You could try to come up with a scheme that targets people you don't like, but that leaves you with an inconvenient truth: people you do like are just as capable of sucking the wells dry.
Which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is when water is essentially so mispriced that it's a really bad deal for the place that is supplying the water, especially during a mega-drought.
The article is very much pot, kettle black. Agriculture is using the majority of the water and mostly for growing alfalfa to feed cows. Everything there is wrong. We don't need that many cows. If the town wants to save itself, it must start water-rationing for agriculture, and ban a lot of alfalfa growing.
Or more effectively (because it is much simpler and can’t be gamed nearly as easily), price the water appropriately based on the sustainable supply. Then it will not be profitable to use at huge scale for low-value water-intensive crops.
If fairly pricing the water ends up hurting local residents, that would best be dealt with by directly paying cash to every resident to make up the typical difference.
(We should do the same with other resources that are scarce or have negative externalities; e.g. gasoline should have the environmental costs of carbon emissions priced into it with a very steep tax, and then every resident should be directly paid cash enough to make up the difference for a typical person’s transportation. Otherwise, people are incentivized to over-use resources that are effectively being subsidized, and the free market economy cannot perform its function.)
In the regions where the water problem is most relevant, pricing based on the sustainable supply isn't possible because the water supply isn't sustainable, and won't be no matter how much you charge or how little you use.
I don't agree with the solution advanced in the linked video of paying farmers not to grow alfalfa. I think we should reduce the cow population by 75% (bringing meat consumption in line with the rest of the world), raise the price of beef, and tax the hell out of it. We do it for tobacco, and meat eaters put the same kind of strain on the health system, so let them pay for their entitlement. And saving water isn't the only benefit of reducing the population of cows, which would include longer life spans and much, much less contribution to Climate Change.
That's pretty easy to do with graduated rates, where customers are charged a low rate for the first X gallons of water, but then higher rates for more usage.
The bigger issue, though, is water rights are completely fucked. In a lot of jurisdictions you are free to suck out any water you can with a well on your property. That means those with the "strongest pump" are essentially free to suck out all the water from their neighbors. Our system of water rights in the West needs a major overhaul that won't be easy due to entrenched, powerful interests and the difficulty of changing some of these laws.
The average American eats 55lbs. of beef a year, 4.5lbs. a month, over a pound a week. I guess we can wait until they all have massive coronaries, but it would be better to just stop this madness and restrict these eaters to 3 quarters of a pound of beef a week.
I completely agree, which is why I said that graduated rates are a good solution - they would tax agricultural (and any heavy user) heavily while leaving residential use cheap.
However, I'm also not in favor of other solutions that are complete fantasies when it comes to our political system. You say "but the easiest and best solution is to adjust population diet, curb agricultural greed and entitlement, massively reduce the population of cows, raise the price of beef and tax it." Except that is a guaranteed political non-starter in essentially every country that has high beef consumption.
50 years ago everyone smoked. What we need are Surgeon General reports linking eating red meat to cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and especially colon and rectal cancers, which shouldn't be too difficult because it's true. Then we need ad campaigns, "Mmmm meat! Tastes just like cancer!" Then all that is needed is for the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Diabetes Association to sue Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef, to find they lied to the American public about the deadly effects of their product, which they intentionally marketed to children - the meat food group was always bullshit. Then comes taxing red meat and the collapse of these industries, because unlike nicotine, red meat is not addictive. Viola! Suddenly there is more water in the West than they know what to do with. Ranchers, cowboys, cattlemen and meat processors are retrained to work at all the water parks and recreational reservoirs that could then exist throughout the West, drawing in fortunes in recreational boating and tourism.
There are observational studies demonstrating a correlation between red meat consumption and various health problems, but risks involved from eating red meat vs. smoking are not remotely comparable, nor is the scientific evidence anywhere near as convincing.
Nor does some people eating meat directly affect others’ health, the way smoking in enclosed indoor spaces does.
It would be better to give people truthful information about what risks are known and what our confidence is in those, rather than trying to scaremonger or force lifestyle changes based on exaggerated health claims.
Climate risks and environmental externalities are a much bigger problem with red meat than direct health effects. (And a better cause for ending subsidies / adding taxes.)
If you are just worried about health per se, it would make much more sense to start by targeting soda and alcohol, and follow up by targeting candy, cookies, chips, etc. Even in fast food restaurants, the fries and soda are a bigger health problem than the burgers.
The World Health Organisation has classified cured and processed meats as Group I carcinogens because there is a causal link between consuming these meats and bowel cancer. Group I carcinogens also includes tobacco, alcohol, arsenic and asbestos, all known to cause certain cancers. WHO classified red meat as Group 2A carcinogens, indicating it most likely causes cancer.[1] Group 2A carcinogens includes alcohol, benzine, diesel exhaust, and formaldehyde.
And having that many cows around hurts everyone on the planet, vegans included. There's 94M cows in the US, or 1 for every 3 people. But it would take 4 people eating 55 pounds of beef a year to consume one 1400lb. dressed cow. On the face of it, there are, at the very least, 25.5M superfluous cows producing more than 5B pounds of methane every year while consuming 46.5B pounds of alfalfa requiring ~7.2B gallons of water to grow.
Say what you will about smoking, but no one ever tried to grow tobacco in a desert during a drought.
And I'm not sure soda consumption is a significant contributor to Global Warming. The health concern is the meat eaters' incentive to quit, while I'd like it to stop being so damn hot and killing everything for the sake of meat gluttons indulging themselves. Eating meat is not any kind of virtue, and it is certainly not more important than the biosphere. For the sake of life on Earth, I can live without people eating so much damn meat all the time.
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/11/03/repo...
Definitely. The less red meat eaters the better, so do your best to eat as much as you can.
The only solution is limit ground water extraction. Putting this on foreign owners dodges the solution no one wants to talk about.
Fresh water at the moment is not a short-term renewable resource. In some places fresh water takes a long time to correct when there is an input/output imbalance.
So just like any non-renewable resource, particularly one vital to life and food, it should be guarded as a local and national security asset.
The article is very focused on the "evil foreigners" angle, which is understandable. I also do not like Saudi Arabia buying up farms and exporting water. But this problem is a tiny subset of the overall problem, which is unsustainable water use. I am concerned that by focusing too much on the evil foreigners, we'll end up with a solution targeted at the evil foreigners, or exporting alfalfa, and we'll end up with the same farms growing alfalfa for cows in California or Arizona which does not solve the problem at all.
What we need is to cap all water usage to sustainable levels, ideally with a cap and trade or market system which would incentivize investing in water conservation and encourage efficient land use. Given how climate change legislation has gone in the US we'll probably end up with the worst water uses being banned, and subsidies for better water uses. It's politically easier to pay people for good outcomes than to charge them for bad ones.