In Tucson, subsidies for rainwater harvesting produce big payoff
newsdeeply.com
newsdeeply.com
There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation.
[1] https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through-it/C...
[2] http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2011/07/rainwater-harvesting-i...
The bummer is, even though you can now have rain barrels, it rains infrequently enough in Colorado that it's not terribly economical to buy 55-gallon rain barrels.
At $2.77 per 1,000 gallons from the utility, with infrequent rainfall it's pretty hard to ever recoup $176 for a 110 gallon system from BlueBarrelSystems. You're looking at 580 rains required to break even- while Denver, for example, sees only 40 days with "any measurable rainfall" a year.
There are many people that place great value on being partially-off-the-grid, on (conspicuous) conservation, and enjoy DIY projects.
> 110 gallons of precipitation [...] can be collected and stored
With additional restrictions.
Well, that and it's basically impossible to determine if cloud seeding actually works. No control group is really possible.
I'd argue that it'd be in the southwest's best interest, in general, to move to clearly legalizing rainwater collection of modest amounts - say 200 gallons.
once they got that rainwater harvesting system, the way they’re irrigating is completely different, and they’re paying a lot more attention to how they irrigate. It really changes behavior. Definitely people are more careful with how they use that rainwater than how they were using the potable water to irrigate beforehand.
Doesn't the article address this nuance?
"It doesn’t rain often here, but when it does it can rain very hard. And the ground doesn’t soak up water very well. So rainwater harvesting is a way to deal with stormwater runoff."
Some kinds of soil are limited in their ability to absorb water (in terms of rate). I believe these are soils with lots of clay in them. So having rainwater collection systems, though it would hurt groundwater recharge, probably on balance is better since it relieves demand on pumping out more groundwater.
Water is another tragedy of the commons. Government often charges for the cost of piping the water from the source, as if the water source had no value itself.
Imagine if fish could be taken from the ocean for just the cost of taking it from the ocean. Oh, wait. That's what we do! And overfishing is also another tragedy of the commons in many populations.
It would be better if a water source was turned into a for-profit corporation with the all the users of the aquifer each entitled to a share of the profits based on past usage. Then they'd break even if they keep their usage the same, but profit if they cut their usage. New residents and companies would pay the market price for anything more than personal use, which nobody would have to pay for.
It would have to cover all the users of the aquifer. Otherwise, those with cheap access to it will profit at everybody else's expense.
That way, the people keep the water, nobody has to pay for personal use, but everybody has a built in incentive to avoid uses of water that aren't worth using up the valuable resource.
Inflating water prices would also disproportionally affect renters, who are often lower-income, because they don't have the ability to make changes like that for their homes.
General carbon emissions are another example. The price burdened by society is higher than the privatized cost.
Imagine we had a system that automatically rewarded cyclists, or people who just take a cold shower--any of the millions of small things--for curbing pollution. Well, price signals in supply and demand are already such a system.
The problem with subsidies, public policy initiatives, and awareness campaigns is that they can't do as good of a job as simple supply and demand economics in organizing human behavior efficiently--for the same reasons why command and control economies don't work as well as market-based ones. Price signals work very well.
And besides this argument for economic efficiency, there is the argument that people's privatized incentives should be aligned with other's, if possible, and policy should reward or punish decisions which bear benefits or costs on society.
And if we want to help the poor, we should really just give them money to help cover their expenses rather than adopting bad economic policy just because it just so happens to be the one that is more kind to the poor. In other words, it's not necessary to bake a smaller pie just in order for us to be able to share it.
Several prominent conservative Republicans proposed about a year ago a system that would do that [1]. They were James Baker (Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Secretary of State under GHW Bush), Martin Feldstein (chairman of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors), George Shultz (Secretary of State under Reagan), Henry Paulson, (GW Bush's Treasury Secretary), and N. Gregory Mankiw (chairman GW Bush's Council of Economic Advisers), and others.
Their proposal was for a revenue-neutral carbon tax starting at $40 per ton. It would be collected at the source (such as at oil refineries), and the money collected would be returned to to the taxpayers. They estimated that would be about $2000 back to a family of four.
If the rate is set right, it would be break even for a person who is carbon neutral. The tax would raise the prices on things they buy and use that produce carbon, but their share of the distribution should be about the same amount.
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/group-prominent-repub...
That doesn't sound right. Wouldn't it depend on using the average amount of carbon? If you're above average you pay out more than you get back, if you're below average you get more than you pay. Probably depends on the exact way the money is returned.
I don't know about this particular scheme, but some use the proceeds to offset regressive taxes, making the scheme progressive overall.
Water is sufficiently important to poor people (and their children) that you can't reasonably price them out of the market. Same reason utility companies can't cut off your water in many places.
Where does it stop? Things cost what they cost. For instance, during famines, food shoots up in price exponentially. It's unclear whether you're talking about redistributive taxation and subsidies or price controls.
I'm ok with the former, and definitely not ok with the latter. Price controls are the easiest ways to guarantee shortages of a finite scarce good. Fortunately scarcity hasn't really been a problem for water in the Western world.
Yemen, however would beg to disagree.
Their most profitable crop, qat, requires huge amounts of water, and their capital is completely out of water[0]. Because they held the price of water artificially low, it was overused and now is gone.
[0] https://thinkprogress.org/yemen-humanitarian-crisis-water-54...
I think if the UN has categorized it as a fundamental human right, that's a good start?
When everything is a fundamental human right nothing is a fundamental human right. After a flood, do you want to get food, water, and shelter in there or do you want to be fiddling with fiber cables?
There we go, in response to your answer about where does it stop. Apparently you also think water is super important.
None of those things you want is a human right. Want water? Dig a well. Want to eat? Grow some food. Want shelter? Build something. If somebody helps you out, its out of the goodness of their heart or a pre-existing obligation.
Saying something is a human right places demands on others which you have no right to do.
Yep, been there, done that...
I don't understand why any region that faces water scarcity doesn't simply make it a necessity.
For instance, in China, everybody is pretty much forced to learn Mandarin (generally). The schools are taught in it, and if you don't do well in school you won't get a good job and will be shown your way to irrelevance.
In India, I believe there are hundreds of languages being spoken. Imagine their economic and political power if the government one day just said "All government free education will be taught in English. There will be no Hindi, Bengali, Keralan, etc etc for schools that receive government funding. Also, all government forms will only be available in English and all government offices will only speak English. If you don't speak English at least decently, you will be fired."
You cannot get away with that in a democracy. In a dictatorship it's the stroke of a pen. Which is ultimately better for the economy?
Only asking this question will naturally lead you to hypotheticals where dictatorships give better results. There are absolutely some systemic disadvantages to democratic systems, but I don't think this is one of them. There is enormous cultural richness and benefit and the multiplicity of languages. The stroke of the pen would help the economy immensely, but also destroy an extraordinary amount of culture and wealth, much of it intangible.
Maslov's pyramid. Does a starving peasant care about culture and intangible "wealth" if trading that for food is what we're talking about? The Communists rammed through a whole new writing system to replace a ~5k year old one and nobody complained too much, even though it's ugly as heck.
other oddity: some people water the lawn by simply flooding it (some front lawns are specifically lower than the sidewalk for that). At first I though it was stupid, then I saw people "watering" their lawn with sprinklers in the middle of the afternoon. I am curious what ratio of the water even reaches the grass.
Best solution is to get rid of most/all of your lawn if you live in the desert with limited water, ie. no large river or something.