Currently California (Los Angeles, the Imperial Valley, San Diego, etc.) sucks a whole lot of water out of the Colorado River and other inland sources. This is of course insane given that California has a fairly extensive border with the PACIFIC FRIGGEN’ OCEAN. A few terawatts of nuclear power and some desalination plants would have fixed that right up. But nooooo, California is loaded with luddites who oppose nukes, so they have little choice but to drain the whole west dry.

But it seems like the French may have the answer:

This New Wind Turbine Produces Clean Drinking Water Out Of Thin Air

Basically, the vaporators used by the moisture farmers of Tatooine.

Simply build a whole bunch of these along the coast and atop the major buildings in places like LA. With a capacity of at least 1,000 liters per day per turbine, California would need… I dunno, a billion of them? Lessee:

The Colorado River Aqueduct provides 1.5 cubic km of drinking water annually to SoCal = 47.5 cubic meters per second.

The San Diego Aqueduct provides 23.4 cubic meters per second of drinking water.

The All American Canal provides 740.6 cubic meters of irrigation water per second.

So, about 811.5 cubic meters per second, or 70,113,600,000 liters per day. The information provided suggests that the turbines can produce 1000 liters per day in a  humid climate… assume that the San Angeles coast is appropriately humid. This means that only 70,113,600 of these turbines would be needed. Easy! At a cost of about 700 grand a pop, the project would run a measly $49,079,520,000,000.

Hmmm. Forty nine trillion dollars seems a bit much. Maybe I made a math error, I dunno. Too lazy to double-check my work. But economies of scale would reduce the cost per turbine, and the system could very likely be made more efficient. If the turbines dropped to 1% of the current price, and they increased output by ten times, the project would drop in cost by a factor of a thousand making it a government-trivial $49 billion.

By doing this, California would not only become “water independent,” they would also generate a hell of a lot of electricity, and the water currently being drained out of the Colorado could be used elsewhere in the drought-stricken west or allowed to simply flow on down the river. The dying ecosystem of the Gulf of California would probably appreciate *that.*