Dealing with drought — three ways to fail
David Zetland at Aguanomics writes a note on California’s drought and policies on water use and distribution…price is key.
Dealing with drought — three ways to fail
BB sent this summary of UC Davis’s “Living with Drought” conference (I got my PhD there), and this bit got my attention:
Everyone seemed to agree that solutions to living with drought are best found together, across disciplines.
“We’re not going to get anywhere if we don’t tackle this in an interdisciplinarymanner,” said panelist Glen MacDonald of UCLA. “It’s going to have to be all of us working together and talking together.”
An audience member praised the speakers for their ideas on reaching across disciplines and planning wisely. “But how can I communicate this to my neighbor who keeps their sprinkler on when it’s raining?” she asked.
“Better education” was the panelists’ response: “All of the devices in the world won’t matter if we can’t keep out neighbors informed of the right thing to do,” said Steve Macaulay, former chief deputy director of the state Department of Water Resources.
In another panel, Frank Loge, director of the UC Davis Center for Water-Energy Efficiency, noted that effective messaging to consumers about the amount of water they are using results in an immediate 5 percent reduction in water use, and can be as much as 20 percent.
OMG, this is so FAIL, but typical of academics.
Their “solutions” are:
- More interdisciplinary work
- Better education (“keeping neighbors informed of the right thing”)
- Effective messaging of how much water is used
Let’s deconstruct destruct those ideas:
- Give us more funding
- Teach people to think like you, because you know the real value of water
- Send love letters that tell people how much they care
I’m amazed that nobody sees that water, as a commodity, is nothing special.
- We don’t have interdisciplinary work on managing a “drought” of beer.
- We don’t “educate” people to drive less or more
- We don’t send love letters to people, telling them how many minutes they watch TV
Why is that? Because we allow prices to balance supply and demand of beer, we acknowledge that people will drive at their convenience (and cost in time and money), and we don’t need to inform people if they are watching too little or too much TV.
Adults (and kids!) are perfectly capable of finding the right balance among their time, money and other choices. That balance will ALSO be right for society if the prices consumers see reflect the costs of their activities (i.e., pollution, scarcity, congestion, etc.)
We can use this same metric and method when it comes to managing scarce water… by raising prices in drought to reflect scarcity. That’s what this article says:
California water rates are set to reflect the price of delivering the water, not the water itself. This fails to give consumers any impression of how scarce the stuff is… “If you go down to a bar and Corona costs 12 cents a bottle, you’re gonna run out of Corona. And that’s the problem with water: It’s just too damn cheap to care about.”
Oh, wait. That’s me being quoted 😉
Bottom Line: People will use less water if it’s expensive. Is that a violation of human rights in California? No, it’s a violation of lawn rights. Homeowners dump half their drinking water on lawns because it’s cheap.
Boulder, CO has increased its water pricing so much that just using water in the house now costs more than watering my vegetable garden and using household water did 3 years ago. AND the price is set to go up in perpetuity. AND I have installed water saving devices and toilets. No vegetable garden for me!
Wow, pricing something that is totally essential to life/living based on “supply and demand” in a social structure that assures some basic expression of inequality no matter how much it tries to assure equality of power just seems to me to be leading to some major social disharmony (to be polite).
Is that the approach we used to solve air pollution?
But hey, we have $1, 1 vote now because how you spend your income is the same as voting and political parties are just brands any way and government is a business and life as Darwin found the law of winners and losers and Jesus said you can’t rid yourself of the poor and besides we have the superhero “Technology”.
I have an idea. Why don’t we grow a pair, and simply lay down the rules/limits that do not assure mutual destruction and let those in the market then do their thing. You know, like every other game we create.
Or would my enjoyment of football be greater if we let the price of the ticket determine the outcome?
The pfree market solutioin advocated here will just guarantee that poor people spend half their income for a drink of water while Las Vegas keeps its fountains running.
On the other hand “grow a pair and lay down the law” is exactly the attitude that will guarantee we get pfree market solution.
I wonder if there isn’t someone out there intelligent enough to find a way to regulate water use and prices without starting a range war.
a place to start might be progressive pricing… low price for “essential” uses. higher price for lawns and fountains. agriguculture preferred over manufacturing (find another way to produce it). i like community solutions but an not naive enough to think that communities are honest or immune from political (power) influence.
i pay 50 dollars a month for enough water to make three cups of coffee every day. but my “water bill” includes a fee for repaving the road in the rich people’s neighborhood.
Colberly: “grow a pair and lay down the law”
Not quite what I was saying, I assume you knew?
Community solutions will not work when 60% of the earth at 4 degrees increase will be in drought and there will be places too hot to inhabitate. National rules that as I stated, promote sustainable water use will be needed. This will have to extend to the globe.
Priority will have to be the sustainability of life which will mean incorporating more policy that promotes the survival of the ecosystem which will mean a change in how we use our economy. That is our economy will have to return more to serving the human races survival in that it allows the reduction of life’s risks than simply being a means to make money.
As to grow a pair, it is in reference to our past 30+ years of timidness in the face of the constant bullying that the market is the only solution (which in it’s current form or any form is the result of “laying down the law”) and all else will follow according to some immutable laws.
We did not solve air pollution and water pollution via the immutable laws of economics. Although there is no denying that we are slowly changing to such as a solution to an already successful and simply implements strategy which had the advantage of not creating a hierarchy to who gets to have clean water vs capital’s needs. Capital gets all the air it needs to make profit, they just can’t kill humanity in their use of it.
But that means growing a pair and accepting responsibility for the results vs the convenient scape goat of “the market did it”.
Becker
i agree with you (mostly) but i still don’t know “quite what [you] mean.”
in any case it’s the attitude of “grow a pair and lay down the law” which i believe guarantees the law will be made by those who espouse the pfree market. i have been on rather a tear lately about the use of counterproductive labels on behalf of of liberal causes (that i mostly agree with.)
I trust your market place solution includes raising the price of water to business and agriculture also. After all, in CA they use the majority of the water by far, while conservation efforts seem to be directed mostly at the people.
@Carolannie1949 — yes, that’s the cost of using drinking water outside
@Daniel — you’re saying many things in your comment. (1) Air has been priced (SO2 in the US, and CO2 in some places). The “full cost” of water is about $1 per 250 gallons. That’s not going to kill anyone in the US. In other countries with *really* poor people, income supports provide a better means of helping the poor, but corrupt, rich pols don’t usually care about the poor. Read my book (living with water scarcity) for a longer discussion. Re: your second comment, I divide my book into part I (economic solutions) and II (political solutions), in which I declare the first and primary importance of setting aside environmental flows.
@coberly — you’re exaggerating, but I’ll mention that regulation is often ANTI-poor (http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/03/14/if-clean-water-is-a-right-why-have-we-been-so-wrong/ideas/up-for-discussion/). Your idea of “price according to use” is also totally unworkable. Farms use untreated water. Businesses use water in many different ways. You may also want to read my book.
@Jerry — CA’s 20% by 2020 applies ONLY to urban (not ag), which is ridiculous. Businesses and homes need to pay more for water, to reduce their demand (rebates of excess revenues per household are pro-poor, of course). For ag, I say limit their withdrawals to protect the environment, THEN let them trade the rest (instead of protecting vested interests). You will enjoy Chapter 4 of my book 🙂
ps: http://livingwithwaterscarcity.com/