Most farming doesnt happen near the coast area's.... and desalinization is expensive.
If farmers suddenly have to pay like ~3 times as much for water.... its gonna effect prices.

I think what will likely happend, is to reduce water waste & consumption in the mid west.... they will price hike it.
So it self adjusts (ei. people learn not to waste water, when it hit their pockets) and this will probably go some way, to aiding it.

And again, farming sector is a major part of water consumption.
Alot of them might just have to stop farming in those area's.

While the issue gets worse over time, its just about reduceing the amount consumed, to match the amount gained every year.
Currently the water consumption in the area is unsustainable.

The water issue in australia is that their running out of underground water pockets, to pump up water from.
Once its gone, its gone, and it can take 100's or 1000's of years before they fill up again.
You cant just say desalinization will fix that, when alot of the farming isnt near the ocean coasts.

The issue is the same though for both.
Gotta stop useing water like that, in those area's for farming sector, and stuff like watering the lawn.
And if people dont stop useing it like that, gotta hike up the price so they are forced to.

I wouldn't blame climate change for this.
This is mostly human activities such as construction and lifestyle.
Deserts are deserts for a reason. They are there for other parts of the earth to get water. If you build estates there, you will need a lot of water to get grass as the soil has to be moist. The people living there would need water to use too. In the US, many homes have pools and fountains, all using a lot of water. Climate change has nothing to do with it.

Besides, two-thirds of the world is water. Why can't we start desalination and use that water?

I'm surprised everyone is moving to Texas and Florida recently, everyone in USA should be moving to Wisconsin and Canada. I don't anticipate most countries will even make the 2050 net zero carbon. China's current energy blackouts are going to kick that can down the road for them.

Climate change is responsible however to the lower amount of rain- and snowfall in the regions adjacent to it which is supposed to fill the Colorado river where they source their water from, as well as the increasingly arid weather conditions outside of the desert regions.

But yeah, building in a desert is a stupid idea unless you really have a good reason for it, like some natural ressource that would get mined/extracted at the site, or not having been a desert in the first place when the city was originally built. Having a type of lifestyle that really uses a lot of water on top of that is just the cherry on top of the wasteful stupidity cake.

1. Carbon taxation isn't going to work in itself without incentives to switch to energy efficient technology. If the US isn't already doing this, they should be, other countries have been doing this for quite some time. As well, carbon tax funds can be returned to the population, so the poor who don't consume much energy anyway actually benefit from it, while the wealthy pay into the fund. The US has been talking about UBI, a stiff carbon tax is a good way to fund it. Other things the US needs to do is end incentives for burning fuels, and increase incentives for non-pollution emissions. Nuclear power is one method for certain locations, but technology in other sectors is rapidly increasing, and even some third world countries have more sophisticated green energy generations than the US, which is kind of sad.

But I'm in favour of a carbon tax, because even if we do get the world on 100% green energy, many industrial processes still use a tremendous volume of fossil fuels. While things are improving drastically, countries like China and the US don't seem to want to budge on updating their manufacturing processes - they have to.

2. Aren't some kinds of pollution already a criminal offense? This isn't particularly a stretch.

3. Most countries have been working on this problem for decades by heavily increasing mass transit, electric vehicles, and increasing the amount of work from home opportunities - I've been working primarily from home for years now.

4. Part of the problem is the rapid growth in beef demand over the last century in certain countries. Most of the deforestation is to support this industry. Then there's this even stupider market "grass fed beef" that is even worse than the already highly destructive than other cow-based markets. Levy heavy taxes against beef, and tank the market, fund government buybacks of land. Fisheries is such an easy solution that it's hard not to facepalm at the brain dead approach of overfishing the entire world that civilization has taken. It's just a matter of protecting most of the oceans, and then fishing the spillover in much smaller regions. The ideology of neoliberal deregulation is like brain damage on civilization, and cancer on the world as a whole.

The idea that carbon pricing would somehow price out smaller competitors doesn't really seem to reflect reality. First of all, carbon taxes are usually designed to begin after a certain point, meaning many smaller competitors wouldn't be faced with any tax. Beyond that, the benefits of switching to more energy efficient technologies often outweigh the costs of implementing them. For example, in supermarkets, utilizing technologies to reduce the energy usage of the refrigerated sections can have a payback period of less than two years, however, if you go to almost any supermarket in the country, you won't see these technologies being utilized, because energy savings is currently not a high priority. As such, even without additional incentives, the changes that may take place to respond to carbon pricing may save money for many businesses over time. 

Note: I quoted you because you already said most of what I wanted to say and I just wanted to add on to it, not because I wanted to argue with what you were saying. 

1. Is it increased taxes?

It's a start. As far as I am aware, there are no (or very very low) taxes on fuel in the US. As a result, a gallon of gas is cheaper in the US than a liter of gas in some countries/regions in Europe. Consequently, the US are driving big trucks which naturally consume more than smaller cars. This alone could cut emissions and petrol consumption of traffic as a whole by up to 20%

2. Is it criminalizing excessive pollution?

That's already done to some degree, like banning CFCs and HCFC, or on the other end of the scale simply by punishing littering. Expanding this could certainly help, how much depends on how big the fines or jailtime would be. 

3. Must we all stop long daily commutes?

Many countries are already working hard to solve this problem. My country of Luxembourg made big waves in spring last year for making all the public transportation within the country totally free to push people to make the switch from their cars to the public transportation. Due to covid coming right afterwards, it wasn't immediately clear how big the impact would be, except for the drivers (not needing to sell tickets meant they could simply open the backdoors and thus avoid direct contact with potentially sick passengers), and traffic has eased up a bit since then, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Another way the country promotes away from the daily usage of personal cars is to extend bike lanes and rental bike stations throughout the city of Luxembourg and also throughout the entire country, and the possibility to bring your bike into the bus or train free of charge. Extending the pedestrian zones is yet another way to push the people to switch away from the car to other means of transportation.

4. Will anything stop deforestation?

Few things will, at least in tropical zones where they are getting used afterwards for farming/plantations and not only for the wood they can provide. In other regions however, deforestation has mostly stopped, and woods are sometimes ever regrowing a bit. But that's not nearly enough to counter the losses of the forests across the equator. There need to be very big reforestations to counter the wood loss alone, not even thinking about absorbing the CO2 we're blasting into the atmosphere right now (I once calculated it, that would need the planting of several billions of trees. Per. Year. Good luck fining enough good space for that!).

Best we can do right now is to ensure our local forests are in good shape and try to push the big corps to move their sourcing out of those forests, both being much easier said than done.

So don't vote? I see no government that takes this issue seriously :/

There are still too many people not seeing the forest for the trees. Better find a way to adapt to climate change as we're not going to stop it, let alone reverse it. Here in Ontario, Canada it also keeps getting warmer, less rainfall, less snow, the river doesn't freeze up anymore in winter. But then a freak storm comes along, dumps a ton of rain/snow and then its, "see it's actually colder/wetter", not realizing that those freak storms are just as much a result from climate change and that dumping 120mm of rain in an hour does not help growing crops one bit.

We'll need to change our lifestyle sooner rather than later

https://theconversation.com/7-5-billion-and-counting-how-many-humans-can-the-earth-support-98797
These data alone suggest the Earth can support at most one-fifth of the present population, 1.5 billion people, at an American standard of living.

One glimmer of hope is that Nuclear Fusion Power starts to produce results so we can start moving to a hydrogen fuel economy. It will be a lot more efficient than putting solar panels and wind turbines everywhere.

There's no stopping it, not enough people in the world will care enough. That's how it goes for a lot of things, and that's okay, we always have the next life.

Australia already gets most of the water from underground water sources.
But that is having another effect... The underground water level is dropping, which is actually having an effect on our forests.

So the current line of thinking is desalination plants to turn non-drinkable water into drinkable water, powered by green energy... Consequently that means new training for me due to the toxic chemicals those plants use.

2019 summer was a fucked year, worst on record. I'm just going to leave it at that.

2020 summer, was extremely mild thanks to La-Nina giving us a break.

Not sure what 2021's summer will bring, but it seems we will be exceeding our yearly rainfall by a significant margin, which means more fuel on the ground... So if the vegetation cures rapidly and temperatures exceed the median, 2021 has the potential to be worst than 2019. Which was a fucked year.
Sometimes wonder why I am a firefighter.

This. Way to many conservatives are ignoring the science and calling it a hoax.
And to many "centrists" are ignoring the issue.

It needs bipartisan support and it needs to be pushed hard as the primary issue.