“Then, after conservation, these projects proposed to bring in more water to the Great Salt Lake, from the Pacific or from deep underground: yes, study them, for sure! Why not?”
His recent fiction has been focused on climate change and adapting. For Robinson, that means both confronting the scale of the problem but not being frozen by the coming tumult. Several of your books try to show the impacts of a changing climate and how humanity could blunt its effects. I wonder if you worry that dreaming of big engineering solutions to climate problems can go too far.
In Utah, our Legislature has spent time debating a pipeline to Great Salt Lake from the Pacific, an expensive project that would probably take years if not decades. There was another proposal to mine deep saltwater aquifers in Utah and desalinate the water using thorium reactors. These solutions are being presented at a time when scientists are telling us the fastest, cheapest way to keep the lake from becoming a catastrophe is to use less water as soon as possible.