Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Why Are the Canary Islands Doomed to Ruin?" video.
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I do spot some problems.
1) Thinking, that housing can be fixed by high density is simply nonsense. We're dealing with population aging and that we can only solve it by having children (at least in the long term), which however needs housing to be of particular type, eg. single family homes with a large enough back yard, at least according to Peter Zeihan. I can say, that people around me indeed didn't start having kids until they've managed to live with their spouses in houses of their own. High density housing would not solve the island's issue, as it discourages childbearing rather, it would transform one problem inter intensity of another and that is no solution. You don't solve an issue by creating another one. The approach needs to be holistic
2) I recall Neil Degrase Tyson being interviewed (I believe by Joe Rogan) on desalinization deployment and according to him, prices of water and shipping are too low to make desalinization viable. It also explains, where we find the most of these plants. In petro-monarchies of the Gulf, which have both the need for water and income from natural resources to justify the investment. To them is desalinization question of water autonomy then. It's different, when you can't afford something and when you can, but don't need to. Also, desalinated water cannot be used for some applications without further treatment, such as in agriculture, which would either require this extra treatment or parallel infrastructure for this lower quality water, both of which ramp the costs up.
3) changing the islands into industrial economies wouldn't be easy, even if the nimby problem wasn't present here. Canarys are off the coast of Africa fair bit of distance from the Spanish mainland and more importantly, the rest of the EU. Shipping is very cheap these days, but that is thanks to scale of shipping done. Would each island be able to produce enough of industrial output and consume enough goods to justify at least a weekly visit by a Panamax to take advantage of the low shipping prices and thus be competitive on the market with the least barriers of entry? You could argue, that the islands could produce strictly for exports to African nations, but that has it's disadvantages too, not to mention that the goods in the other direction would also not be supplied that easily, hence lower incentive for shipping to the islands, hence higher prices, hence lower competitiveness... I am not convinced of viability of such measure.
Taking everything into consideration, making the area into IT hub is likely the only sustainable way to go, because it doesn't need that much more inputs, but there we have that Nimby problem again...
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