Cranking up desalination water plants is a remedy for the potable water issue, however, then we have to start concerning ourselves with the consequences, if any, of excessive desalination. Since we have an overabundance of salt water, we know not what the ramifications might be with lessening the amount and where that breaking point would be reached. But ramifications will expose themselves without question. Because that is how it goes. Advances lead ultimately to negative setbacks. I suspect the consequences would involve a reduction in sea life that require salt water. But it may not be limited to just that.
It's the conundrum humans face with regards to life on earth.
A cure-all all the way up and down. For desalination of sea water, a giant still using the heat from a nuclear reactor, which has the primary purpose of generating electricity, uses two stones to kill one bird. Instead of the old design of light-water uranium reactors, the new designs of the Small Modular Nuclear reactors use molten salt as the coolant and the carrier of the fissionable material, with a steady output of heat energy for as long as the fuel charge lasts. This energy is being generated 24/7/365 for several years before requiring refueling, there is no chance of a “China Syndrome” catastrophic fail, and no chance of a radioactivity release. The excess heat not used for production of electricity (which would be so cheap as to make hydrogen generation by electrolysis economically feasible) would be used to make potable water out of stagnant water from almost any source, and leaving the mineral deposits behind. the minerals could then be refined into the various elements (including lithium, if you HAVE to have it anyway), but also concentrated brine which has an extraordinary number of metals, and not just sodium in solution. These various salts could be separated by differential crystallization, as the salts of various minerals precipitate at a very specific point of supersaturation in the remaining brine. Gold could even be extracted from sea water using this process.
A whole new industrial base could be built up from this method of extracting chemical elements from sea water. All it takes is imagination and determination. We probably already have access to most of the technology, it s a matter of applying it.
If the process of using hydrogen reactions with oxygen produces water vapor, you’re not “mucking” with water, but creating it.
“It’s the conundrum humans face with regards to life on earth.”
Out depopulationist buddies, such as Gates, already have a fix for this. Just get rid of excess people and many of the shortages just go away. Then the elites will have plenty.