Dystopian is “water was free so the big farming business pumped the aquifer dry and exported the agricultural goods. Now people here have no water and the land is a desert”.
This stuff is economics 101.
The full quote is:
“”Soren Bjorn, a senior executive at Driscoll’s who in January will become the chief executive, said in an interview that he “absolutely” sees the region as a model of water pricing that could be replicated in water-stressed regions from Texas to Portugal. “Water can’t be free anywhere, because you can’t run a sustainable water supply without pricing it,” he said. “That would apply to the globe."
“”
Where I live it rains for the majority of the year. We could put out buckets and easily capture enough to care for our needs, but then you have to deal with making sure what we are going to ingest is clean and deal with no water pressure and hauling water around the house. It is so much easier to pay someone else to deal with it. So, water could be free some places, but…
As they should, because there’s no such thing as “your own well.” A well lets you pump water from a shared aquifer. If 100 parcels of land were on one aquifer and one resident pumped all of it, leaving none for anyone else, it would be a misleading lie to say they were just pumping “their own well.”
It's classic "tragedy of the commons" stuff. Having a "free" input sets up incentives for waste since that resource now exists outside the influence of market forces.
So it's either putting a price on these resources or careful regulation. The latter is not very popular in today's political climate.
Has never worked very well. Government bureaucracies are very bad at pricing and allocating things appropriately. A case study is in the 70's the government decided gas allocations for every gas station. The result was a patchwork of gluts and shortages across the country.
Reagan ended all that as his first Executive Order, and overnight the gluts and shortages vanished along with the gas lines.
Very much rooting for Argentina's Milei to provide a similar lesson in modern times but I am afraid that he has very few allies helping him (besides his own idiosyncrasies) and the current laptop class would simply ignore it as they ignored Venezuela's lesson...
> Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
There's a very unambiguously wide gap between water being freely available to every person for sustaining life, and water being completely free to use in quantities of trillions/quadrillions of gallons for profit.
You don't need to farm water-intensive crops in deserts, especially in the modern era of extremely effective logistics. We should be growing crops where they're most suitable for, and applying something closer to normal pricing dynamics will nudge us closer to that.
Agreed there's not a bright line, but we're clearly at one undesirable end of the spectrum.
I agree, but then we're back at exporting produce from wherever water is cheap and abundant. Which is a good thing and necessary, but it has to be done carefully at the industrial scale we're at.
Is it? What about using limited water for crops that don’t have as much value to survival as other crops? Or wasteful locations, etc.
I’m not advocating charging necessarily, but using up a limited resource with reckless abandon seems short sighted. What am I missing? Is it not a very important resource to manage?
But you see, their family got the land for free through a Homestead Act a few generations ago after they drove the Natives out (and/or murdered them) and now they get subsided water and property taxes through Prop 13 and cheap labor from undocumented workers, so why not do everything else in their power to maximize profits? That is the only mission in capitalism, after all.
"paying the water bill" is a pretty normal thing for a large portion of the world. certainly for most of america.
paying for water is not a dystopia. and taking a totally normal part of life and calling it "dystopian" with no further explanation is one of the laziest arguments ever.
Paying for water when you are poor is a threat to life and livelihood that's dystopian. This is the nature of dystopia, it mostly affects the impoverished.
Is it not the same for paying for food, as well? I generally agree, but water seems an arbitrary line to draw when we still have shelter and food to consider.
Before humans decided to pollute a lot of the fresh water on earth or appropriate it for themselves, humans could just go to the nearest stream and get water. In that sense, it feels right that it should be easily accessible at no cost. Meanwhile, humans have usually had to expand considerable effort to build a shelter and gather or grow food. So i don’t see the line as being arbitrary.
When I lived in a rural area on septic and well, my electric bill was often under $200 in the summer, running AC fairly heavily, and taking care of ~6 dense garden beds full of veggies for ~6 months... and regularly watering 1 acre of grass to keep it from drying too much. We even had a timer to auto-water the garden and parts of the lawn... We'd even let it run overnight on a few occasions (needing to water, but coming home very late)
I hardly considered water a costly resource
On "city" water now in suburbs, I followed a similar pattern for grass on a 1/4 acre lot, and heavily watered the lawn one month, and I had a $300 water & sewer bill -- on top of my $100 electric bill.
Water went from being something I hardly considered to something I am far more careful about 'wasting'.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Like others have said, “Water can’t be free anywhere” seems to be inevitable at a commercial level--but dystopian on an individual level. If you had neighbors in your rural area aggressively pumping water out of the ground your well would dry up...and you'd be paying "market price" for it.
Just looking at water usage when I owned a house, irrigation uses a ridiculous amount of water relative to everything else individuals use to live--including laundry, bathing, dishes, etc. If memory serves, sewage costs are significantly more than the water itself (and sewage as metered off of water consumption--so you're likely paying sewage feeds on water you're irrigating with).
The actual cost of enough clean drinking water for people is very small. Enough that drinking fountains are common and people shouldn't need to ration drinking water.
Yep, this is why we need a water price and dividend system.
Whenever you use water it is tracked and you pay the market price. All of that is then collected and put into a pot. It is then given back equally to everyone.
Everyone is thus incentivized to use less and those that use less than the average amount of water - a huge majority of people since the heaviest users use so much - will receive more money than they spent.
Eh, NIT and any sort of UBI are mathematically the same thing given you still have an income tax and can adjust the percentage. This just accomplishes that goal in a progressive way.
Well.. if your grass would dry out and become yellow without watering it, then watering is a luxury. The water in deep wells will eventually run out. Why waste it on grass?
No dog in this fight. I moved out of Scottsdale to the Great Lakes region a bit back partly because of the water issue. So I definitely get the natural inclination to not want to have to think about water.
All that said, I mean, if your HOA requires this, is the problem with the city charging for water use to upkeep the infrastructure required to deliver it? Or is the issue really just that your HOA has rules that it shouldn't?
Limited natural resources shouldn't be free for industrial exploitation. Unfortunately, money is the best mechanism for incorporating these concerns into a product.
A bucket of water from river or lake somewhere can likely be free in many places. Even ground water if you exclude building a well.
It is not unreasonable to charge everyone using water when it is treated, delivered and sewage is taken care of. As long as the price paid for minimal daily use is not exploitative.
