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]

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