Wasting Water

[rowyn]

WSJ article on low-flow showers. Includes, among other things, government regulation of showerhead pressure, plus bonus ways of subverting said regulations, and possible new regulations under consideration.

So ... stupid question: if the goal is to get people to stop wasting water, and if most municipalities own the waterworks … why don’t the municipalities raise the cost of water? I mean, I don’t care about my water usage because water is cheap.  If water weren’t cheap, I’d take steps to use less.  Don’t other people think that way too? It worked for gas when gas hit $4 a gallon; people started driving less. Am I missing something in the basic supply/demand equation here?

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

You can try to reduce it indirectly using incentives, but it's more likely to have unintended consequences -- you want people to stop wasting water in a specific way, not to stop using water in all ways across the board. Like, say, washing their hands less.

When commodity prices rise you get a shockwave going through the whole economy, hurting everyone. You don't really want to do that on purpose.

Also, supply/demand curves work best when there's a sliding scale of supply that can react to the demand -- water and power (for two) don't really work that way. It takes years to build the infrastructure to deliver it, so instead you get shortages and MASSIVE swings in the price as it crosses the thresshold. The whole Enron scandal was about people manipulating this effect.

[telnar.livejournal.com]

If you raise the price, people will cut back first on their lowest priority uses. That is likely to mean sprinkler systems and leaky toilets will be dealt with long before hand washing gets cut back.

The concern you have about supply/demand effects relates to spot prices during a shortage -- not to long term contracts. Charging a market price for water doesn't mean that it has to be instantly updated to reflect changes in available supply (although raising prices to some degree during a drought might be a good idea, since it would encourage conservation without the need for heavy handed regulations).

Also, water is extremely cheap today in the quantities that consumers use it. My last water bill had a usage charge of $1.83 per thousand gallons. That's not the sort of cost which will drive people to the poorhouse if it rises slightly.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

If it only rises slightly it's not going to change peoples' behavior. Right now a 30 gallon shower costs you 6 cents -- a 1000% rise in water prices probably wouldn't convince you to take a less comfortable shower, but it would drive businesses that use a lot of water into bankruptcy and devastate the economy.

Market-based incentives aren't going to do the job in this case.

[rowyn]

Ahh, I see your point. We might be happy enough making showers more expensive, but making farming more expensive has a huge ripple effect, and there's no elegant way to do the one without the other (though we already have and use inelegant ways of subsidizing water use on farms, as Telnar noted).

The air-mix shower that tricks you into thinking you're taking a regular shower is the nicest idea from the WSJ article. Assuming it works and isn't just like Jurann's misty-shower that doesn't feel like it's rinsing you off. >:)

[telnar.livejournal.com]

I think that "devastate the economy" is more than a little strong. In the short run, farmers in areas where water is scarce (like Southern California) would concentrate on crops which require less water and become less profitable, which would probably drive some of them out of farming entirely. That's not a good thing, but to keep this in perspective, agriculture is only 0.7% of US GDP (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB3/EIB3.htm) and most US agriculture happens in areas where water is not scarce.

There would be many long term effects, most of which are likely to be good.

As a result of more US farming shifting to areas where water is readily available (in part because investments in farming equipment in the Midwest would be more profitable with the supply of usable land more constrained) and more imports of water intensive crops from countries where water is less scarce, we would see less competition for water between farmers and urban consumers.

It's not a good thing for there to be rice farms in California (rice cultivation requires standing water) until the water supply problems are addressed. More expensive water will force that change. If we want to help the rice farmers, I'd much prefer to help them do something else or farm rice somewhere else than keep supplying them subsidized water.

Unsubsidized prices for water would help solve the shortage in the longer run by increasing the effort being spent to make desalinization more efficient. We're not that far away from being able to use water from the ocean cost effectively (when the water doesn't have to be pumped uphill afterwards). Once desalinization becomes cheap enough, we might no longer need to think of drinking water as being any scarcer than oxygen.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I think you've got the right idea, in fact -- but government arbitrarily deciding what a price will be is not exactly "market-based incentives."

My water bill is about $400 per month, as I live in Southern California. This state built a good water infrastructure in the late 60s and early 70s, but the population has doubled since then and we're still using the 1970s systems.

As an aside, California's idea of market-based incentives seems to be to drive all people that create jobs out of the state.

If it were made possible for private industry to supply water, then market-based incentives would come into play. Otherwise, it is merely government fiat.

===|==============/ Level Head

[telnar.livejournal.com]

Agreed; although the situation is much worse than government not seeing that raising the price of water would be a less intrusive way to achieve their goal. The cost of water to many users (especailly agricultural users) is actively subsidized.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

I think there's the whole thing of access to clean water being a basic human right, that makes people basically squeamish about raising water prices.

[rowyn]

That's fair. Terry made a good point, too -- raising the cost of water enough to deter consumers from wasting it would impose a far larger burden on business that depend on it (and that are probably already using it efficiently, because even at a small cost it'd make up a large portion of their bottom line.)

[jurann.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with you. Water is probably the smallest of all my bills right now, if the price went up by triple or even quintuple I probably wouldn't even NOTICE. And I don't think it would put anyone in the poorhouse. Granted, I frankly live in a part of the country where water is completely abundant with no real risk of that ever changing.

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

As far as I am concerned, cleanliness - especially that provided by showering - is the foundation of civilization. I simply cannot get through the day in a remotely civil fashion without starting it with a good strong shower. My ancestors didn't struggle and slave to crawl out of the muck and filth just so I could install a low-flow shower head and fight the thing every day to get remotely clean.

In our first house, the low-flow thing had just kicked in and all the shower heads I bought had the restrictors actually cast in. A dremel made short work of those.

It'll take a well-armed police state to get my morning shower away from me, and even then they would find me particularly dangerous to approach.

[jurann.livejournal.com]

I have them in my showerheads and they're not causing me ANY trouble in getting clean. o.O Then again, I use misting showerheads, which don't require massive water throughput anyway. I do notice a lack of oomph when I turn them to solid stream modes, but I rarely use those modes anyway...

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

We had nearly a decade of drought locally. Everyone uses about a fifth of the water they used to.

And frankly, you wouldn't notice the difference. We're just better at it now.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I like your attitude -- but I submit that the approach will not be by violence, but by simply levying costs upon you until you behave. Or go somewhere else.

This is nationalizing California's approach, basically -- which will create a national version of California's financial condition.

California would have collapsed years ago were it not for the happy accident of the dot-com epicenter being located here.

===|==============/ Level Head

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's not very difficult to charge variable prices for water based upon who's using it and how much they're using. But it's hard to increase the price of water enough, as someone passes from the 'low water use' category to the 'high water use' category, that user behavior will change (other than to complain to their elected officials - people are extremely good at screaming to their council critters and state representatives when watering their lawns is expensive).

That said, it's extremely easy for heavy industrial users of water to lobby for advantaged prices, on the basis that they're bringing dollars to the economy. (Even if those dollars aren't very efficient, which agriculture often is).