Holy hell, I swear people who write opinion pieces like this have no idea what a mountain is.

It takes about 30 Watts to move a gallon of water up one meter. Start running the numbers on what it would take to move water from the Great Lakes (500 ish feet ) over the Rocky Mountains and you should quickly realize how terrible this idea is.

Same calculations should be used to determine that farming at 1-2 thousand feet in elevation makes desalination a bad choice as well. But desalination can be used for all the people living near the coast and allow farms to use more of the water at the higher elevations.