That's a cute photo, I used to love doing these kinds of cooking experiments as a child. Great intro to chemistry and you get to eat it... If successful!
Your mention of the burnt sugar did make me think of something, however. It's been on my list of things to research for a while:
How bad for you is burned sugar? Is it carcinogenic in the same way as burnt oil (oil heated past the smoke point I mean)? If so, is all caramel bad, even stuff that wouldn't be considered burnt? And what about the fumes released during cooking?
All things come with a tradeoff so this is not intended with an anti-caramel agenda. Rather I'm thinking about minimizing health risk from tasty treats.
I should try making caramel from erythritol. I bet it has a cool minty taste.
This is a cool idea. However it strikes me as obvious - as in, there are a lot of very smart people already looking for solutions like this so I expect it has been explored before. Did you search for existing literature? I did very briefly but didn't come up with anything useful.
Large scale evaporation is already done in lithium mining, for example. Perhaps some related studies have been done there.
I also expect the are potential issues besides the geopolitical ones highlighted here.
What effects would this have on the coastline ecosystem - for example, due to concentration of salt over a large area?
What materials could be used for the wicks? If it's a natural material I guess it would decompose into a salty mush.
Not to mention, complex environmental systems are... Complex! How hard is it to be reasonably sure an experiment like this would actually have the intended positive effects? Rather than causing localized flooding due to unexpected concentration of the rainfall, for example.
Final note - you state several figures related to cost (megajoules of energy for pumping, cost to generate a megajoule with solar etc.). I don't have a reason to doubt these but generally you should provide sources along with numbers so that people can independently verify them.
Although it's been quite a few years since I read Pinker's book, my impression is that he is advocating exactly that. I don't recall any dogmatism in the book, it's very clearly a set of guidelines rather than a set of rules.
Actually my main takeaway from the book was that it was aimed largely at stereotypical "stuffy academic" writing, something which I'm sure Pinker has encountered a lot of in his career - and variants of which can be found here too.