desalination of water: politics, technology, etc.

There's a lot of babble threads on water and many mentioning desalination but I think this topic is worthy of its own thread.

It looks like much more desalination is on the horizon. If this is going to be done on a mass scale, that means the levers of control over a resource that can be called life itself could be concentrated in the hands of a few. Or of many, all depending.