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Comment by ForrestN | Hacker News Reader

The Vox series on Netflix has an exceptionally good story about the water crisis generally. I left with the impression that right now water is not priced appropriately, and the solution is to impose more normal market pricing on water market by market. If you live in a rural area where it's hard to get access to water, or where your water usage requires elaborate cleanup to maintain the water supply, you should have to pay way more.

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this doesn't seem like fair thing to do at all. Clean water-acess is a basic human right, market forces should not determine who pays how much. Think of children of poor families born into areas where clean water is expensive...i don't want to imagine the consequences.

Water for human consumption costs are mostly in purifying and distribution, and are already charged. Water for agriculture is often subsidized and not limited from preventing environmental destruction (aquifer over-drawing, f.ex.)

I don't think the idea is to make individuals pay market rates for drinking water, but rather commercial water users, especially industrial and agricultural projects.

This. It’s conflicting to see that people who use water for basic needs have a higher water bill than farmers who use it for commercial purposes, and due to the lack of market pricing for bulk water are not incentivized to conserve water even in drought conditions.

Is this significantly worse than food being subject to market forces? Both are needed to live.

I dearly wish there was enough food and water to go around (and the data says there likely could be, if people in developed nations changed our lifestyles†). But, here we are. Drinking water is likely to become more scarce in the future if we don't get climate change other control.

†I'm 100% complicit in this too, btw.

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