We need a new economics of water as a common good
nature.com
nature.com
Just finished a week motorbiking in Laos. It's currently incredibly hot and dry. They are at the end of dry season, but having lived in many climates with hot/dry - it still caught me off guard.
Many of the farms were bone dry - dust everywhere. Doesn't help that the regularly do 'slash & burn agriculture' where they're burning the forest, clearing it, planting their crops, and repeating after they exhaust the soil. We were constantly coming across areas on fire.
But no - that's not the issue. The government is corrupt there and is constantly selling the rights to build dams. There's no environmental survey before doing so - they're just cropping these things up all over the place; even where the return is very minimal. If there's a profit opportunity - it's there.
This is of course causing downstream rivers to run low, preventing water access to farms and villages that rely on it.
And the kicker: Laos doesn't even get the electricity generated - 90% of it is exported to neighboring countries like Thailand.
Just incredible to see.
It isn't easy to develop a country that is so severely set back by war. Especially without outside help and/or investment.
Laos also isn't getting the same attention as its neighbors like Thailand and Vietnam by the West almost as if it holds no strategic value to the West.
Not saying I think they should stay that way, but maybe just adding one perspective on why they might feel that way.
> In my time in Laos the people were incredibly welcoming and open to foreigners.
We need to be cognizant that often they have little choice. We have all the power and money. The economic disparities, as I'm sure you noticed, are hard to concieve without witnessing them.
I'm pretty damn sure they weren't exactly given a choice.
Yes, the US administered Japan for a while, and along with the USSR, GB and F administered Germany. I don't know at what point they turned it over to the Germans, but Germany's government was a free market one until 1970, when they took a sharp left turn.
The more recent attempts by the US to administer Iraq and Afghanistan were total failures. It would be interesting to see why those failed and the Japanese/German occupations were successful.
(Of course I know that the USSR didn't turn over the Soviet sector until 1989.)
Germany in the fifties and sixties was governed by Germany's center right party, CDU. But the CDU of the fifties was in many ways more "leftist" (a word best dropped from polite conversation) than today's center left SPD. Their 1947 policy conference was headlined as "overcoming capitalism and marxism"[1] and was quite left wing. It was pared down a few years later, but it's had a lasting impact.
The seventies brought political changes, but it doesn't seem accurate to describe them as a sharp left turn in terms of economics. It remained a free market social democracy, there was no discontinuity there. Foreign policy changes, and a sort of grudging reflection of the cultural changes of the sixties were much more important, or at least are more well remembered.
Are you sure about that? Everything was destroyed, because the RAF and the USAAF bombed everything day and night for years. They quite literally tried to bomb Germany and Japan back into the stone age. About every city in Japan was firebombed to ashes.
And the German men were killed. Millions died of starvation after the war ended.
What was different with Germany (and Japan) was - free markets. You can see this starkly in the different fortunes of East and West Germany. The first was under communism, the second under free markets.
Free markets pretty much don't exist in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Laos. Adding money to unfree markets just disappears.
History shows us in country after country after country, free markets leads to prosperity, leftism leads to poverty.
And while some areas were partially destroyed, once you move into the suburbs not to mention the rural areas, everything was left standing. And even where there was rubble, under the rubble were roads and within the rubble were bricks.
They may have tried to bomb Germany back to the stone age, but they couldn't; from what was recently posted here, they probably realized this, but they did try to bomb the population into submission[2], which also didn't work, it's just a war crime.
Millions of Germans did not die of starvation after the war, though hundreds of thousands died of starvation and exposure in 1946/47, which was the harshest winter of the 20th century. I'm not sure how that jives with your whole free market thing; but like I said, Germany in the fifties wasn't the libertarian utopia you make it out to be, so that's probably why people died.
Edit: Let me hasten to add that I don't want to minimize the impact bombing campaigns have on cities and countries. Tens of thousands of people died in Dresden. We still dig out unexploded ordnance where I live, 80 years after the fact. I'm just saying that a lot of infrastructure remained. Germany after the war probably had more infrastructure left standing than Laos did before the war.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden
[2] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
"More than nine million Germans died as a result of Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the first five years after the Second World War-a total far in excess of the figures actually reported."
-- "Crimes & Mercies" by James Bacque
> I'm not sure how that jives with your whole free market thing
The free market thing started around 1950.
> Germany in the fifties wasn't the libertarian utopia you make it out to be, so that's probably why people died
The deaths were before 1950. As for libertarian utopia, I never said that. I said it was the free market that enabled Germany to rise from utter devastation to be the dominant economic power in Europe in just 20 years.
As for Dresden, it was a civilian target, not an industrial one. The US usually targeted industry. It also did not participate in the German Miracle, because it was in the Soviet sector.
Lastly, the German bombing of England was concentrated on London civilian targets, not industrial targets, and it didn't impact infrastructure and industry much. The Luftwaffe also could only reach a small fraction of England, most of the industry was safely out of range. The British went hungry during the war, but they didn't starve.
For reference, the series of Impact books gives a good overview of the effect of the bombing campaigns on Germany and Japan.
https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Forces-Confidential-Picture-Hi...
More:
"Bomber Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive" by Charles Messenger
"Gruesome Harvest" by Ralph Franklin Keeling
"Maximum Effort the B-29s against Japan" by Kevin Herbert
"Target Germany" US Army Air Force
A bit of caution: these are not nice books.
Do you have any evidence of this stuff? Maybe it was flat because they were bombed to hell, untold number of dead (especially productive age males), etc etc. Who could possibly expect lots of economic activity in Japan immediately after the war?
You are getting your history exactly backwards. Post war Germany was ordoliberal aka "sharp left" until the 70s and neoliberal aka "sharp right" after that.
I'm not going to count Japan and Germany since there is that little "Marshall Plan" detail that, at least as I understand it, may have had some small influence on their development. [end sarcasm]
No seriously, how can you make that statement and not mention the billions on billions of dollars they were given in aid? That's the height of intellectual dishonesty bro.
You might also consider the hundreds of billions spent trying to develop Iraq and Afghanistan, to little visible effect.
And you do not even have to look at Africa and squandered aid. Russia has enormous revenues from its natural resources, but the money ends up in yet more oligarch yachts and gigantic Putinopolises on the Black Sea coast, while random Russian soldiers loot toilet bowls and the Russian army is so decrepit that it cannot capture a city somewhat larger than Bangor, Maine after several months of battle.
I mean, the last effect is actually beneficial to us, but still, it nicely illustrates the point about billions being to no use if they are stolen.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan>
Japan's recovery benefitted as well from US post-war assistance, though also from a deliberate government-led economic policy as well.
You're aware that there was no actual "miracle", right? It's just a name given to an economic boom, which France and Britain also experienced, under different names (golden age for the UK, trente glorieuses for France).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses>
Germany and Japan both benefitted by the fact that their extant infrastructure and owners were demolished, removed, and/or financially wiped out by the war and/or the ensuing occupation and denazification / deimperilisation (in Germany and Japan respectively), which removed ownership-based objections to new development and investment --- think NIMBYism, but on steroids.
There's an article I've mentioned and submitted to HN numerous times, Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937). I'd first heard of it through Isaac Asimov who was a research assistant for Stern whilst a student at Columbia.
<https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...>
As markdown: <https://rentry.co/szi3g>
The piece looks at the innate opposition to technological (and economic) innovations and advance largely from extant established interests, in the areas of transportation, communication, power, metals, textiles, agriculture, and construction.
Something I've noticed in looking at development is that greenfield projects* in which there is no extant political, social, and economic power structure to present an opposition move far faster than those with a well-developed set of independent agents. This is highly pronounced in transportation, where initial route deployment occurs through undeveloped lands. As the transportation itself induces further development, commerce, residences, industry, etc., those interests themselves impose high frictions and costs on further development.
To put it another way, simply following financial amounts hugely distorts understanding of the impact of assistance. Money spent in Germany and Japan (both physically, politically, and financially devastated by World War II) went far further than equivalent sums in either occupied but victorious regions (e.g., France) or unoccupied victors (e.g., UK).
It's interesting to note that high-speed rail (HSR) development has proceeded most rapidly in regions either strongly disrupted by WWII, or in which industrialisation is now occurring for the first time to any significant degree: Japan, France, Germany, and China most notably. HSR's failure-to-launch in the US is attributable in large part to resistance from regional airlines (SouthWest most notably for the proposed "Texas Triangle" routes), and high land costs and dense extant development (both East and West coast projects).
Single-factor explanations are of course limited. Italy (defeated and occupied) did not see the same post-war rebound as its Axis allies Germany and Japan did, though it did of course grow. The Eastern Bloc similarly lagged, likely for other reasons (though it also often saw a far more rapid initial response, see notably North and South Korea's respective development following the 1953 armistice, with the North greatly outpacing the South).
We occupied and ran the countries for a decade, and funded, rebuilt, and defended them. Most of all, they were first-world economies before the war; Germany was probably the world center of intellect and culture. And they retained all those skills (though many leading pre-war intellects moved to the US), just not the infrastructure.
It's a bit different for Laos!
This is a really offensive mindset. As if developing countries can only progress by getting "attention ... from the west." Thailand and Vietnam haven't been getting "attention ... from the west" because of their "strategic value" or any special humanitarian concerns. It's because those countries have been building up their financial systems and industry. And countries in this region are progressing by aligning with Russia and China often in opposition to what Western countries would want.
You speak as if Thailand and Vietnam didn't hold important geopolitical values that the West and China want to exploit which makes them attractive to investments.
Those same countries still need to court outside investments to build out infrastructure and industries like recent efforts to move manufacturing to southeast Asia.
Also the point made that the main difference between which countries recover and which don't post-war is whether they receive economic investment doesn't seem to be relevant to communism or who exactly did the previous bombing at all.
In particular, Thailand has long been tied to the US, and Vietnam is to a signiicant degree aligning with the US as protection from China. They also have other relationships, of course.
If the merits are so strong in your argument, why this tired sophistry of victimhood, and attacking the parent comment?
we also crushed Laos 50 years ago in a way that was before unknown to mankind:
Operation Barrel Roll was a covert U.S. Air Force 2nd Air Division and U.S. Navy Task Force 77, interdiction and close air support campaign conducted in the Kingdom of Laos between 14 December 1964 and 29 March 1973 concurrent with the Vietnam War. The operation resulted in 260 million bombs being dropped on Laos, making Laos "the most heavily bombed nation in history".[1]
In Laos, the legacy of U.S. bombs continues to wreak havoc. Since 1964, more than 50,000 Lao have been killed or injured by U.S. bombs, 98 percent of them civilians. An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to explode upon impact, and in the years since the bombing ended, 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by the estimated 80 million bombs left behind.
In 2016, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos. He pledged an additional $90 million in aid to remove unexploded ordnance on top of the $100 million that had been spent previously. The work of cleaning out unexploded bombs from the soil continues.Basically every nation in that area is acting in the most selfish way possible and distrusting each other.
https://www.econtalk.org/david-zetland-on-water/
What blew my mind was how different water economics is from place to place. Availability of water (and the intersection of that with other unexpected factors, like crime) have a huge impact on day to day living. I was surprised by some of the vicious cycles (for example, water 'brown outs' - providing water for limited hours of the day - actually drives up consumption, since people get more than they need and store it for later use, often at great expense). Somewhat analogous to other 'runs' we see, e.g. banking.
It's one of my favourite Econtalk episodes. Highly recommend.
He had a pro-market view but lets his guests state their views before politely saying “i disagree for this reason”, then moving on.
The 16+ years of archives are great to go back and listen to especially the interviews about the financial crisis of 2008. He talks to some heavy hitters in the finance industry and it’s fascinating to hear their different views.
Among other adaptations, they hunt not by driving their pray to exhaustion or by using heavy weapons like spears, but by digging up beetle larva infected by parasitic Lebistina larva which produces a very concentrated toxin that they use with very thin bows and arrows to bring down pray (which they have to chase down anyway).
They do have to be careful when making the toxin, however, since enough can enter through a cut in the skin to kill an adult.
I'm from Michigan. Fresh water is so accessible that even restricting its use for environmental purposes just isn't a thing. If we ever run out, the world is already on fire.
Agriculture measures their water in Millions of acre feet! (MAF) They use dozens of MAF per year.
Nestles use is not so much as a rounding error. And the water they bottle is used for it’s highest imaginable purpose - drinking.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/27/california-n...
Bottling water is okay! People need to drink water, bottling water doesn’t use that much water, and convenience is good! We should recycle the plastic but that’s a separate issue altogether.
More proof that the biggest threat to the environmental movement is environmentalists.
This has got to be the most stupid comment and counter-argument I read this week.
1. Metal water bottles and thermos have been around for way longer than tech bro.
2. Metal water bottles and thermos have been used by every kind of workers for more than half a century. Even fancy ones.
3. Thermos and water bottles are way cheaper than plastic bottles pack. Starts at ~$8 at wallmart https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/stainless-steel-water-bottle. So, no, it's not some fancy tech bro elite shit.
Now, bottled water has its use but if you are running a construction site you know damn well you have better and cheaper options (towable water bowsers, citerns, tanks, etc.).
There has been an issue with the municipal water supply where I live for the past 2 months.
It started with the entire town of ~2k people getting some sort of gastro virus within 2 days. The pharmacy was sold out of everything imaginable, most stores were short staffed, etc.
Then the third day the muni posted on Facebook that they were going to be performing "maintenance" on the system. They then shut off the water for 2 days.
Here we are 2 months later and are still dealing with pressure, color, turbidity, odor issues. They have not provided any additional information beyond "maintenance".
I suppose I could import a sufficient whole house water filtration system and import the replacement filters for eternity. Even then, nobody knows exactly what the issue is with the water, so I'd be grasping at straws or purchasing the most expensive possible system that treats every known potential issue.
So, yeah, we're drinking bottled water for now until there's consensus that the municipal water supply is safe to drink again.
In fact, ag water in the US is super low compared to residential rates, which is why CA grows almonds and lettuce.
Farms may be required, but their inefficiency and waste are not necessary at all. Very few industries become more efficient without cost pressures.
Is bottled water wasteful? Compared to what? Do you dislike it because it's commercial? Farms aren't commercial? is your belief in something's utility to society is how we should judge human activity?
We're looking at about 4 orders of magnitude difference between Nestle's extraction and agriculture.
2a- wrt Nestlé vs almonds, two wrongs don't make a right.
2b- One effort to fight one injustice does not in any way reflect any position whatsoever on other injustices. Perhaps the Nestlé fraças is an opening salvo in a larger war; low hanging fruit to establish precedence for future battles.
3- California Water Resource Board addressed a sternly worded memo to Nestlé, asking them to please stop using 25x more water than they're entitled to. I'm certain that if almond growers did the same they'd also receive a sternly worded memo.
4- A keen observer may wonder if hurtful memos are sufficient for curtailing abuses. Perhaps bigger sticks are required. For some bluesky thinking on that topic, please read the Nature article referenced in point no 1.
(emphasis mine)
And that is supposed to be a problem ?
edit: to those who down-voted me,
can you provide a reason why having more private profit driven investments on water is a good thing that we should aim for?
yes companies should not be allowed to hog a social good, and using an economics-style revalorisation will lead to the same dubious shenanigans done with carbon emission offsetting where companies will do some creative accounting to hide their value extraction.
The choice is often between private investment and no investment at all. It’s all well and good to say the world shouldn’t work that way but meanwhile people need water infrastructure while you are going about changing the world.
No other option? Citation needed.
There are always opportunity costs.
The Soviet Union mostly managed to feed its citizens, but that doesn't mean we should copy the Soviet model.
- https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-01-20/environ... and https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/the-figh...
- https://www.mashed.com/717227/nestles-water-controversy-expl...
- https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/michigan...
Here's an example from Canada - https://esemag.com/water/nestle-sells-canadian-bottled-water...
We can assume that Nestlé executives are sitting in Switzerland dreaming up where in the world they extract the most water from, put in a bottle, and reselling to the communities (and further afield) that they took the water from.
Isn't is the actual business they do? What's wrong with it?
nothing in an of itself, but if you look at the strategies that Nestlé employ around the world to gain access to water while cynically damaging communities, it is hard to be on their side.
Like corporations have never ever murdered people for resources. Google United Fruit and find out where the term "banana republic" came from.
Once they had been on the bottled milk they can't go back to breast milk so when they leave the hospital the mothers are forced to buy the artificial milk.
Many of them can't afford it so the babies starve to death.
This is what the corporation you trust has done. Literally killing babies for profit.
Bottled water should be a niche business. In the same category as surplus MREs or heavy-duty construction radios.
That's for paying consumers to decide.
What's the problem with that? It sounds exactly like what the water utility does, except with plastic bottles rather than pipes.
utilities prioritize the welfare of the citizens who reside in an vote for the (local/regional/national) political apparatus VS exploiting resources with the aim of maximizing profit for shareholders
one benefit that private water companies like Perrier / Fiji Water / Nestlé et al provide to society is that they "distribute" water to locations where there's less. Or at least that what it seems like.
However, on the one hand very little of the water consumed this way is by people who do not have access to local water. Two; they try as much as possible to underpay the "community" from whence they extract the water, so that should be made more fair.
How is this any different than any other industries that consume water (eg. farms or factories) and use that to make money? At least with nestle water, it's not a premium product so in all likelihood it isn't getting shipped across the world like Perrier is.
Even without being shipped across the world, in most places, bottled water is still hugely wasteful. Multiple facilities, haulage, plastic, stores, and refrigeration to deliver something that is directly piped into almost every building.
Not according to the rate increases in my bills. More like padding their pensions and political apparatus.
How much is your water bill per gallon of water? Now how much would that amount of water cost you purchased from an organization like Nestle?
For all the people here who like to trumpet their advanced intelligence, there are certainly a lot of triple-o stooopid statements made.
That alone is a big problem. And water utilities aren't run for profit. Or if they are, they're heavily regulated.
Government agencies often don't have a profit motive, but some pricks are still getting rich from the corruption.
Hence it is important to economies on their use.
Eg instead of having court appointed bankruptcy proceedings that tie up the time of a judge, just liquidate.
In general, you want to arrange government procedures to be simple and quick to carry out, and with not much subjective judgement requirement, because that requires competence and provides nooks and crannies to hide corruption in.
Pulling back the responsibilities of government and lettings markets handle more, is a good way to assist with this effort.
(Another example: when you privatise a government owned company or department, you should pay off its debts and auction it off to the highest bidder. Government officials should not be used to judge a beauty contest of business plans for the new entity. Those plans never work out as advertised anyway.
In an account sense, paying off the debts first doesn't make a difference: a company with 1 dollar more debt on the balance sheet should just sell for an additional dollar more.
But in practice, asset stripping is much easier done with highly leveraged companies, and politically it's hard to keep the government from (implicitly) backing the debt.)
That doesn't seem to be what everyone is mad about though, judging by the comment chain.
>And water utilities aren't run for profit. Or if they are, they're heavily regulated.
I'd be sympathetic to this argument if nestle was the sole provider of water in an area, but they're not. In a hypothetical universe where nestle has a monopoly on bottled water distribution and is abusing it by charging $2/bottle or whatever, the damage would be limited because people could just... use their own bottles. Also, given that bottled water "is a big problem", should we really care that consumers can't get them for cheap?
There is no being objective when the conversation starts in such an intentionally spread artificial obligation to consider. Their claims of ownership are not backed by immutable physical evidence but mutable spoken social norms.
Your skepticism alone is insufficient objection to curtail conversation that may rustle Jimmie’s but otherwise does no quantitative damage; it’s not as if mere conversation magically alters the status quo. Rest assured Nestle will be ok tomorrow.
In any case, that doesn't mean that the liberal notion of private property escapes criticism. Indeed, that is very much the problem. According to the liberal view, radically individualist and absolutist as it is, property is first and foremost private; the common good is conceived of as something resulting from the voluntary cession of private property.
But this is backwards and this notion is not at all the traditional view of property. According to the traditional view, human beings are social animals, not atomized individuals, and this means there there exists a common good. Furthermore, private property exists for the sake of the common good. That private property exist at all is because it enables the common good. It enables human beings to pursue the good; its absence would frustrate it by introducing conflict, an unjust distribution of goods, and so on.
This imposes a limit on private ownership because if private ownership exists for the sake of the common good, then it cannot be the case that the private ownership of something is harmful to the common good. If I bought up all the arable land in the world and in this way prevented the possibility of farming and food production, I would indeed be harming the common good. Water is similar.
But nobody is actually buying up land so nobody can grow food, nor is nestle buying up water so nobody can drink it. In fact they're doing the opposite. They're taking water from the ground and selling it so people can access it. I don't see how this is any different than a farmer growing food from the ground and selling it to people.
Same goes for land use. Agriculture is a main driving factor of mass extinction (yes, we are in the midst of a biosphere mass extinction event) because they ignore the common good, and other land uses bring their share of problems with it.
Mexico city and probably a hundred others are looking at the effects of that.
If water were gold, no one would let it run into the ocean.
In the American West, water is underpriced for farming (80% of usage) due to senior water rights.
Not sure about industry in general, but some users like semiconductor fabs do recycle water. It looks like they're going to recycle more. [1] Cities are starting to recycle too. These are water users who can pay for relatively expensive water. San Diego is doing more than most cities here.
It's overly wordly but it's basically saying "water is so cheap that the private market as no incentive to invest it in to improve the efficiency of its use"
Same argument people make about fossil fuels - it's so cheap (often due to subsidies) that the private sector doesn't invest in alternative)
What happens in 50 years, when aquifiers under middle east and much of the midsest USA runs out?
There is no private investment that can save them.
There are a ton of ways private investment can help make water use more efficient. But if water prices are artificially low, that investment will never happen.
Israel has 10M people and gets 50% of its water from desalination - 75% of drinking water. It also reclaims 90% of agricultural waste water.
It's absolutely possible for countries to solve many of their water issues with new technology.
Shortage of water does not mean you have nothing to drink - drinking water is a tiny fraction of water use, only the poorest run out of drinking water. It's a solved problem in rich countries.
What you don't get is that water shortage = famine.
The problem is agriculture. Desalination is far too expensive to use for irrigation, irrigation requires insane quantities of water.
Agriculture is so cost sensitive, and the amounts of water they need are so vast, that most crops are not irrigated even when water is free - the cost of fuel that you'd have to use to pump water from a nearby river to a field is too high.
You know what would make a difference? Water infrastructure, like giant pipelines from north of Canada to dry areas of US, like we have for oil. Giant reservoirs to store flood water.
You know who builds them? Governments.
Did you intentionally ignore my comment about water conserving agriculture innovations? Drip irrigation, reuse of waste water?
You act like private industry hasn't already innovated in those spaces.
They have.
That seems to be an argument that you should be demanding more of your officials rather than that you should leave vital infrastructure in the hands of someone whose sole motive is to squeeze the most money out of it.
Make sense now?
You can follow the links in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading
I don't think privatization is the way to do it though.
Chile's private water rights management does not undervalue water. In fact they value it so much that a new class of professional developed : water real estate brokers.
Private leasing of public lands to the highest bidder is an interesting use case that does not get much attention
My home country the Netherlands actually has a water shortage. But much of it is below sea-level and we pump a lot of non salty water into the sea (at great expense) to keep the land dry. So, this is a notion that needs a little explaining.
How come there is a shortage in a country like that? Very simple: farmers don't like it when their fields are a swamp, so ground water levels are kept very low. This is done by draining, pumping, etc. Most of that water ends up in the sea. This in turn is governed by local policy on which farmers have a lot of influence. Additionally, they use groundwater for irrigating the land. Because dry land doesn't produce a lot of crops.
So, ground water levels are at a historic low in a lot of places. To the point where nature is struggling and water companies that also rely on ground water for supplying drinking water have to remind people to limit their water usage. In a country that is basically a swamp below sea level.
The solution to all this: change policies and stop using ground water at an unsustainable rate. There's plenty of other water. But using that is more expensive. Ground water tends to be very clean as it has been filtered through sediment layers. Surface water from rivers, lakes, etc. needs more treatment. Collecting rain water seems very uncommon. But there is plenty of that as well. Most of it is pumped and drained straight to the sea.
There is an abundance of water. So much that it is actually a problem. If my country stops pumping and draining water out to sea, it won't take long for a lot of it to be reclaimed by it. And in a pinch, we can actually take ocean water and desalinate it. This would of course be ridiculous in the Netherlands considering that two of the largest rivers in Europe flow through it to the North Sea and given that it rains a lot here (less than it used to, but still).
Other places in the world have a lot less water. But this planet is far from running out of water. Most of it is still covered by water and we have plenty of ways to produce drinking water from that. All we need to do is transport it around to where it is needed. In some places, desalination is cheaper than doing that.
What are you trying to say? I'm not sure where you live but in most countries food is made and distributed privately, in stark contrast to how air is distributed.
Earths resources are not endless. We share earth with future generations. Thus we should try and live in harmony with eco systems.
Fresno has a very interesting water history and has done a good job of learning to recharge its aquifer, among other things. It probably has better water security than most of California and anyone interested in improving water security for their region would do well to learn a little something about Fresno.
More over... It's simply not the problem either - cities never are.
Cities need water for individuals - ablutions and drinking, some light industry. The amount they use pales in comparison to what farmers and livestock will go through, and the volume and type of effluent produced, as well as contamination risk.
My personal view of this is that Marxism doesn't really have much to say about organizations below a certain scale, and what it has to say about larger scale orgs is that they are icky/alienating. Everything else is more about trying to verbalize the ickyness than to explain anything substantial about the org mechanics.
You can keep your playstation. That's personal property. The people who want to abolish private property are interested in removing the ability for you to exercise power over others because you are holding a public good in private. For instance, by purchasing land and renting it to others, or by using private water rights and making a profit from them.
If we can talk about this stuff without resorting to strawmen, I think there's an interesting and useful exchange of perspectives that can happen.
I declare your house a public good, it is now mine.
> This is always the response of someone who doesn't understand the difference between "private property" and "personal property".
This is the response of someone who does not make a distinction between these because there is no distinction. Only to people who think there is a distinction believe that there is a meaningful difference. No one is obligated to believe in your belief, nor are they going to on purpose dumb themselves down to your level so that people can argue on your field. You are trying to force your definition of words so that you can appear as if you have something meaningful to say, but you don't.
My property is my property. Not yours.
> If we can talk about this stuff without resorting to strawmen, I think there's an interesting and useful exchange of perspectives that can happen.
Of course you do, you're a commie. You absolutely believe in this despite how many holes your ideology has, because if you don't you won't be able to win. Every single bad aspect is nothing compared to the defects in your opponent's world view.
You're not here for discussion.
No, it's not. Collective ownership is not "hippity hoppity, your stuff is now my property". It's about the management of goods -- land, rivers, buildings, etc. -- for the good of all, not just the one person designated owner.
You are still thinking in terms of ownership, which should absolutely not be a thing for public goods like land. Come back when you've actually read Marx and not some far-right exegesis of Marx.
I'd be embarrassed if I were you, but I don't think you have even the slightest capability to even pretend to be a human.
You are not enlightened.
Private houses, when used as a primary residence, are typically closer to the personal property rather than private property realm. There's a very real discussion about how the land should be allocated, but it's more likely that land use becomes addressed via land value taxes rather than by appropriation.
> [Rude remarks re: definitions]. My property is my property. Not yours.
Private property, real property, personal property, public property -- these are all types of property in the discourse. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and many other economic theories use these terms, and choose (or choose not to) differentiate between them. Plenty of conservative thinkers recognize the difference between private and personal property, and choose not to treat them differently.
> You're not here for discussion.
I think you'll find I'm very much interested in a discussion, if there is discussion to be had. Despite your hostility, I don't believe I've resorted to any 'punching down', as it were.
> Of course you do, you're a commie.
My personal beliefs are on that side of things, yes, though that's not the language I would use. (FWIW, I would also describe myself as opposed to Soviet style communism. I am not, for instance, a fan of Lenin's authoritarian "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", and I find many authoritarian communists absolutely vile.)
What do you think happens to land if you don't pay your taxes?
Answer: appropriation
there is no question about it, just about how to accomplish.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is that there probably isn't one solution that would work on every part of the planet and further more that in practical terms there isn't a single "we" on the hook to solve.
There are probably many different strategies, from restricting private companies from extracting water at low cost and making huge profits, to building water infrastructure in places where there are none, to desalination, to eradicating cholera, etc. etc.
But what I do believe is that ability to pay for water should not be a limiting factor to having access to clean water because it is a basic ingredient of life and so nobody should profit off of access.
Do you, as a "über capitalist" also believe the same to be true for food?
I didn't interpret GP to say "total state ownership over food production".
Their keywords were "basic" and "minimally required".
That should have told you that they were supporting food programs where basic foods are guaranteed.
None of that means they support "total", as you say, nationalization of food production.
History has shown us that nationalization of food production leads to the starvation and death of millions.
Free market production has led countries to excess foods, such as grain, which can be and is shipped across the world to combat global starvation.
Reasonable amount of water and food should be in reach of every citizen. Does not mean production of those have to be privatized, but maybe margins can be limited when it is bought from open market.
So yeah, tax the other guy who is like me and tax me.
(And before you respond with, "Well, you can voluntarily pay more in taxes" you should know that I've put aside hundreds of thousands a year towards environmental conservation, and two, I believe that even if I donated 100% of my own income it wouldn't be enough. I believe in taxes as a mechanism, and I believe that taxes on income at or above what I make are eminently reasonable.)
Global warming means more global freshwater.
I don't see how that's a good thing. Global warming means sea level rise which means more people crowded into less space which means more pressure on natural ecosystems and more conflict over less resources. Plus a hotter world means we're using more of that water keeping crops hydrated.
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/modern-water-well-diagr...
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-western-droughts-permanent-los...
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-02-23/calls-g...
madagascar had a droight this year, which caused crop failures and mass hunger.
France had record low yields due to droughts
snowpack and ice is gone, meanong water that falls does not stay untill summer. Glaciers dwarf the largest reservoirs.
People like you fail to understand that for every dollar that fossil fuel companies made in profit, we will have to spend 4 dollars fixing the problems they caused.
Go read the IPCC report and educate yourself on this very basic question