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Comment by ashneo76 | Hacker News Reader

We should talk about the companies subverting water for bottling water, almond and avocado operations

Yes, let’s talk about almonds. That way we can avoid talking about beef.

https://www.businessinsider.com/real-villain-in-the-californ...

The article's callout of alfalfa is an exception to the rule. Beef cattle eat a lot of human-inedible silage (byproducts of raising corn and soybeans) and for economic reasons the land they graze is typically non-arable land. Beef is a natural way for humans to benefit from the inedible byproducts of corn and soybean operations.

Re: water, typical cattle operations supply natural rainfall (gathered in ponds) and not irrigated, meaning they return the moisture they consume to the soil along with some nitrates which fertilize the plants they graze -- they do not somehow retain 106 gallons of water per pound of meat.

If you don't live in a desert, cattle are a beneficial part of the ecosystem as they extract human-edible calories from non-arable land. During drought, irrigation and supplements like alfalfa become necessary to keep a herd alive, but the problem isn't the cattle -- it's the drought.

Drive the five and its not marginal land being grazed for cattle. These are factory feedlot operations, not bucolic rangeland operations with 1500 head on 150k acres.

Whataboutism.

Yes, beef needs to be addressed. But so do almonds and bottled water and and and…

Can you put numbers on all those industries? I was under the impression that alfalfa for cattle feed was the most egregious waster of water on the west coast of the US, based on articles like https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-05-26/why-th... and the well-known dairy subsidies, but I haven't looked at it in the last five years.

I don’t understand this internet obsession with bottling water. Surely under the worst drought conditions bottling water has to be the very last thing to stop. Literally water for humans to drink has to be a top priority.

"Water for humans to drink" comes from the faucet. The bottled water industry shouldn't exist at all, other than as a niche product for areas hit by natural disasters, remote construction or work sites, and so on.

Then the negative externalities should be properly priced in.

Unfortunately it's a tragedy of the commons type problem, which is the perfect use for government except our government is currently broken.

Are they priced into bottles of water? That seems orthogonal, or perhaps I'm missing something?

“should” bring the operative word here

we all know that rarely if ever happens. market don't care.

That's what "pricing in the negative externality" means: making the market care.

and who exactly is doing the pricing here then?

government, for example, by taxing the externality

so it's not the market naturally pricing it in then is it?

No, and it couldn't be, which the point that you seem to be circling. Markets aren't self-governing--they don't set the rules that they abide by (including which externalities are priced in and which aren't)--that's a function of government.

No, you're not reading:

> Then the negative externalities should be properly priced in.

is what I was replying to, saying the market isn't going to naturally do this because capital doesn't actually care about negative externalities until forced to.

That's literally all I said.

Right, I'm pointing out that it's a nonsense comment. "The negative externalities should be properly priced in" implies government intervention, and indeed the market cannot do it. At best you're violently agreeing with everyone in the thread.

> "Water for humans to drink" comes from the faucet.

The parents in Flint, MI mistakenly thought this as well.

Are you testing your bottled water regularly?

Never lived somewhere with tap water you could smell from a foot away, and taste over the flavor of any tea brewed in it, no matter how strong, huh? And yes, that's in the US.

(though, sure, a home water filter might also solve that particular problem)

> a home water filter might also solve that particular problem

Yes. I don't see why it's an issue. A lot of houses have water softeners because hard water destroys appliances. An RO filter for the kitchen isn't a lot more expensive than that.

(And I've also lived in developing countries where the water isn't always safe to drink. Boiling or filtering worked fine).

Makes some sense, still, especially for renters, if they don't want to have to move the system and have a big (yes, it's big to some people) up-front expense. If it's just for drinking water, it looks like you can get over 2500 person-days of drinking water in the form of CostCo 16.9oz 40-bottle packs ($2.95 for 40 bottles) for the same price as a cheapish RO system (~$200—you can buy about 333.3 gallons of that Costco water for that). About half a liter of plain water intake per person per day on average, in the US, from what I can tell. Even if you double that to account for tea and coffee, that's about two years' drinking water for a couple.

Considerations: that's not even the cheapest filtered water one can buy, and the RO system has consumable filters (= more expense—frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the bottled water is straight-up cheaper, overall), maintenance, and installation to worry about.

I don't think buying bottled water regularly is necessarily irrational. FWIW, we do have an under-sink filter on our kitchen sink rather than buying bottled water, though I'm not convinced it's justifiable based on cost—we don't live in so-bad-you-can-smell-the-water land anymore, but the filtered stuff still tastes a lot better, and it's nice not to have to remember to stock up on water at the store, though we're so bad about maintaining the filter that I think if we did it right the extra time and more-stuff-to-remember would make buying drinking water more convenient after all)

A minuscule amount of household water use is for drinking. The prices should be cranked way up on it before bothering with bottled water.

Why not crank up the prices on bottled water instead? And if household water usage is minimal, why crank up prices on it at all? The reduction in demand won't make a dent in overall usage and it'll hurt a lot of poor people.

EDIT: Never mind, you said usage for drinking. I agree, things like lawns are wasteful. You could probably increase rates on households that consume more water.

A greater percentage of bottled water is drunk. Drinking being the most critical use of drinkable water. If there's a shortage that's the activity you want to most prioritise over others.

I didn't say household water use is minimal, I said a tiny portion of it is used for drinking. People use on average like 200L a day and drink like 3.

It's mostly used on showering, gardens, washing machines, toilets, pools, dishwashers. Activities that could generally be cut a fair bit. You crank up the price and my showers are definitely getting shorter, my non-existent garden pool and dishwasher would get removed if they existed, id pay attention to the water level setting on the washing machine instead of just leaving it on high, and only flush for shits. I absolutely do not believe people would eat a huge budget hit to keep these activities nor that they're already running at a much higher rate of water efficiency. Demand would plummet and more water would be available for drinking.

Everything hurts poor people more. That's how having a financial buffer works. It's basically the definition. Poor people are people who have few or no resources. You want resources to make life less painful. Cutting water use hurts poor people. Allowing things to get so bad that neighbours have water flow issues would hurt them more. It's not going to be the wealthy that go without in any scenario so "trying to fix it will hurt the poor" is a nothing statement.

> I didn't say household water use is minimal, I said a tiny portion of it is used for drinking.

I think you only read the first part of my comment and missed the edit.

Also if we're talking about drinking water, transporting it through pipes is way more efficient than putting it in plastic bottles and trucking it all over the place. Sorry, bottled water is a loser whichever way you look at it, even if it's primarily drunk.

It's exploitation of under-developed regions with ridiculous profit margins: Free water, cents for billions of PET bootles, packaged and sold for dollars.

This environmental impact of plastic and indigenous water resource impact is completely avoidable. [0][1][2][3]

[0] https://www.salon.com/2017/09/16/coca-cola-sucks-wells-dry-i...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/oct/04/ontario-six-n...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nestle-200...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/02/coca-col...

The business model of the bottled water industry is to take public water from limited local supplies and then distribute it globally, obviously at a significant profit to themselves, regardless of the actual need for that water.

Globally is the key word here. I'm not familiar with bottling industries in the south west, but in general, if you're taking a scarce resource from a locality and distributing it elsewhere, it should be clear how that can quickly become problematic. It's more of an issue if that scarce resource is as fundamental to survival like water.

Ideally, the SW would be importing bottled water, not exporting water, because it's not something they have in abundance. If there are large commercial operations exporting water, they should be the first to be cut off from these operations. That seems very unlikely it would be permitted though.

Personally, I've never wanted to live in this area (or at least make a large investment in a home/property) due to the scarcity of water coupled with growth. Nothing against the region, just seems like an unecessarily impractical region to live due to environmental factors and the climate models I've seen, at least for my comfort levels.

There's plenty of drinking water if states manage their water sustainably. The biggest draw on water in most places is agriculture, not drinking water. There's no reason to pump aquifers dry and then use energy to transport water from elsewhere.

Don't forget the waste.

It takes ~3 units of water to bottle 1 unit.

To say nothing of the carbon impact with packaging, shipping, disposal.

To say nothing of the pollution with microplastics and estrogenics.

Ad nauseum.

From what I understand, it's the opposite. I cannot get the same bottled water in the southeast as in the northeast, because it's bottled locally.

Sort-of related, but my local water supply is used for bottled water. They were drilling a new well which was not completed on time, but had already signed an agreement with the company for water rights. I was unable to wash my car, etc, but they could happily bottle water.

We have a lot of limestone here, so our water is pretty good but has significant mineral content. Without a water softener my faucets would be ruined within years, caked full of minerals.

It can be both. Consider "brand name" waters such as Voss or Perrier or S Pellegrino.

I thought about mentioning those companies, but I considered them to be too small of a market comparatively. For example, almost everyone buys 12-24 packs of their semi-locally bottled water, including national brands Dasani & aquafina that come from local bottling companies. I can't talk about the water issues in Fiji and France, but my guess is that it's <1% the total volume of bottled water consumed in any given area (outside LA or NYC of course).

Oh, they just mad cuz the companies get a concession for cheap. That is it.

Is that not a valid thing to be angry about?

Sure. Then just say I’m mad because these water bottling companies get the water concessions for cheap (and I don’t), instead of some other made up reason that might be less honest but a more sympathetic argument.

Arguably the reason they bottle the water is because of the cheap concessions. Without those, their profit margins are a lot slimmer and maybe the industry is much smaller, leaving more water out of bottles.

They're selling the cheapest commodity in the world for more than the price of gasoline. Even with smaller margins they're still making money hand over fist.

The floor is yours senator

I'm not sure I understand the word "subverting" here, those uses are for human consumption directly and food production, those feel pretty legitimate. Arguing against grassy lawns, I can see.

You can import food grown elsewhere; it's not sustainable to water-intensive food locally. Bottled water is an inefficient and carbon-intensive solution for drinking water--drink from the tap.

Still, why the term "subverting"?

I'm not the OP, but I assume it's an error and it should be "diverting", perhaps with negative connotations

“Subverting”?

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