Survival on a fictional desert planet has a lesson for a drought-stricken state

Of course, you'll also die. The problem with a stillsuit is that you can either evaporate a given bit of water for cooling, or you can capture it, but you can not do both. It's physically implausible. Not necessarily impossible, because maybe hypothetically there's some way to concentrate more heat in less water, evaporate that, and recover the rest, although doing that with A: nothing but human power and B: not actually making it so much harder to walk that it's a net loss. And I'd say the efficiency number given in the book probably are impossible, probably provably so in some manner.

then yeah, that'd be pretty stupid and wouldn't solve anything. because the entire point of moving to a "market" structure is to make the price variable (and in the case of a drought, making water more expensive). Then everyone is financially incentivized to conserve and the high-water-seniority low-margin alfalfa farms could sell their water rights to the almond farmers who just want their expensive trees to survive until the drought ends.

Then Enron crapped all over it with fraud and collusion. And, of course, since it was Dubya in charge, the Feds did ... absolutely nothing.

I'm not a free market defender. However, we will eventually need something like a market in electricity; there are going to be too many suppliers sending electricity into the grid.

In addition, had lots of electricity suppliers existed, Enron would not have been able to get away with what they did. The whole reason Enron could do what they did was that they could deplete the grid capacity by taking single power plants offline for "maintenance". If you could backfill that capacity and make money, Enron never have been able to pull that off.

That was why the Republicans went out of their way to sell off California's electricity producers.