It happens with almost every nuclear reactor built, no matter when

At the cost it comes in at, it competes with longer-duration energy storage. Very expensive, and only has value to the extent that it reduces the need to build storage instead.

Per the article:

Now, these problems have been fairly obvious for at least a decade. Why are they only becoming acute now? Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble. In fact, China’s real estate sector became insanely large by international standards.

I see lots of renderings and press releases…but nothing about what it actually cost once built, and I don’t see others rushing to do the same, which suggests that the project didn’t come in anywhere near the promised cost per unit volume of desalinated water.

Huh? Plenty of desalination going on already. Brine gets diluted back into the ocean.

The reason it’s limited is that desalination requires a lot of energy and is therefore too expensive for most agricultural use

Sadly you can’t desalinate without a significant energy input.

There has started to be change. The US and EU are actually cutting emissions already, and it looks like China is about to.

It’s that we’re not cutting emissions to zero quickly enough yet. That’s going to take a lot of work to make it happen.

We’re at the point we’re pretty bad things happen, but not yet at the point where they’re bad enough to take down civilization. Acting quickly will keep it from getting that bad

It’s not about ‘fucked/not fucked’ but a matter of degree.

We’re at the point where we go into what is essentially a minefield where we’ll see individual ecosystem components fail. We don’t know exactly when each of those will happen, but we do know that every 1/10 of a degree of warming we can avoid sharply lowers the risk from here on out.

Probably used a color palette calibrated to use the blue end of the spectrum for the cooler temperatures since the late 1800s. Those low temperatures have stopped happening.