Egypt’s Qattara Project is a mega-construction plan to cut a waterway from the Mediterranean coast inland to fill the Qattara Depression. The newly created body of water, constantly evaporating in the brutal environs of Egypt’s northern desert, would provide electric power owing to turbines being turned by the non-stop inflow of seawater to replace the loss. Moreover, the arid, harsh and barren landscape could very well benefit greatly from what may turn out to be a local climate reversal, actually greening the area to an extent with rainfall created by the sea inlet.

Neighboring Israel has already accomplished very much the same. Its Desert Water Project pulls in truly impressive acre-feet of the Mediterranean, flowing inland and converting the low-lying Negev Desert from wasteland into farmland. Moreover, the seawater is desalinated at the coast, being funneled first through reverse osmosis plants. So the water that arrives in the Negev is clean and potable. There are now forests and parks and a booming population where scant years prior, and for millennia before that, was utter desolation.

California possesses its own vast territory of desert wasteland—desolate tracts also near to........

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