Comment by jandrewrogers

A core piece of wisdom in chemical engineering is that anything is possible with sufficient energy. Fresh water being available in any particular part of the globe is the kind of classic thermal (read: energy) and mass transport problem that chemical engineering is all about.

Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution.

For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.