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]

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.

[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.

[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).