new farms in the Southwest, with ag water now available for Arizona and California from this project, as well as municipal use. Las Vegas could perhaps have it's own local desal plant, as well as a bigger share of the actual Colorado river water, and all those investors banking on Harry Reid's opening of federal lands for Las Vegas developers would be trotting off to their banks with buckets of sales contracts and cash. Yes, Harry Reid would get even richer, with all of his buddies.
There would still be political competition for long-standing desert grazing users, and they'd probably still lose out in the battle for their way of life, and the big feedlot/meatpacker cartelists would probably open up some operations on that fragile desert tortoise land after the Bundys are run off, too. So we could still all eat beef if we wanted.
But hey, hey hey, the ZPG zealots. . . . Prince Philip and Maurice Strong. . . . will probably carry the day for a while yet, and growth and industry will be smeared in the propaganda mills of public education, the media, PBS, and Sesame Street to the point where the human herd will probably march on, into the population reduction shortages of food, medical care, useless foreign wars, and corporate-managed socialism until world population does indeed sink six sevenths of the herd into non-existence. . . . .
