"Drought Has West in Chokehold"

UPDATE: Some useful background on the water issue at Crumb Trail.

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I haven't really followed this story very much so far:

Explosive population growth, environmental lawsuits to divert water for wildlife and below-average precipitation have put a strain on the big federal reservoirs that supply the West but were designed decades ago when the outlook was far different.

I don't worry too much about running out of oil and so I don't think I will worry about running out of water.

My only question is "At what price will we have just enough water?"

To my mind, what a story like this means is that water has been "too cheap" (e.g. unreasonably low/politically-motivated money costs applied to those vast Federal water projects, insufficient value placed on existing natural resources etc etc) and now, because of a host of factors, it's going to get more expensive. We'll have to pay more. How that cost, not whether, ripples though society is the question.

Comments

[nnyhav]

We'll just have to stop making the desert bloom.

[David Sucher]

I agree; and my point is that we can do that most elegantly by attempting to let water costs float to their "real" cost.

[nnyhav]

Wish I could share your optimism; given history of grazing rights and other such (implicitly) subsidised behaviour on one hand, and Uzbekistan/Kazakhstan cottonfield depletion of the Aral Sea on the other ... and deregulation's not exactly popular these days.

[TM Lutas]

There's a need, in any realistic privatization scheme, to precalculate what's the price ceiling on water in an automated kind of way. By price ceiling, I mean what is the next source of water that exists that you could get without worrying about availability for quite a while.

Once you know your price ceiling, you can make reasonable assessments about what would happen if the political controls went off water. You would no longer have the unreasonable fear that all the water will just magically disappear into the massive vault of some weird boogey man cross between Frank Herbert and Scrooge McDuck.

The problem is that until you get that information out, you simply can't counteract the FUD that political control forces will put out.

In reality, it's unlikely that water will immediately peg to its price ceiling but such a vital, long controlled, commodity needs to have the price control pressure taken off it in a controlled manner. It's not like oil. If oil deregulation goes wrong, you're stuck and can't get to work. If water deregulation goes wrong, you can die (and pretty quickly) while the market's bouncing around trying to find the market clearing price. Politicians have a duty to keep the death toll down when they undo their previous interventions.

[David Sucher]

Oh I am not necessarily optimistic.

I am merely suggesting what should happen, not what will.