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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

I like lawns. So do lots of other people. It's okay to expend resources on things that aren't bare essentials. The price mechanism, not social control, is what allows for efficient allocation of scarce resources. Let people who want to pay for the water water their lawns.

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> Lawns in US take 41 million acres. That figure makes lawn the most widespread plant under irrigation in the contiguous US.

https://healthylandethic.com/2013/11/17/why-prairies-matter-...

Pretty wasteful use of limited resource - water.

But how much of that is irrigated? As I understand it in California there is a lot of irrigated lawns. But I doubt the majority of lawns in the US is irrigated or watered.

Do you own a lawn? Scotland is perhaps the only place I know where you can not water lawn in summer.

I grew up in Ohio and currently live in western PA. I've never once watered my yard.

I envy you guys all. It takes me up to 2 hours in the evening and I am not happy with the results.

Those in New Zealand can avoid watering, particularly if the lawn is kikuyu. It is a complete pain to maintain though as it grows very fast when it’s warm, wet and sunny. It makes you itchy is you lie on it too.

A lot of people (at least in the PNW) just let their lawn go dormant in the summer rather than water it. Since we'd be using city water in most places, it is expensive to dump that on grass.

New England here, haven't ever watered the lawn

Please! There are plenty of places. Western PA for one.

Even if I did water my lawn, I don't even understand how I could waste water where I live, short of owning a fracking operation.

It depends on what species the lawn is. If it's the same species that grows naturally in vacant lots and by the roadside, it doesn't need watering unless there's a significant drought.

And its a great plant to boot!

- Kids love to play in it.

- Quickly soaks up CO2 by growing phenomenally fast.

- Great at mitigating soil erosion and keeping slight hills from sliding

- Great feed if you live in the country (I drive by an old horse shelter on my way to work).

- Oh, and you don't have to water it if you don't live in a place where it's not supposed to be.

But that says more about the people that live where grass shouldn't be than it does for us who live where grass wants to be.

You're right but water is not priced properly. Everything above the minimum requirement to survive should be at least 10x more expensive.

Yes, although for that to work water needs to be priced differently from today.

Okay. So let's do that. Let's let the price of water reflect its scarcity. Appropriate conservation measures will follow automatically without some central bureaucracy having to make uniform rules that are necessarily poor fits for individual preferences and circumstances.

> Let's let the price of water reflect its scarcity.

You say that like it's the easy solution. It'd have to be regulated on a federal level. Good luck getting that to pass, well, anywhere. With the way humans discount future consequences, and the amount of money companies can use to lobby or bribe politicians, it's going to be way too late when it'll become politically feasible to do in many places.

Why would it require legislation? Scarcity will drive up price automatically.

The market is very good at ignoring or hiding scarcity or other externalities until the damage is done. Nothing is "automatic" about it. The "free market" doesn't exist in a way that would allow the price to organically reflect water's actual scarcity.

Because we'd have to rework the existing legislation that determines who has right to the water, & also the various legislation that expressly prohibits the reselling of water or the forming of water markets. We don't legislatively set the price, but we have to create the conditions for the market.

What would you advise a poor person should do if they can no longer afford food because it's too expensive?

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